23-year-old breast cancer survivor Brittney Beadle says her new “purpose on earth isn't to suffer, but to enjoy herself and spread love.” We’ve been following Brittney for a while now and her declaration is part of an extraordinary, and very public, growth process. More than anything, listening to Brittney is like gulping fresh, gorgeous air. She has so much spirit.
Brittney was only 18 when she found a lump in her breast. “My doctor said 18-year-olds don’t get breast cancer,” she recalls. Three months later, the lump had grown. Beadle returned for a biopsy and found her doctor had been wrong — 18-year-olds do get breast cancer.
Read MoreHitting the Re-Set Button
Now, at 23, she’s “hitting the reset button.” In a powerful Instagram post (below) Beadle says, “I have been living a cancer story for 5 years now. It consumed me. Every thought, action, and post I made had to do with something about cancer even if I didn't realize it,” she explains. Now, she’s rethinking what it means to live with metastatic disease.“Cancer Isn’t My Story”
As those in the SurvivorNet community know, cancer can quickly consume our thoughts. Beadle was no different: “Healing was my focus, but it was driven by the fear of cancer,” she writes. “I was always trying to find new ways to help heal my physical body, but that was just telling the Universe there was something there that needed healing.”
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Instead, Beadle says, she needed to “‘reset’ all the limiting beliefs I have gathered over my 23 years of living.”
“Cancer isn't my story,” she writes, “it was an experience that I kept living over and over and over again in a loop I was unable to break myself out of. But that isn't the case anymore because I found my way out, or should I say aligned my way out.”
Brittney Beadle, who had lived with stage 4 breast cancer for five years, says cancer helped her tap her “abundant power.”
Tapping Into Her Power
Through cancer, Beadle says she has accessed her power: “We all have this inner power inside us, unlimited, abundant power that we each have access too if we open ourselves up to it. Challenging times, much like cancer can be an opportunity to help us tap into it.”
To be clear, she says, she doesn’t plan to “ignore cancer” or medical treatment — just re-frame her approach. “I am putting [cancer] in a box and releasing it to the universe. My purpose here on earth isn't to suffer, it is to enjoy myself, spread love, and to help change the world, which right now really needs it … now it’s time to listen to what my soul craves.”
Breast cancer in younger women, says Dr. Ann Partridge, an oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, is often more aggressive.
Young Women And Breast Cancer
There are about 11,000 women aged 40 and under diagnosed with breast cancer every year in the U.S. says Dr Ann Partridge, an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. That’s a small percentage of the 260,000 women diagnosed annually in this country.
But in some ways, a diagnosis for a younger woman can often be even more devastating because, Dr. Partridge says, the cancer is likely to be a more aggressive form of the disease and also at an advanced stage, because screening for younger women is not standard.
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