You had some symptoms before you called your doctor, like inflammation in your body, clogged milk ducts, soreness, red marks, all confused by the fact that you were still breastfeeding. Tell me how you decided to call your doctor and how quickly you went from finding a lump to a diagnosis of breast cancer? So I’m standing looking in the mirror doing a self-breast exam with Chris standing next to me, and I feel my boob and I feel the lump. I was feeling under my arm and I felt a very noticeable pea-sized lump in my armpit. I remember looking at Chris and just having him feel it too. It was a Saturday and he was like, ‘You should call Dr. Kim,’ my OB/GYN. The next day I texted her some information. She didn’t like the sound of it and suggested I see this breast surgeon who comes to Bishop. So, Monday morning, I’m in there for a mammogram. And they ended up doing two mammograms. So that’s when my concerns really heightened because I knew that they were doing another to zoom into this area. As soon as I walked into the surgeon’s office, Dr. Olson, she just flat-out knew—she knew the second she looked at me. This is a hard question, but what was your initial reaction to your diagnosis? Fuck, fuck, like, I’m not. This isn’t me. I am so planned and organized. How did this fucking happen? I was shocked. I was terrified. I’ve been so close to watching people die, like losing my parents. I’m not scared of dying, but god, I have kids, like little kids and an amazing husband that I have to be here for. And when she diagnosed me, I thought that it was everywhere because of all that inflammation I was having. It all made sense. I was like, ‘It’s definitely in my back; it’s definitely in my bones.’ I just thought I was fucked. And I didn’t even know where to start or what to do. I remember walking out of that room and Chris was outside play-ing with Zep in front of the hospital. And I’m like teary and I tell him what’s going on. And I think both of us were just like, ‘What?’ I had to stt looking at it as a life s t ce of living instead of a dea s t ce. How did you come to settle into the mindset to share your cancer journey so openly on social media and what are you hoping to achieve by that? Sharing is now a survival technique because it actually brings healing. I was so naive to breast cancer—I had been an advocate for Boarding for Breast Cancer for over a decade. I never thought it would be me. And I think that was my turning point in wanting to share this message. No matter if you’re healthy, young—cancer can hit any of us. And in sharing over the last five years, and having children, I’ve realized how helpful talking about things can be because we’re not alone—we all have our struggles and our ups and downs. Social media has painted such a fake picture of life and what it should look like, and I wanted to break down that stereotype of what this was going to look like. I’ve realized through the filming of our movie how there’s layers, and one of the layers that I’ve really learned to peel back is that of vulner-ability and being able to express myself. Then seeing the outpouring of support, not just from the industry, but also other breast cancer survivors and current patients, I feel like it helps to humanize it. When you talk about your experience these past few months, you’ve been talking about it as a transformation. Can you elaborate on the transforma-tive aspect of what you’ve been through? I’ve always been able to make a plan and execute the plan, have a goal and achieve the goal—most of the time. Being an athlete, I visualize so much, and I usually can make those things a reality. But when you’re diagnosed with cancer, you’re stripped of all of that. Now I’m having to trust other people to make these very big decisions about my body and my health that I have no idea about. Cancer has always been a word that kills people in my life; it’s not something that you survive. So when they said that if I went through all these treatments, I’d most likely survive, I had to start looking at it as a life sentence of living instead of a death sentence. Through that, I had to make my mind think of positive ways of over-coming this. I’ve always been able to try to harness the good in most things, but the transformation really happened going through chemo. I was being given so many medicines and drugs that essentially kill your body. And at times, I felt like I was dying. And every time that I felt like myself again, I could feel this almost grounding sense, where I was never going to be the same as I was before. I was given so much time to just sit and be that I had to learn how to appreciate that empty space of just be-ing with no distractions. I had to find a way to ground myself and think of it as a way to come out of it looking different and transforming like a butterfly from its cocoon. So much of the journey was the real raw stripping away of every-thing—I just had to allow it all to go away and survive. INITIALLY KIMMY DIDN’T TALK ABOUT her diagnosis publicly. She says, “We were trying to collect all the pieces and figure out how we were possibly going to go through this and at what stage I was at. We knew there was this fine line of being at stage three and stage four. Stage three was survivable. Stage four was where we did not want to go.” Her doctor explained in the interview that only 2.4% of breast can-cers are inflammatory; this was one of the handful of cases she ever ex-pects to see in her career. This cancer tends to show up in women at a younger age and spread more quickly than other types of cancer. Inflam-matory means that it’s either been there awhile or it’s growing very, very fast, which meant it was critical to get her treatment started immediately. Kimmy also reached out to fellow snowboarders Megan Pischke and Izzy Lalive. “They both shared, so candidly, their experiences [with breast cancer],” Kimmy says. “And they each had so much insight that I was simply able to follow the roadmap that my doctor gave me.” That’s when she shared her diagnosis on Instagram. 078 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 20.3: Page 78
