Author(s): McDonald, Jennifer

Biography & Memoir

In mid-December 2013 Jennifer McDonald was diagnosed with breast cancer, an infiltrating lobular carcinoma to be exact. Up until the moment of diagnosis she'd thought she was pretty in tune with her body, but she sure as hell didn't see this coming. There's no breast cancer in her family and she has three sisters, two older and one younger, none of whom have been diagnosed with anything more than an easily dispatched colorectal polyp. This prompted her son, 13 at the time, to ask the aunt who looked after him while she was in surgery, "Why did it have to be my mum?"...Why indeed. In a bid to make sense of what was happening to her, Jen started writing a series of blogposts entitled My Big Breast Adventure while undergoing, if you'll pardon the expression, the 'pointy-end' of treatment throughout 2014 and 2015. With funny and provocative titles like Cut, Poison, Burn...and Laugh, Dying and Other Inconveniences, What the FEC? and The Girl with the Dolphin Tattoo, Jen blogged 32 times over that two year period garnering an avid following and touching many people's lives. Her oncologist, who's mentioned many times in various posts, has written the Foreword for the book that this blog has now become. Here's a sample of what he and others have said: "No patient going through cancer just wants 'support'. At best, they would like the huge, scary roller-coaster called 'treatment' to stop and let them off. At least, they would like to meet someone else on the ride who can give words to the experience - and make some sense of it all. Jen McDonald is that person."