Being an Indian girl, I didn't know anyone who had gone through breast cancer

Transcript

You know being an Indian girl I didn't know anyone who had gone through breast cancer. And my grandmother had been through breast cancer but no one had spoken about it and you know, I'm not gonna lie there is still shame and stigma associated with cancer. And yeah I was really afraid of what that meant for my marriage, my relationship, you know my future. It felt like it was all about to be lost.

Because I knew from the minute I had my breast cancer diagnosis that everything had to be about me and getting me well and putting me at the front of everything from this point onwards. Because that was the only way I was going to survive. And that's a huge issue for South Asian women. We're not given the ability to put ourselves first enough. So when there's something like as big as cancer comes knocking at our door, we just don't know how, we don't have the toolkit to deal with it.

I think in my community there's a huge fear that cancer means death, cancer means you're damaged, cancer means the end of something. But for something to end somebody else has to begin. And actually if we change the perspective, when we just say, 'Okay it's happened, but what's next?'. And we have a story like mine, which is a real story of hope, then we can just dull down the stigma and dull down the shame and dull down the taboos. So I share for that reason because I genuinely believe that if someone heard my story, they'd be less fearful of a breast cancer diagnosis. And that's a very powerful thing to do and it's something I wish I'd had.