Katie Post sports a few more scars than most 35-year-olds.
There’s a faint line tucked in her left armpit, leftover from a sentinel node biopsy. There’s a mark above her collarbone from a chemotherapy port and another scar above her left breast — the residual of a lumpectomy.
Post doesn’t hide her scars; she’s proud of them. They’re signs of her yearlong battle with breast cancer. Since being diagnosed in the spring of 2013, she’s undergone surgery, brutal bouts of chemotherapy and radiation and has been in remission for the past year-and-a-half.
She’s active member of the local breast cancer community — she’s the state’s leader for the Young Survival Coalition, which is a national network for young women who have breast cancer, a member of the Malama Ka Pili Paa cancer support group in Hilo, a young advocate for the Living Beyond Breast Cancer organization, and also is a second-year pharmacy student at the Daniel K. Inouye College of Pharmacy.
Most importantly, she said cancer is something that’s changed her — for the better.
“Cancer is part of me now,” she said. “When I look back at cancer, I don’t look at it as being something bad. I look back at it being something good. It was bad when I went through it … but it was good in the sense that, it made me a better person, stronger — and who I am today.”
Post has very little family history of cancer. She was also tested for the BRCA cancer gene mutation. She doesn’t carry the mutation. Plus, she was only 32. So the day she first felt a lump in her breast while taking a shower, she did what most young women might do — she ignored it at first.
“When you’re young, it’s something you don’t think about. It’s one of those things you think you’re immune to,” said Post, who was living in Florida at the time. “You think it’s never going to you. I never thought I’d get it.”
Statistically, young women often face delays in diagnosis, according to information from the Young Survival Coalition. They have more dense breast tissue — which makes detecting cancer via mammograms more difficult, and they often face more aggressive forms of cancer. But data from the coalition shows breast cancer is the most common cancer in women ages 15 to 39, with 13,000 new diagnosis each year.
Post is now a staunch supporter of all women conducting regular breast self-exams. Before the lump in her own breast was removed, she encouraged “practically every woman she knew” to feel the tumor.
And now in remission, she takes things one day at a time. She moved to Hawaii for pharmacy school in 2014, and conducts cancer research at the university. She feels lucky. She doesn’t regret the cancer, she said, because it has put things in perspective.
“I live every day like it’s going to be my last,” she said. “Just because I know now that it could be. I tell everyone I love them, and you never know when you’re time is up. It’s definitely changed things.”