Asha’s Story
“I am so passionate about this. I want people to know their options. I want better for my daughter and I want better for the world and to me it starts with knowing your options."
Procedures:
“People just don’t know. I didn’t know this stuff. Especially as a black woman. I started to be very vulnerable and post very vulnerable pictures of my radiation burns in the hopes that one woman could feel less alone,” Asha said.
Asha was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017. Since then, she has undergone countless treatments—including the radiation that burned her— and breast reconstruction surgeries, but according to her, the story begins even earlier, in 2016, with a trauma that indirectly gave Asha the tools to save her own life.
The year before her breast cancer diagnosis, Asha underwent a routine surgery to remove a painful uterine cyst. As a child, she’d had major back surgery; she was well acquainted with her pain tolerance and how her body healed. This surgery was different. In the aftermath, she did not feel like herself. An emergency ovary removal and an excruciatingly painful incident in which a major nerve was sewn into an incision left her extremely depressed. In absence of affordable mental health resources, she took the gym. She progressed so quickly that she was invited to be a fitness instructor at her gym.
“Two months after that, I was in the shower and I was shaving under my arm and I felt a tiny bump. The only reason I attribute to knowing it was there was the crazy stuff of the year before that drove me to the gym, where I lost weight and I became super attuned to my body.”
That tiny bump was Stage 3b breast cancer. Asha’s diagnosis was the product of self-advocacy. Her doctor initially advised her to wait six months after an inconclusive ultrasound, but Asha pressed for the most accurate possible assessment, which was a biopsy. When it came back positive for breast cancer, she and her doctor were shocked.
“At that moment, it felt like I left my body, and in the last year, I can truly say that I’m slowly returning back to her.”
Two mammograms and two additional biopsies later, Asha underwent chemotherapy followed by bilateral mastectomies with expander implant breast reconstruction, 33 rounds of radiation, and four boosts. The radiation left her black skin with third degree burns for which no one and nothing prepared her.
“Radiation is something that we don't see in movies, that we don’t see represented today. If you Google “black radiation burns,” you will typically see white skin. Even if you say black skin, brown skin, even if you say please, show me anybody that looks like me.”
She healed and moved on to an implant exchange procedure, where she was excited to feel soft implants instead of hard expanders. The results were not what she hoped they’d be. She was uncomfortable and in a fog. She quickly learned via independent community research that her implants were among those recalled for BIA-ALCL concerns.
“My surgeon only gave me the options that he could perform, and the only option that he could perform was under-the-muscle implants. Given all of the activities I performed and all the fitness classes I taught, he should never have thought that cutting an actual muscle was a viable option.”
Asha had her implants removed to improve her health and comfort while she worked to educate herself on all the options out there and determine which was best for her. This act of self-advocacy came with its own emotional challenges.
“I thought ‘I am ugly. This is not pretty.’ I think for me, healing can only come from being honest with ourselves first. I looked at myself and said ‘OK now what? This is not the look. This is really some raisins in a pudding on my chest. How can I find beauty?’”
Just 3 weeks later, Asha was asked to walk at New York Fashion Week with Anaono. The audience celebrated her beauty as she walked in a bra and underwear with no breasts.
“I thought if they could find beauty in me, how can I not find beauty in myself?”
She actively worked to love her body again on her own terms, choosing her words carefully each time she spoke to herself. Modeling opportunities continued to flow in, helping Asha to reclaim her power in this challenging moment. She prepared herself to pursue another form of breast reconstruction, this time, with more information and a clear sense of what she wanted for herself.
“I didn’t want to wake up from a surgery and feel less empowered. I had fought really hard to be in that place. I wasn’t settling for anything, I’m taking the best of the best only, always.”
After four years of consideration, Asha found a surgeon who understood who she was, where she was coming from, and how she wanted to heal after surgery. Her surgeon fought to ensure that Asha understood her options. She chose DIEP flap breast reconstruction and traveled for surgery.
“I am so passionate about this. I want people to know their options. I want better for my daughter and I want better for the world and to me it starts with knowing your options. It starts with knowing that it’s now just what the doctor says, and that starts with knowing your options. I want better for my kids: they’re my two reasons.”
Asha has since healed extraordinarily well. Her advice is simple: be your best as you seek the best.
“Seek out your best surgeon, but also seek out your best self. You can’t expect them to create miracles if you are not also trying to create miracles yourself. We as patients have to make sure that we’re doing our part in it. Unless it’s absolutely necessary, don’t rush into a surgery. Take a beat, take a breath, before you make a decision.”
You find more of Asha’s thoughts in her column on Every Health.