Hello, my name is Casey Mallon and back in 2020 I donated my hair and raised funds for cancer research through Love Your Sister. This year on 6/12/23 I am going to be running another fundraiser where I will be cutting and donating approximately 8-12 inches of my hair again to make wigs for cancer patients. This time raising money for a friend who has been through extremely tough times in the past 6 months due to cancer. The financial pressure she has been under due to incredibly expensive procedures, appointments, treatments, etc. It would be fantastic if you could please dig deep and donate some money to support this cause.
How do you prepare yourself to hear those words, to hear you're going to lose your hair, lashes, eyebrows, as well as your confidence and self-esteem and maybe even the ability to have kids and inevitably yourself. Even when it's your own life at stake how do you process and accept the thing that is going to save your life will also kill so much of you at the same time.
Below is a little insight to Kuy’s story and what she has endured over the past 6 months.
At age 28, I had to unwillingly join the club nobody wants to be apart of. On 10/5/23 I was diagnosed with breast cancer and if that wasn't bad enough the next day I found out it was the most aggressive type of breast cancer you could have, 'triple negative' and that my first step was chemo. Triple Negative is a type of breast cancer that does not have any of the three receptors commonly found on breast cancer cells (oestrogen, progesterone, and HER2 receptors). This type is much harder to treat as there aren't as many options. Triple Negative accounts for around 15% of early breast cancers.
So far, I have had to change jobs from which I loved to prevent myself from getting sick (even though technically I am sick), go through IVF and freeze my eggs to ensure I can hopefully have kids one day and still have to have a needle the size of a small straw even month to turn my ovaries off. I have had to get an (ugly) port placed under my skin to receive many different types of poisonous/toxic drugs through, go through countless scans, biopsies, procedures, surgeries (with more to come), be picked and probed and questioned more times than I can count, go through chemo which is literally just poisoning my body. In result see the many changes that the gift chemo keeps on giving, from rashes, to weight gain from steroids I have to take just to feel okay (no folks, it’s not like the movies you don’t actually lose weight), to my hair coming out in clumps, my lashes and eyebrows falling out, wearing wigs and make up to make myself look normal to everyone else whilst feeling like a strange to myself and to a fatigue I have never experienced before. Not to mention the toll the financial stress has taken on me, who would have thought it would be so expensive to fight for your life.
The one thing that has made everything easier is the support I have around me, I honestly don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have the people, I do in my life who I am immensely grateful for every day.
Thank you everyone for your support and please don’t forget to check your lady lumps!
Great work Casey!