Apr 08
23
Diagnosed with Breast Cancer, at the Age of 21!
Can you imagine, you’re in the prime of your life, when your life is in full swing, and you are in the middle of your college career, you are diagnosed with something that is most common among women that are at least in their forties, many times well into their fifties? Well that’s exactly what happened to one such college student at the ripe young age of 21, just the legal drinking age, and she was diagnosed with the scary disease. Â
Her name is Colleen Cappon, and she is in a great minority, thank God, for this young age diagnosis of such a potentially serious disease. The worst part about getting breast cancer when you are younger, is that it is usually caught in it’s more advanced stages because of a combination of factors.Â
That combination is that since younger women are not expected to get it as much, the awareness isn’t there, and the other factor is that screening women for early breast cancer detection is hard since younger women’s breast tissue is more dense, and therefore a lot harder to detect harmful lumps or masses of tissue that may be cancerous in a mammogram. Colleen Cappon had a particularly agressive tumor that had tripled in size just over a week after she was diagnosed, so she went radical and had both her breasts removed.Â
She also had chemotherapy treatments to agressively go after the cancer before it spread to her critical lymph nodes or covered a larger area, overtaking her healthy cells. At the age of 22 now, she is cancer free, and still follows a diet regimen rich in antioxidants, as well as takes Tamoxifen for a few yeas to help block the estrogen hormone, which is thought to fuel breast cancer growth. Since breast cancer runs in her family, and her mother had it twice already, she will have to take precautions, even with her breasts removed, which is unfortunate!Â
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