Breast cancer helped
TAMSIN SARGEANT was only 39 when she received the devastating news that she had breast cancer. She was a fit and active mother of one so the diagnosis came as even more of a shock – but it also made her suspect that the illness might have been triggered by her genes.
“I found a swelling in my sternum and something about it worried me so I went to my GP,” says Tamsin, a social worker who lives in Wandsworth, south- west London, with her partner Tom, 45, and their eight- year- old- daughter Esme. “They found that I had aggressive breast cancer which had spread to my lymph nodes.”
After seven months of gruelling treatment including chemotherapy, radiotherapy, a lumpectomy and the removal of her lymph nodes, by March 2010 Tamsin was in remission.
But although her doctors assured her that the cancer was gone Tamsin decided to have a genetic test to find out whether she was a carrier of the BRCA gene which increases the risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer.
In the UK, one in 450 people is a BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene carrier and out of the 55,000 diagnosed with breast cancer each year five per cent will be as a result of BRCA.
Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie recently announced that her ovaries and fallopian tubes had been removed because she had inherited the faulty BRCA1 gene.
“I knew there had been other instances of breast cancer in my family so I wanted to find out so I could take the necessary precautions,” says Tamsin.
To fill in her family medical history, Tamsin, now 45, wrote to her estranged father who she hadn’t seen since childhood. “My father left when I was young and had another family,” she explains.
Tamsin then received an email which read, ‘ Hi, I’m Claire, I’m your sister’. “While I don’t have a relationship with my father, I’d always known about a half sister but had never spoken to her,” she says.
The pair exchanged emails and a remarkable friendship blossomed. In March 2011 tests confirmed that Tamsin had the BRCA1 gene. “I was gutted but I knew I had to be proactive about it,” she says. That