Three years ago Rebecca Scheinkman, then 32, was having a prebirthday brunch with a group of friends when one of them asked her a bold but important question: “Can I feel your lump?”
Just days before, Rebecca, a licensing manager in New York City, had received a devastating diagnosis: triple positive breast cancer, which she later found out was metastatic. Her friends wanted to know what it felt like, so they’d be better able to detect their own lumps. “I took off my shirt and bra and let them go to second base,” Scheinkman says with a laugh. “That was the moment I became a breast cancer advocate.”
But that wasn’t the first time Rebecca had come up against cancer. At 14, the native New Yorker was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. She needed repeated bouts of chemotherapy and painful spinal taps over the course of two years. Unfortunately, new research shows that adult survivors of childhood cancers are at a greater risk for breast cancer, and Rebecca is living proof. Weeks before that birthday brunch, she found a lump in her breast while putting on her bra. It was hard and immovable. “Instead of taking the ‘Let’s wait and see’ approach, I called my gyno right away,” says Scheinkman.
When she first received her breast cancer diagnosis, Rebecca felt surprisingly optimistic. “I thought, I did this once, I can do it again,” she says. But she also admits to being daunted by the severity of her disease—stage IV means the cancer is a chronic illness she must fight for the rest of her life. It spread to her brain last year, though she’s been able to manage her symptoms by taking up to 22 pills each day. That hasn’t stopped the 36-year-old from thinking about her future and even starting to plan an epic, wedding-style party for her fortieth birthday. “Instead of gifts, I want to donations to breast cancer research,” she says. “It’s going to be a fund-raiser to end all fund-raisers.”
She also volunteers with the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and tells every woman to do what her friends did after that brunch. “They were feeling their own breasts right there in front of me,” she says. She loves seeing women take charge of their own health: “If you feel like something is wrong in your body, get it checked out. You are your own best advocate.”
