No one prepares you for that moment. For that phone call. For the instant you feel the life you have built, with care, patience, and love, beginning to collapse. “I’m sorry... we found cancer cells.” How? Why?
All I could see were the faces of my two daughters. Had I failed them? Would I still be here to watch them grow? Would I still get to be their mother? No one prepares you for the fear that follows those words.
How could this happen? No one in my family has ever had breast cancer. I never skipped my annual checkups. In fact, I had undergone my routine mammogram just one month earlier. It showed nothing. No warning signs. No reason to worry.
So how? How? How? Then time seemed to stop.
A procession of faces flashed before me: my husband, my parents, my siblings, my family, my friends, my colleagues. One question overwhelmed every other thought: How was I going to tell them?
And then came the hardest question of all. How was I going to tell my daughters?
In that moment, I felt I had somehow let everyone down.
My own body, one I had spent years caring for, had betrayed me. It had pulled me into unfamiliar territory, a place I never imagined I would have to enter. I exercise with almost obsessive discipline. I pay close attention to what I eat. I rarely get sick. Even COVID somehow passed me by. So how had this happened?
Once the initial shock began to fade, another part of me took over: the journalist. Instead of asking only, Why me? I began asking the questions I have spent my career asking.
What do the facts say?
What do the numbers tell us?
What are the treatment options?
What are the chances of recovery?
The answers surprised me. Nearly 90 percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer have no inherited genetic mutation linked to the disease and no family history of it. That reality challenges one of the most common assumptions many of us carry: that breast cancer is primarily hereditary. It also made me question the countless medical forms we fill out, where family history often feels like the defining measure of our risk.
I learned something else I wish someone had told me years ago: an annual mammogram may not detect a tumor in its earliest stages, while an MRI can sometimes reveal what other imaging cannot. I knew none of this. I wish I had.
By the grace of God, and because my cancer was caught early, I found myself facing a disease with a clear treatment plan and an excellent prognosis.
What I am going through is deeply personal, and something I would never wish on anyone. My first instinct was to keep it private. I thought that if I didn’t talk about it, perhaps I could pretend that the long road of treatment ahead wasn’t real. Perhaps silence would make it easier.
Instead, the opposite happened. The more I learned, the more I felt a responsibility to speak. I realized that staying silent would not change my reality. But it might deny another woman information that could change hers.
That is why I decided to write. Not because I am asking for sympathy. Not because I am seeking pity. I have been overwhelmed by the love, kindness, and support I have received, and I am deeply grateful for every message, every prayer, and every hand that has reached out to help me.
I am writing because I now understand that my story is not unusual. Thousands of women are living this same experience, quietly, and often alone.
Today, I find myself searching for women who have walked this path before me so I can learn from them. At the same time, I am choosing to make my own journey public in the hope that it may help someone else.
Perhaps another woman, somewhere far away, will read these words before finally scheduling the screening she has postponed for months. Perhaps she will ask for a second opinion. Perhaps she will insist on an MRI after a normal mammogram if something still doesn’t feel right.
Or perhaps she will simply find comfort in seeing me continue to write, continue to work, continue to appear on television, living my life while navigating treatment. I am not afraid of what lies ahead. Treatment will be difficult. There will be hard days. I know that.
But I also know this: I can endure pain. I will fight with everything I have, with my strength, my spirit, my body, and every ounce of determination I possess. I will fight for my daughters. For my husband. For my parents, my siblings, and my family. For my friends, who have become family in this life far from home.
I will fight. Perhaps it will defeat me. Perhaps I will defeat it. But I will never surrender.
To every woman who has fought, or is still fighting, this battle: I stand with you. I may grow tired. I may cry. I may have moments when I feel overwhelmed.
But I will never stop living. I will never stop loving. I will never stop finding joy. And I will never stop doing the work that gives my life purpose.
Breast cancer is now part of my story. But it will not be the ending of it. And I refuse to let it define who I am. I also hope to challenge a mindset that still exists in many of our communities: a fear so deep that people hesitate to even say the word *cancer* aloud, as though speaking its name somehow gives it power.
I believe the opposite is true. Naming it is the first step toward confronting it. Talking about it is the first step toward awareness. Awareness is the first step toward saving lives.
My name is Rana Abtar. I have breast cancer. It is part of my story. It is not my identity. And it will never define the life I choose to live. Because if this disease has entered my life, then I intend to confront it with the one thing it can never understand: A relentless love of life.
