WE ARE BRIGHT PINK

Katherine
My name is Katherine Berman. I am 26 years old and have a brand new husband and a brand new life. I got married in a 1930’s wedding event that was the wedding of my dreams and one that I had planned with my mother years before. My husband is the oldest of many and I wanted the chance to really celebrate. Happy events don’t happen all that often in my family and when they actually do we really like to go all out. We had this massive wedding and departed for our honeymoon. Shortly after coming home and settling back into real life my husband josh and I made a decision that would change our lives forever. You see when I was eleven years old my aunt Susan died of breast cancer. Three years later, after the death of my father my mom was diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of breast cancer. I grew up very quickly and became the parent to myself and my younger brother. I promised myself then that no children of mine would ever go through what I was going through.

A month after our wedding, we decided that we needed to start married life off on the right foot. My husband was back in school studying for a career he really enjoyed and now it was my turn. I quit my dead end job to write the book I had started a year earlier and set out to really discover who I really am. I have always been very artistic and I finally am getting back to my roots. I design clothing, write, paint and sing. The job that I quit had been very slowly killing my soul. When I was younger I worked as a professional singer. I had given it all up in reaction to my mother being diagnosis. I had managed to fool myself into believing that being a scientist was my dream. Being at home and working on artistic endeavors brought me back to sense and it was then that we faced facts about my health. For years I have wanted to eliminate cancer from my life. We were talking about starting a family.

With the help of my new mother-in-law and a close family friend I was accepted as a patient in the breast cancer department at the University of Pennsylvania, as it can be very difficult to taken seriously in your mid-twenties. After meeting with the fabulous cancer geneticist I had much better information. She was the first doctor to call my family’s history genetic. The fact that almost thirty members of my mother’s family had breast cancer and that my mom’s only remaining sister currently has breast cancer was plenty for Penn. Unlike most hospitals they didn’t need positive genetic proof.

I was on my way. We decided to do the prophylactic mastectomy now, and I had a very good reason for doing it. I want to dance at my children’s weddings and I want to hold their children in my arms. So off I went through this very streamlined process. It wasn’t until after the surgery a month and a half later that we discovered just how unusual I am.

They released me from the hospital 18 hours after my surgery. I was already fifty percent of the way through the reconstructive process, a very irregular occurrence. I went home and started to heal. Everything was wonderful. My incisions healed quickly and felt great. 4 days later we got a phone call that made everything I was going through worthwhile.

The surgeon called personally to give me the pathology results. When they did the routine biopsy of the removed breast tissue they discovered abnormal growth in my breast. The surgeon had called to explain that I had defiantly made the right decision. She told me that I could have had cancer as early as thirty. Everything is minor in comparison.

This whole process has changed me forever. I have come to realize just how strong I am. I am preparing for my final surgery, having done 1000ccs of expansion in under a month. I have realized that my husband is amazing; I am even more in love with him every day. My friends are also amazing and very silly. I have one who threatens to get me drunk and play “pin the nipple on Katie” with sticky dots. The most important thing of all is that cancer won’t leave my husband a widower far too soon. It means that I can have babies without guilty thoughts. And I have the chance to be one of the first women in my family to not have to battle cancer. The inconveniences of this surgery are minor. I would take them on again in a moment. The picture shown here is one of me half way through reconstruction. I am happy, healthy and much wiser than when I started.