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In early 2008, 43-year-old mother-of-three Natalie Wilson was weaning her youngest son, Quinton, off breastfeeding when she discovered a hard lump on the lower part of her right breast.
Wilson was rather blasé about the lump and assumed it might be a clogged milk duct from nursing. Her husband, however, insisted that she go to a doctor to get it checked out, just in case. Wilson did so, if only to appease her husband — but was then immediately told that she had breast cancer.
Her doctors immediately made plans to perform a double mastectomy, and Wilson agreed, albeit reluctantly. She worried that losing her breasts would make her feel less of a woman, but she had no other choice.
Over the next several years, Wilson underwent surgery after surgery. Every time, her doctors were successful in removing the cancerous tissue from her body – but the tumors kept returning, or her body completely rejected the artificial breast implant her doctors inserted to keep her breasts even.
Wilson once opted to have both breasts removed – “I was 35, and didn’t want to worry about this for the rest of my life, so I opted for a double mastectomy, with the removal of the left breast as precaution.” – but even this didn’t work because her body only proceeded to reject the reconstructive implants later.
With each subsequent procedure, Wilson’s experience of trauma and fear about her illness only continued to grow.
After 10 failed attempts of using artificial breast implants to reconstruct her body, Wilson’s doctors finally decided to use cadaver – the flesh from dead bodies – and some fat transferred from her thighs and buttocks to reconstruct her breasts. This was in 2013.
For the next three years, it seemed that Wilson’s body was finally accepting the new reconstruction and things would finally begin to settle down.
Until in July 2016, Wilson was told, for the second time, that she had cancer in the tissue behind her nipple. Her doctors would have to take one of her nipples in the tumor removal process.
It was only just as Wilson was ready to recover from this identity altering procedure that her doctor delivered another blow: The cancer had returned in her left breast, for the third time now.
“I felt I was going backwards, and that all these years were for nothing,” Wilson confessed.
In September 2016, after another surgery and biopsy, Wilson was finally – finally – deemed clear of cancer.
“I felt relieved, but unsure as it's come back before,” she said of her recovery. As a woman who now only has one breast, she tries to “teach [her] children that it's not about appearance, it's about how you are as a person.”
Although Wilson lives every day in fear that her cancer will come back with more vigor than before, she hopes to use her experience as an example for other women who are also struggling, “I want to empower people and show that no matter how much you've been through you're not alone.”
