Overcoming cancer once is a feat in itself.
Overcoming it twice, all before turning forty,
is almost mind-boggling.
Forty-one-year-old Raylene Hollrah of
Hermann, Missouri knows this firsthand.
She’s a seven-year breast cancer survivor
and a one-year anaplastic large-cell lymphoma survivor. The first one is self-explanatory, but the second is extremely rare, and
has only been diagnosed in 112 women
around the world.
As Raylene tells it, however, “the second
cancer, I feel like I should have never had,
but I did - and I think there’s a reason for
everything.”
Raylene became aware of her breast cancer when she was undergoing fertility treatments in 2007 while trying to become
pregnant with her second child. At the recommendation of her doctor, she underwent a
routine breast exam. Her doctor discovered a
lump, and she was sent for an immediate
mammogram that revealed nothing. Two
weeks later she had an ultrasound that also
revealed nothing, but at the persistence of
her doctor she scheduled a needle biopsy for
what the doctor thought was likely just a cyst
at this point.
“When she did the needle biopsy, her
whole demeanor changed after she removed
that fluid,” said Raylene. “I told my husband
on the way home, ‘I have breast cancer,’ and
he said, ‘No you don’t. You’re reading too
much into it.’”
Unfortunately, she was right.
She compares the shock to having a brick
thrown into the window of “my American life
- the white picket fence, the beautiful big
window in my living room. But my choice
was, pick up the pieces and let the light
shine through, and we can get it fixed.” After
enduring a summer of chemotherapy and
having both breasts removed, Raylene was
struggling to adjust to wearing prosthetics. “I
felt like I was a very elderly woman… they
were heavy, they just didn’t feel right,” she
said.
After passing on three other doctors and
doing independent research, she decided to
have cohesive implants in 2008, which are
shaped to give a less rounded look than silicone implants. Her doctor informed her that
her implants would last around ten years.
She decided to go through with the procedure. It took her a long time to come to terms
with her decision, she said. “My chest did not
define who I was, but it was taking away
from my femininity, and I felt like I was
stripped of that.”
And after the surgery, she went forward
in rebuilding her life. She continued being a
wife and mother to her now ten-year-old
daughter, Allyson, and became the guardian
of a teenaged son, Ryan, in 2012. She went
back Ѽ