Advice for Young Adults Facing Triple-Negative Breast Cancer, Or Any Cancer

After being diagnosed with stage 3 triple-negative breast cancer the day after her 29th birthday, Meagan Pettit underwent chemotherapy, a bilateral mastectomy, radiation and reconstruction. Now managing lymphedema, she is preparing for an innovative lymphatic bypass surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where she also spoke at a patient event about fertility preservation before treatment.

In a video interview with CURE, Meagan shares her advice for other young adults facing a cancer diagnosis: find support in the cancer community when ready and remember that life does not end after diagnosis, it just changes.

Transcript

What advice do you have for other young adults out there who are facing a cancer diagnosis?

One of the biggest pieces of advice is to get involved in the community whenever you feel prepared to do that. At my time of diagnosis, I was kind of more of a lurker in the community. I was on Instagram watching everything happening but wasn’t really ready to get involved and lean into this identity. About a year after my diagnosis, I started getting involved in the community, joining support groups, and making connections with other cancer survivors, previvors or thrivers. I feel like that completely changed the experience for me because it made it not feel as isolating.

Being a young person and watching your peers do all of these things in life that you feel like you aren’t doing when you’re in treatment — and looking at all of these potential limitations that may be ahead of you when you don’t really know what it’s going to look like — can feel like such an isolating place to be. You can’t really talk to your friends about what’s going on because they’re just not going to get it. So being able to have access to a community of people who genuinely understand all of the nuances of what it’s like to be a person in the community, and especially a young person, with all the different considerations to have for yourself, is such a game changer.

The other piece of advice I would give is to recognize that life doesn’t end after diagnosis. Life might look different, but you get to decide how much you want to identify with your diagnosis. You get to decide if it’s something that you really lean into, advocate for and make sure other people know about, or if you want it to be something you hold close to yourself and keep more personal. It seems like a lot of times people don’t know how much to identify with their diagnosis, especially while in treatment, because it feels like such a big part of your life and has so many impacts on the way you function. But just recognize that you get to decide that — and nobody else can decide that for you.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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