Leave your dignity at the door, and pick it up as you leave

I suppose I better start off and explain a bit about me before I start blabbering on. 

I’m Kayleigh! *wave!* I’m 28 years old, about to be 29! 😬
I have a wonderful fiancé, who I have been with (fb official) since 31-12-2015! We are due to get married on 28-07-2020. We have a beautiful baby girl called Erin Olivia, who was born on 31-07-2017, 2 years exactly to the date her father and I had our first date! 

This is my family unit, James, Erin and Myself. This photo was taken on 08-09-2019 in a little family walk in the woods!

James and my relationship, started off as nothing but a bit of fun back in 2015, we used to lark around together and conveniently bump into each other in the same pub and end up staying on out late together. 

Things started changing when in the December 2015, I kept having issues with bleeding after ‘you know’ which was uncommon for me. I reached out to my GP, who performed my first smear test. The results of that came back a bit dodgy, and it was found I had CIN3 cells.. CIN stands for cervical intra-epithelial neoplasia and practically means it isn't cancer, but there's a risk it could turn into cancer if untreated. So I undertook loop excision in the January 2016 to remove these cells and decrease my risk of them turning cancerous. 

At this time it gave me a big wake up call, I’m 25, just turned 26 at the time of the surgery and I have dodgy cells in my cervix. Alarm bells started ringing, wow. Life can really bite you on the bum when you least expect it! What if I had ignored all these symptoms? Then my poor heart goes out to Jade Goody, who was told she had cervical cancer at such a young age! 

My first bit of advice is - girls, do not ignore your smear reminders! Leave your dignity at the door, and pick it up as you leave to go home. A few seconds of slight uncomfortable feeling ‘down there’ can save your life!

As I have a strong family history of breast cancer has followed in suit from my grandad (maternal side), great aunties and my mother. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007 and after undergoing some genetic testing, we found out that she was a carrier of the BRCA1 mutation gene. (The one that Angelina Jolie has.) At the time of her cancer/genetic diagnoses, I was only 17 and had no aspirations of having a family, settling down so declined for myself to be tested although it was offered. 

I was tested in 2016 following the cervical smear issues I had already encountered and they found I was also positive. 

This meant that as a woman, I have a 95% chance of getting breast and ovarian cancer. Which at 26 is a lot of information to take in! The conversation quickly lead to having that open chat with a new partner about numbers, percentages, ages, dates, chances etc etc. Basically I had until the age of 30 to complete my family before I need to SERIOUSLY consider an elective mastectomy (remove breasts) and oophorectomy (remove ovaries.) How do you explain that to a man you have only been seeing for 6months and only just became FB official?  I would of thought he would of run for the hills. I’m glad he didn’t. 🖤

So that’s where my journey all started. May 2016!