I'm the middle child, no wonder!

Happy New Year friends! I look back on this past year and still don’t even believe that I am 3 weeks into my recovery. It feels like I’m still back in August trying to decide when to have my genetic testing done. Time has seriously flown by y’all.


First, I want to address something I've been hearing lately from a few different people in talking about my surgery and it's that "everyone is going to get cancer anyway". This bothers me to hear because I feel that it completely discredits my choice to get a preventative surgery and the severity of it. Yes, everyone has a chance of getting cancer, depending on your lifestyle and many other things, absolutely, and people will continue to get cancer but no, not everyone has the genetic mutation that I have, in fact only 5-10% of women have this genetic mutation that causes breast cancer. This does not change my risk for other cancers but it does give me peace knowing I have eliminated my 87% genetic risk of breast cancer in my lifetime. If you don’t have the genetic mutation, YES you still have a chance of getting cancer BUT a woman who has the gene mutation is about five times more likely to develop breast cancer than a woman who does not have a mutation… If 5-10% do have the gene then that means 90-95% of women DO NOT HAVE THE BREAST CANCER GENE. So my surgery was absolutely for a reason. Do your research please. Get educated!!


Now, I will get into my NYE status that everyone got so confused about! I am so excited to share this awesome news with y’all. I have a big sister! In searching for my mom, she found my blog and she was able to find out about our family history and get tested for the breast cancer gene. Here is the story :)             

All of this began back in November. I got a text one Saturday morning from my mom that said I needed to come home today because they needed to tell Lauryn and me something important and that it wasn’t bad. I immediately called my sister in a panic and we brainstormed about what it could be. We discussed the option of my mom being sick again. We thought maybe they were just saying it wasn’t bad so that we wouldn’t worry. We thought maybe they were going to lecture us about our church attendance (normal) or that someone lost their job. We literally made a list of things it could be. Did we win the lottery? Nothing was making sense. We had no idea what to expect. We both immediately went home. Of course my sister was late. I was texting her while I was sitting in the living room with my parents, telling her how they were acting so extra happy and weird, I could not for the life of me figure out what was going on. My sister finally got home and we both sat down in the living room. My parents started beating around the bush and then started arguing about what music channel to put the TV on, mom wanted holiday music, dad wanted Christian, are you kidding me?? My mom finally left the room and came back with an envelope. She pulled out two separate stacks of paper, handed them to us and said "Girls.... you have a big sister." The first thing out of my mouth was WHAT followed by hysterical crying. Lauryn was quiet. I sat there and read through the recent emails that were exchanged between her and my mom. And then I got to the pictures. Cue loss of all composure.             

Below is my mom. Can you see the crazy resemblance?!

Saw the above picture first. Saw mom so much in her. Kept reading and looking at pictures and kept trying to fathom in my head what I had just been told. I am not the oldest anymore. I’ve thought one way for 25 years and it’s all just changed in an instant. I have to say I was truly shocked to the core. Not in a million years did I think this is what they were going to tell us. After the initial shock and crying calmed a bit, my dad encouraged my mom to share her story with us. We shed a lot of tears that day, all of us together as a family, even my dad :) We laugh about him and my uncle Graig because they are very emotional and they are probably going to cry again reading this. It’s ok guys.

Mom proceeded to tell us her story with tears streaming down her face. She was 18 years old. She found out she was pregnant. She chose to live at a special home for girls during the pregnancy, had a little girl, and gave her up for adoption. I admire her greatly for this decision, especially in that day and age when things weren’t as relaxed as they are now. She still chose adoption. I look at my mom in a whole new light. I can’t believe that she carried this secret for 34 years. I think back on the times that we watched teen mom together and the episode of 90210 where Dixon tries to find his birth mother. I know she was probably thinking about her daughter during all those times and I thought we were just catching up on our guilty pleasure shows.

My big sister was given a letter this past Easter weekend from her parents that my mom had written in July of 1978, before she was born. After they got back from out of town, her husband started doing research online based on the information given in my moms letter. On April 9, he compiled a list of 30 women that had gotten married in Bexar County from 1979-1985 that all had my mom's birthday. They started looking up the women on Facebook and found my mom. Upon further research into my mom's pictures they knew it was her. They look like twins to me, I still can't stop staring! Weeks went by and my big sister periodically looked at my mom's page. At one point, she saw that mom posted about my Aunt Mini's passing from breast cancer.  She found the obituary and saw that it mentioned that she had 5 sisters. My mom's letter to her also mentioned that she had 5 sisters. She ended up finding some of my aunts on Facebook and matching their graduation dates with the ages mentioned in the letter. This is when it became real for her and she knew she really had found her birth mother! In the next few months, she researched further and saw pictures of Lauryn and me at Race for the Cure on Facebook. It was at that time she realized my mom's name was on our shirts too, not just my Aunt Mini's. She realized that my mom must have had breast cancer also. A few months later, on July 6 she came across my blog YES! She learned through it that my mom was diagnosed with her first breast cancer at 34. This freaked her out a bit because she learned this the night before her 34th birthday. She truly felt that this was a sign from God telling her to get more information for herself and her future as soon as possible. She tried to contact my mom a couple of times through Facebook (mom didn't notice because it was going to the 'other' box instead of her inbox since they weren’t friends. If you’ve never checked your ‘other’ box go now! I found a bunch of old messages from people who wrote me about my blog that I didn’t know and felt sooo bad about never seeing them!). She also tried old email addresses that my mom never checked. As she waited for a response she kept up with my blog. It is so crazy for me to think that as I was posting each month, my very own sister- I had no idea about- was reading it.

My sister met with a doctor and decided to proceed with a mammogram and genetic testing. On October 12, she had her first mammogram and got a dreaded call back a few days later saying they found an 8mm mass. She got an ultrasound and it turned out to be a normal lymph node, thank God. She decided to pursue genetic testing but when she received all the paperwork, her heart sank because she had so many family history blanks she didn’t know how to fill in. This was her push to finally send my mom a letter in the mail. She sent a letter, with all the paperwork on October 31, 2012. My mom received a package a few days later. She opened it up and immediately broke into tears. When my dad got home from work she called him into the room and told him that she received a letter from her daughter. The next few weeks they would try to decide how to tell my sister and I and that my friends brings me back to the start of this post.

This is becoming a book, so I think this is a good place to stop for now. I feel extremely blessed. Can't wait to share the rest of this story and tell you about our first time meeting :) Happy New Year!

-Eryn