Be your own advocate
SURVIVOR’S MESSAGE:
As a college student, Allie Santana had no more reason than any of her friends to be worried about breast cancer — at least not anytime soon. After all, there was no family history of it, and none of her four older sisters had ever been especially concerned about the disease.
But while studying at Florida Memorial University in Miami in her early 20s, she attended a health fair and what she learned about breast cancer resonated.
“The speaker was telling us that with most conditions — diabetes, heart disease, weight control — we can somewhat control them with our behavior,” recalled Santana, 44. “But with breast cancer, there’s nothing we can do to prevent it. You just have to stay aware — and be vigilant.”
Though she’d never personally known anyone who’d been diagnosed, Santana immediately became a breast cancer advocate. The engaging and extroverted Santana — who was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to South Florida at age 6 — participated regularly in Komen Foundation Race for the Cure events and spread awareness among her peers.
“I got super involved in the cause,” Santana said.
She also made sure to do what the health fair speaker urged: perform monthly breast self-exams.
Long before any of her friends had considered doing so, Santana — who is a telecommunications specialist with Comcast — underwent her first mammogram at age 35.
She learned that she had high breast density — which meant she had a four to five times higher risk of invasive breast cancer than women with low breast density do. High density breast tissue also makes it harder for radiologists to detect tumors in their earliest stages, so Santana did more frequent self-exams in between her annual mammograms.
And on Labor Day weekend in 2015 that vigilance paid off: “I’d had a clean mammogram a few months before, but on that Saturday morning, I felt something different in my left
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“He’s gone,” the hospice nurse told us, almost in a whisper, as my three daughters and older grandchildren, surrounding the hospital bed he slept in, held his hands and kissed him goodbye.
After a long, painful, and deteriorating illness, Ed took his last breath. Calmly, easily, and without a struggle.
It was the moment, just as the sun set in the sky and at the beginning of the Sabbath, that I became a widow and my daughters became fatherless.
That was three-and-a-half years ago, and after 50 years of loving, building a home and raising a family with Ed, the fear of living without him shook me to the core. While my children and grandchildren cried and wailed in pain, I just stood there, as if I was having an out-of-body experience.
It’s not that Ed’s death was such a surprise.
During his last five years, Ed had struggled with a deteriorating illness that included severe stenosis, scoliosis and neuropathy, but what finally killed him was yet another – and final — bout of congestive heart failure.
In his last years, late-night 911
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