A breast cancer diagnosis is hard enough – what happens when a mother and daughter go through it at the same time?
Genna Freed should have been in the mood to celebrate. On a cloudy November day in 2022, her mother, Julie Newman, was about to complete her final round of radiation, after being diagnosed with breast cancer in September. The whole family, a close-knit bunch, was gathering with balloons and signs.
But Freed, then a few weeks shy of her 31st birthday, was carrying a secret. Spurred by her mother’s diagnosis, she had her first mammogram a couple days earlier, and it had turned up a suspicious spot. Now she needed a second, diagnostic mammogram, and likely a biopsy. She found herself walking a surreal sort of tightrope, caught between relief that her mother’s treatment was over and fear that she might soon be starting her own.
“I went to the radiation center that morning, celebrated my mom having her last radiation treatment, had breakfast with everyone,” she recalls. “And then quietly went back to the medical campus, to the building across the street, to have my next set of scans and imagery done.”
Two weeks later, on 9 December 2022, Freed learned she had an early form of breast cancer called ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). Telling her mom, she says, was excruciating: “I just remember being like, I don’t want to give her this news, but I also cannot keep this from her.” Just three months out from her own diagnosis, Newman, now 68, was shocked. “It was like a kick in the stomach,” she says. “I couldn’t believe it.”
