Dana’s Family History of Breast Cancer: Having the Conversation

When Dana told her kids that she had breast cancer she knew first-hand how they might feel. She shares her plans to continue the conversation about their family history of breast cancer as her kids grow older. 

Audio Descriptive Text

• Super comes up with “Dana On having ‘the conversation’”
• Dana is shown sitting as she is being interviewed throughout the video.
• Dana’s family photos are shown.
• A photo of Dana’s mother is shown.
• More family photos are shown.
• A photo of Dana’s mother during treatment is shown.
• More family photos are shown.
• Photos of Dana during the surgery process are shown.
• More family photos are shown.
• Super comes up with “It’s Time to Talk About Breast Cancer Risk”
• The last screen shows “BRING YOUR BRAVE” with the logos for the National Association for Chronic Disease Directors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and directs viewers to visit: cdc.gov/bringyourbrave

Script

[Dana] You know, I was terrified. To tell my kids that I have cancer was like, obviously, a very scary moment in my life. The second I told my then five-year-old, I just saw her face kind of go dark and she said, “But that’s what Yaya Georgia had.” She knew that her grandmother had died of this very same thing that I was sitting down and telling her that I had. And she is worried that I’m gonna die. So that was definitely a dagger through the heart. My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was in college. And unfortunately, when she was diagnosed it was already at stage three. And that was frankly, from not having gone to her gynecologist for about three or four years. So, had she been more on top of her healthcare and her doctor’s appointments, it probably could have been caught sooner, prevented, and had a different outcome. And it’s hard for me to even say it but there was this feeling when I was diagnosed that like, I’m just like her. In the same way that someone looks at me and says, “You have her smile. You have her laugh.” It’s like, “You have her cancer.” I, unlike my mother caught it very early, and I was like, I’m not giving this any chance. I decided to do a double mastectomy a month later and I am in recovery. My daughters are now five and eight years old. So they’re very knowledgeable about the disease. And I think when the time is right, I wanna talk to them about, all the preventative care and that they need to be more on top of it than some of their friends because there is a family history. But I’m not quite ready to put that burden on their shoulders yet.