Meet Host Kathleen Moss

A Breast Cancer Diary

Thanks for checking out my new podcast! This episode is a super short intro to my story just in case you haven't heard it before. Thanks for listening! -Kathleen

Episode One Transcript:

[00:00:00] June 26, 2024. Dear diary, Wait.... Are you my diary? My name is Kathleen Moss. Welcome to my podcast. You may know me from my YouTube channels, "Etrogen Diaries"; and "Seeking Deeper Health"; or maybe you found me through my Instagram account, @a.breast.cancer.diary. However you got here. I'm glad you made it. This podcast called "A Breast Cancer Diary"; is a new project that I'm hoping will last for many years. It's not going to be polished, professional, or even an entertaining podcast. Because to be honest, for me, recovering from breast cancer is mostly about finding ordinary people who can help me feel less crazy as I continue to make sense of what just happened to me and my mom.

That's all I'm here to do, to help you feel less alone--less crazy for all the things that you've been worrying about. So at least for the first season, instead of inviting experts on, I'm inviting my friends and fellow advocates from the breast cancer community, who have unique experiences and can tell personal stories in their own informal language, without shame.

This first season is really about our intuitive moments, moments when we surprise ourselves and do something really strange, but also freeing, like leaving the career that we've been picturing ourselves staying at for 20 or 40 more years, or posting a photo of our newly reconstructed breasts on Instagram just for solidarity sake, or saying no thanks to chemo or implants when we totally had planned to go through with them up until the last moment.

This weekend will be my first anniversary of my second mastectomy on the right side and my final revision on the left. Talk about closure. I got some serious closure that day. That was a day I so looked forward to. I still can't believe how fortunate I was to have so many other breast cancer survivors supporting me that day, and week, and month.

Instead of a funeral procession for my lost breasts, we made it into a celebration of life, recovery, and wellness. and helped me so much being a part of a community that celebrates chests of all shapes and sizes and symmetries.

This last year has probably been one of the most painful and important years of my life. My dad's dementia finally dipped to a point that made it so that we were unable to care for him. Mom's breast cancer came back and then stole her from us, leaving me with little to do with my time and my heart. I started to pour myself into the work of breast cancer advocacy and awareness, and I've met so many amazing women along the way.

I finally had the chance to get a tattoo on my concave side to cover the gnarly scars this spring. It makes me smile more readily when I look in the mirror. I'm still learning to really see myself and love my body more fully, but I already love it more fully than I did before cancer.

This last month, I interviewed two of my favorite women from the group of superstar doulas who midwived me through this last couple of years, and I'll get to share two pieces of their stories soon in the podcast. But first, I want to share a little bit about who I am.

I'm a 51 year old wife, mother, nutritionist, writer, and spiritual director who grew up in Portland, Oregon. I put myself through college, waitressing, and going to school part time for 8 years. My first romantic relationship was with a man who was a sociopath, so I didn't really date at all from age 25 to 37. His addictions weighed on me so much that I spent my first 10 years of work life working as a social worker in the foster care system, which was the place that he and his brother, another abuser of mine, got so messed up.

I was 30 when I decided to adopt an older foster child as a single parent. And I did. My daughter was 9 when I got her and 10 when I adopted her. I had a spiritual community around me that was super solid and helped me take care of her well. When I was 38, I started online dating and I met my husband, who I married a year later, and we moved out to the country, where we still live, with just one of our kids still living with us.

In my early forties, I had two cancer scares. One came through uterine polyps, and the second, a year later, showed up as a shadow on my breast ultrasound, which happened because I found a benign lump in my right breast. For eight years after that, I had ultrasounds on both my uterus and my breasts every six months. I became a nutritionist to try to influence my increased risk of cancer seven years ago, but all the removal of silver fillings, cheap meat, and processed foods from my diet could only go so far. And like so many women I've come to know, the stress of COVID is what I believe put me into the danger zone.

I didn't ever feel a lump in my cancer torn breast, but my sweet body told me that there was something wrong by sending dead cancer cells out through my nipple in bloody discharge three years ago. That's when we started all the MRIs and biopsies, which at first showed nothing, probably because of my dense breasts. But eventually, I was diagnosed with DCIS, or precancer of the duct. After my single mastectomy for DCIS almost two years ago now, I was told that I also had been harboring invasive lobular breast cancer in that breast, but not enough of it that I had to have chemo or radiation.

I only had a couple of millimeters of active cancer. I knew instinctively that implants weren't for me, so I had a plan to get a Goldilocks Mastectomy. But it turned out that my DCIS was in my skin by the time I had surgery, so I got a concave closure with a lump of extra skin that my surgeon wanted to turn into a nipple... even though I had told her that I didn't want a nipple.

At the time of my first mastectomy, I felt really lonely. I started looking for a way to get into deeper community with survivors. I found that in the Flat community here on the West Coast. They not only helped me not to feel so alone in my struggle, but I also saw how much they were celebrating their bodies, which freed me up to let go of insecurity and self consciousness, which I never thought would be possible, especially six months after mastectomy. I found them on Instagram, and that's why I've been telling my own story, or what I've called my diary, on social media. I see it as a quick way to connect with women who desperately need this kind of support in a timely way. I never thought I'd be such a big fan of social media.

Nowadays, I still do work for flat visibility, and for flat to be offered as an option after a mastectomy. But most of my advocacy work is around lobular cancer awareness, supporting a group of 50 advocates who are seeking to do local advocacy in their own communities with the help of the Lobular Breast Cancer Alliance.

I mentioned that my mom also had breast cancer and died of it recently. This happened just four months ago, and I'm still processing the loss. It was just a month between diagnosis of her lung mets and her death. I'd been living with her about half of the time for the year prior to her death, so she left a huge hole that I'm still trying to figure out how to fill.

Hopefully this new project will be a way to memorialize her, and a kind of tribute to her memory. Stay tuned for my first full length episode where I'll be interviewing one of the first women I found online who made me feel less isolated by sharing photos of her cancer torn body. Michaela Raes will be my guest on the next episode.

I'll talk to you then.