- April 23, 2024
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Susan Moore always thought her breasts were too large, and she told herself that when she turned 40, she would get a boob job.
But this wasn’t what she had in mind.
In 2003, a month after she turned 40, and only a few months after having an unremarkable mammogram, she found a lump while doing a self-check.
A mother of three (then 13, 7 and 3 years old), she was going through a divorce at the time and had started dating someone whom she met by typing, “Hey, handsome,” in an online dating site.
“In the beginning, when I was diagnosed, I thought, ‘He’s not going to stick around for this,’” Susan recalled of her new boyfriend.
She knew the relationship was serious when he drove from Southern California to her Northern California hospital. “I’d wake up in recovery, and he’d be there,” she said. He was there for all 10 surgeries leading up to the big one on March 1, 2003.
Still, what happened next took her by surprise.
“He proposed to me the day before my double mastectomy,” she said. “He’s my angel that fell from the sky.”
For about the past 10 years, Susan has been happily married to Jeff Moore, who is the top salesman at Palm Coast Ford. She is a new advertising account manager at the Palm Coast Observer, which is where I met her and interviewed her recently for a story for Breast Cancer Awareness Month and also to introduce our new staff member to the community.
It was a shock when he proposed — they hadn’t discussed the possibility of getting married. But she didn’t hesitate to say yes.
After the double mastectomy, Susan’s mother, Brucie Shaw, came to live with her. She was supportive not only by helping to take care of the house and the children, but also emotionally because she knew exactly what Susan was going through. Shaw had breast cancer seven years earlier.
Beginning in April 2003, Susan had six months of chemotherapy, which had to be completed before the reconstructive surgery.
“The first (chemo treatment) is scary,” she recalled. “You’re waiting for the bad to happen, and it’s creepy. They’re putting this poison in you. At first, the only side effect I had was bone pain in my legs, and I couldn’t walk. Then, you lose your hair. You wash your hair, and it’s just in your hands. It’s weird. … You lose your eyelashes last. You lose it everywhere. Eyebrows. When the eyebrows go, that defines your face.”
The transformation was dramatic. She looked in the mirror and barely recognized herself.
But, she was determined.
“When you’re going through that, it’s harder for the people around you,” she said. “You’re in a mode where it’s like it’s a job: You have to get up and go get chemo. My hair falls out, but I have to stay alive."
After the double mastectomy, she said, “I remember seeing my chest for the first time, but it wasn’t traumatic. It was more traumatic to see my sister go through it than it was to for me to go through it.”
The gene runs in the family. In 2008, Susan’s sister and two aunts went through the same process. Double mastectomy. Chemotherapy. Fortunately, all five women are alive and well, and Susan credits her own state of happiness, even after all of the trauma, to her sense of humor.
“You just have to be strong,” she said. “You have to be surrounded by people who are positive, and you get through it.”
The fear of recurrence remains — for herself, her mother, her aunt and two sisters, and also for the next generation. Susan’s daughters are at risk. In the coming years, they will be eligible to be tested to see whether they have the gene, as well. Susan's sister's only daughter has already been tested, and it was determined she did not have it. But either way, this is a family of survivors — strong women with perspective.
“Afterward, some people feel insecure,” Susan said. “They don’t feel as pretty and sexy afterward. But to me, it didn’t matter. I was alive. That was what was important.”
