Sara starts fundraising for breast cancer research inspired by her family history and her own high risk of developing the disease

Sara, from Syracuse in the United States, recently found out she has an elevated risk of developing breast cancer at some point in her lifetime. As a result, she’s been driven to support Against Breast Cancer by running the London Marathon in 2025. Here she explains why, as well as some of the challenges she faces in the American medical system.

I grew up in a family that is no stranger to breast and ovarian cancer. Before I was born, my family lost loved ones to this awful disease. And, I remember when I was much younger, two family members battled breast cancer, one beat it and the other lost their battle.

Watching these two family members’ experiences left an impression on me. As I got older, I wanted to do what I could to learn about my own risk and undergo a breast cancer risk assessment.

At first, this assessment was cost prohibitive – my health insurance wouldn’t cover it and I was looking at a $5,000 (£3,900 GBP) bill. At the time, I was a working professional in my early 20’s and that was not in my budget, so I put a pin in thinking about the assessment.

Almost 10 years after I first started exploring a breast cancer risk assessment, I was able to get my health insurance to fully cover my risk assessment.

The way that things work here, you need to have a life insurance policy before you go through any kind of an assessment because if you find you have a higher risk, there’s a very good probability that you will not be able to get life insurance afterwards.

There was about an eight-month process of finding the best life insurance policy, knowing that if I were to come back with a high risk that was necessary because I’m at the point in my life where I’m thinking of starting a family in a couple of years. I’m getting married this summer. It took a few months to get enrolled in the best life insurance policy, and then it took a couple of months to go through the assessment, both with my doctor’s and also counsellors.

There was a part of me that had hoped I wouldn’t come back as high risk for breast cancer, but the day I got the phone call, it was November of 2022, it was not a surprise. It was numbing knowing my life’s going to change because I can no longer bury my head in the sand.With this high risk, I have to get tested every six months and screened every six months. That comes with a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress. A lot of what ifs. I gave myself about a week to process and to grieve the news, even though I knew it wouldn’t change who I am. I had a lot of family I could lean on to talk through this, both on my fiancé’s side of the family, because his family also has a lot of breast cancer, but also on my side of the family. I’m really lucky to have an incredible medical team here that I could lean on and talk to as well.

Within about two months I had my first mammogram. I was 30, maybe 31. I remember going into the doctor’s office, and the doctor looked at me and said ‘why are you here? You’re young. You shouldn’t be worrying about this.’ And I said because I’m at high risk and they replied ‘is this on your paperwork because we need to make sure insurance is going to pay for it because someone your age is too young to start getting these screenings.’

I remember thinking this is absolutely wrong because it shouldn’t matter what age you are if you want to start screening. And a little light bulb went off. Why is it like this? If someone wants to be preventative with their health, if they know they have family history, if they know that they’re high risk, you don’t have to have all these questions, you should just be able to walk into a doctor’s office, not be ashamed and get the screening that you need.

So the first mammogram was very stressful just because people just didn’t hear it and they didn’t care. I learned that I need to be my own advocate going through this journey and I also learned that I really don’t want to deal with this for every six months of my entire life. So after that I got established with the Breast Care Centre here in Syracuse, NY. It’s run through one of our universities and they have this incredible breast cancer programme. The doctor and I met and we talked about all of my options and, for the time being here in the US, it’s recommended until you’re in your early 40s, you go through mammograms every year and MRIs every six months, depending on your risk assessment, as well as ovarian cancer screenings as that’s another part of what I’m at high risk for.

The doctor said that either within 10 years (when I am closer to my early 40s) or after I am done having kids, if you want to talk about getting a mastectomy or if you want to talk about having ovaries removed, we can. I knew going into the appointment that that’s what I wanted to do because having all of these invasive screenings all the time is a lot.

I went for my first MRI this past fall, and it was one of the scariest things I’ve done for so far. It’s an uncomfortable position. It’s emotionally draining. But I know I’m incredibly lucky that I have these tools that you have these screenings because if anything is caught, I can take care of it immediately.

When I found out about the work that Against Breast Cancer is doing, I knew that it was an organisation I wanted to align myself with, not just to run a marathon, but to do so much more because the research into secondary breast cancer is remarkable.

I’m a runner. I’m not a fast runner. This will be my third marathon, second one in London. To be running for an organisation that is doing such incredible work on such a tough topic will get me through the toughest parts of this training, knowing that not just doing this for myself, I’m doing it to raise awareness to raise funds.

When I run the marathon, the thing I want to do is have memory miles, whether they’re written on my arm or in the back of my running vest, in honour of survivors in honour of people currently fighting breast cancer or in honour of people who have passed away because of breast cancer.

When I decided to take on another marathon, I knew there was so much more to it than just running 26.2 miles. It’s such a greater project and a greater experience. I’m really looking forward to really the next ten months of training, awareness raising and fundraising.