For as long as I can remember...

...breast cancer has been a looming threat in my life. I can’t really pinpoint that defining moment when the news was first delivered. The information wasn’t ceremoniously passed to me at a particular age, it just always was. As a young girl, I remember huge family gatherings with both my mother and father’s family all celebrating the holidays together. Especially birthdays; birthdays were huge in our family then. I remember uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers, even great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers. Everyone celebrated together. All, that is, except the women in my mother’s family. The women in my mother’s family have all been struck down at a very young age, robbed of years of family gatherings and all that life had to offer. My grandmother died from breast cancer at 34-years old and my great-grandmother died from breast cancer at 32-years old. March 2008 marked the 7-year anniversary of my mom's passing, after her diagnosis at 47-years old. Her doctors told her that based on the staging and aggressiveness of her disease, she most likely had it since she was 37. These are the facts, and I seemed to have always known them, as matter-of-factly as that.