NEWPORT, Vt. (AP) - Deveney Choquette’s education about breast cancer began when she was in sixth grade and her mother received the diagnosis.
Choquette was still a teenager when her mother passed away in 2000. Choquette began working with Relay For Life the following year.
“It was something that made me feel very close to (my mom),” she said.
As a popular radio personality, Choquette took the opportunity to raise awareness around cancer detection when she got her first mammogram at age 30. “I did it live on the air,” she said. “I’d heard horror stories about how it was going to be this horrible experience, and it really wasn’t that bad at all.”
While many guidelines are pushing the age back for women’s first mammograms, Choquette was advised to begin hers early because her mother had been diagnosed young.
And it’s a good thing that she’s been proactive.
In May 2016, at the age of 33, Choquette was diagnosed with breast cancer herself. She has now had a double mastectomy and is in the midst of treatment.
“As morbid as this sounds - and I don’t mean it that way - I really always felt that I would get breast cancer,” she said. “I just didn’t expect it to happen so young. I thought I’d be older.”
But even while dealing with her own diagnosis, Choquette is working hard to raise awareness of the importance of early cancer detection.
“I remember that cancer wasn’t something that everyone had. It was something that maybe your uncle’s brother or sister had, but it wasn’t something that you really saw. So that was a big deal when my mother was diagnosed,” she remembered. “Nowadays unfortunately it’s the opposite. It’s everywhere.”
While Choquette wants all of us to do our breast exams and get our colonoscopies, her crusade doesn’t stop there. Because what she really wants is for us to start trusting our intuition about our own bodies.
That’s how she finally got her own diagnosis.
“When you’re young, most women have very fibrous breasts, so you do kind of feel lumps all over the place . But this one felt different. This one was hard,” she said. “I just had that feeling in the bottom of my stomach: This isn’t right. You need to call the doctor.”
When her doctor did the exam, the response was, “You don’t have anything to worry about. Your mammogram is next year. I don’t see any reason to be concerned.”
Choquette happened to have an appointment with a different medical provider soon after. She told the second doctor the same thing. “I have this lump, would you do an exam?”
Once again, the doctor said it was nothing.
“I said, ’I’d really, really like to have a mammogram. I need one next year anyway. I’d rather just do it now, get it over with, so I can stop freaking myself out.”
It was on that mammogram that the doctors finally saw what Choquette already knew in her gut.
“The doctor said to me, ’You were right. You have breast cancer.’ It was almost a relief for me, because I’d had these feelings and they were so strong. To be validated - I’m not losing my mind. This was something to be concerned with,” she said. “I fought for myself because I knew there was something wrong.”
If she had waited until her regularly-scheduled mammogram the next year, she said, “By then, who knows where I would be?”
Choquette wants people to remember that we know our own body best.
“I think too often we don’t rely on that gut feeling we get, or on those instincts. We kind of shove it off and say, ’I’m making a mountain out of a molehill and it’s not a big deal’,” she said. “But you get those feelings for a reason. I think that you really have to trust your body and trust yourself to know whether or not it’s something that you really should get looked at.”
And, she said, it’s important to be informed. “It’s knowing the difference when you find a lump in what they feel like - a cyst versus a cancerous tumor. There’s differences in how they feel.”
Choquette is currently going through breast reconstruction surgeries and treatment, while also looking to the future. “I’m just trying to be as positive as possible. I have a really great support system and I think that’s really crucial,” she said. “Going through this process, I definitely learned who my real friends are.”
She plans to continue working with Relay for Life, and she’s working with local medical providers to create a mentor program that connects breast cancer survivors with newly-diagnosed women. “I would really like to spread the message to encourage women to trust their instincts and be proactive, and remind them that they have the power. It’s a powerful thing to be in control of your body and of your health.”
Choquette still talks to her mother a lot, she said. And sometimes she hears her mother speaking back to her.
That’s what happened one day right after she was diagnosed. She was out for a run and she was crying, wondering how she would get through cancer.
She was running up a big hill when her mother’s voice came to her.
“She said, ’It’s just like running up hill. This is going to be a steep journey and it’s going to be hard, but the view is going to be worth it.’ That has been my mantra through this . She was right. It has been very hard. But I do know that there is a light at the end of this tunnel. And I know the view will be worth it.”
As for the rest of us, she has one clear message: “Get your boobies checked!”
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Information from: The Caledonian-Record, https://www.caledonianrecord.com
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