My BRCA Journey

Let’s start at the beginning. In 2004 my father sat me down and told me that he had prostate cancer. I was a freshman in college, headed into my second semester and honestly couldn’t believe it. He said he was removing his prostate and that he had reached that decision himself – that it wasn’t something that he would allow to define him. 

Surgery was scheduled for the following month. On February 23, 2025 my mother, brother and father headed to Kaiser while I went to SJSU that day. I had a light schedule that ended in Monday night chapter with my sorority at the time. I quickly found out how many good people I had surrounding me. I would leave a class and my phone would alert me that I had voicemails or text messages from friends checking in on me and asking about my dad.

We were told surgery was successful and we wrongly assumed he was in remission. My father was a proud man and spoke English well. Some years later, we learned his comprehension was a bit limited in medical environments – as he didn’t want any of us to attend his follow up appointments with him.

Shortly before my dad’s diagnosis, my grandmother passed from Ovarian Cancer. I had met her in person in 1997 and she moved here in 1998 after an earthquake on her island displaced her. We had a strained relationship – hello strong Catholic beliefs coupled with her thinking less of me because I was from my dad’s second marriage. I watched her suffer before my eyes. I had never seen anyone’s midsection so large that they appeared pregnant and weren’t. I tried to connect with her and she passed in the summer of 2003, shortly after my high school graduation.

Along the way, we had extended family pass away from various cancers. I also grew up with the knowledge that my mother’s first husband passed from Acute Myleoid Leukemia when they were 23. Cancer scared me. My aunt’s breast cancer diagnosis absolutely frightened me. My dad was in what we presumed was remission. I had already lost his mother – now a third person with cancer?!