At age 33, Alison Martin found herself sitting nervously in an oncology waiting room. She was there to discuss her upcoming double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery, and she was alone. “Most of the time I wouldn’t even tell my parents or friends when I had an appointment, because I would feel guilty if someone insisted on taking time out of their day just to come sit with me in a waiting room,” Martin says. “So I’d be there alone next to these women with their partners, and I felt like everyone was looking at me and thinking, Look at that poor girl, she has nobody.”
Just a year before, everything in Martin’s life had been going exactly to plan. At that time, she’d graduated from business school, had a great group of friends, and was working at a prestigious finance firm in New York City. The only thing that was missing in her life was someone to share it with. As the new year approached, Martin made a resolution to finally carve out some time from her 80-hour work weeks to start dating. “I remember thinking, 2024 is the year I’m going to focus on meeting someone great.”
As 2023 came to a close, Martin had been working through her end-of-year checklist and realized there was one box left to tick: getting her mammogram. Although she didn’t carry a known gene for the disease, Martin had a strong family history of breast cancer — her paternal grandmother, aunt, and older sister had all been diagnosed with the disease — so she had started getting mammograms at age 30. “My breasts were so small they needed to bring in a supervising technician to help get the image,” she remembers. “I always felt like if I had breast cancer, there was no way I wouldn’t feel a lump.” She was asked to return for a biopsy, and on the second day of 2024, she learned breast cancer wasn't always obvious, no matter the breast size. As she scanned a MyChart message from her office, Martin’s jaw dropped: She had ductal carcinoma in situ. “I didn’t know what 'in situ' meant, but I sure as heck knew what 'carcinoma' meant,” she recalls.
Although her first instinct was to panic, Martin calmed down after learning her diagnosis was non-invasive (which is what "in situ" means) and stage 0. “I remember my mom saying I was going to have a tough year ahead of me,” Martin says. “But I was determined not to let it impact my plans for the year. I would get through whatever treatment I needed, and then I would put this whole experience in the rear-view.”
With her diagnosis came a flurry of appointments and consultations, many of which Martin attended alone. She knew her friends and family would have jumped at the opportunity to support her, but she feared telling them she needed that support would only garner pity. “To me, showing vulnerability about being lonely felt like weakness,” she says. “Maybe that’s why at the beginning, I tried to handle everything on my own — I felt like I needed to prove to everyone I was strong, to reassure everyone but also myself.”
After going over her options with her care team, Martin was leaning toward a full mastectomy and reconstructive surgery. Unlike many young women diagnosed with breast cancer, her care team advised she would not need chemotherapy, and the double mastectomy could save her from both radiation treatment and the need for a five-year course of estrogen-blocking medication, which may have impacted her fertility. “I’ve never had any attachment to my breasts, so the idea of losing them meant very little to me,” says Martin. “At first, I even deluded myself into thinking of it as a free boob job.”
But reconstructive surgery, Martin learned, is very different from cosmetic breast surgery, and would leave much more visible scarring. When her surgeon showed her the after photos of previous patients, "it really hit home for me that this wasn’t just going to be an inconvenience,” she remembers. “The scars would be big, and obvious, and impossible to ignore. When I’d thought about dating, I’d only considered the time I would lose, not how this would impact my self-image and confidence. It was devastating, and I felt so alone.”
As she weighed the pros and cons of a full mastectomy, Martin was put in touch with another breast cancer survivor who had undergone reconstructive surgery. “The first question she asked me was if I was married or in a relationship,” Martin says. “When I told her I was single, she very bluntly suggested I look into other treatment options. The idea that I should compromise my health because a potential partner might be turned off by visible incision scars made me angry.” She decided to move forward with the double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.
The six-hour procedure went well, and Martin went home to begin the healing process. “This was when people really showed up for me,” she says. The recovery would take about a month, when she would mostly be bedridden and unable to lift her arms. Martin’s mother traveled to the city and slept on the couch in her studio apartment for weeks. Friends checked in constantly, dropped by to keep her company, and sent food since she couldn’t cook for herself.
Five weeks after surgery, Martin felt well enough to start dating again. She activated her profile on a dating app and matched with Sam. “He was the first person I went out with after surgery, and for the first few dates I just didn’t tell him about it,” she says. On their third date, Martin found herself back at Sam’s apartment. “We were at a point where I realized there was no putting it off any longer, so I stopped and said, ‘There’s something I need to tell you. I had breast cancer and a mastectomy.’” She explained that this was just five weeks ago, and that she still wasn’t ready for him, or anyone, to see her body. “There’s no textbook for how to approach this,” she says. “My whole little speech was awkward, and stilted, and messy.” But to her, his response was perfect.
He told her he wished they’d met sooner so he could have been there to support her. “I’d been freaking out this entire time that people would see my scars and nobody would ever want to date me,” Martin says. “But then I met Sam. It happened so soon after the worst thing that happened to me, and he’s the best thing that’s happened to me.”
Almost two years later, Martin is now in remission, and she and Sam have moved in together. When she reflects on those days in the waiting room when she felt so lonely, Martin doesn’t feel sad for that version of herself: She feels proud of her. “I went through that experience without a partner, which means I can get through anything without a partner,” she says. “It made me realize I don’t need Sam in my life, but I want him in my life.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t still bad days. While her physical scars may eventually fade, the emotional ones are still healing — something Martin realized when she recently found herself sobbing in the shower. “Sometimes out of nowhere, it hits me: Oh my God, I went through the three most horrible, traumatic months of my life, and then I just plowed on like it never happened.” But with Sam’s support, Martin is starting to accept that maybe vulnerability isn’t weakness, and that it takes strength to ask for help. Cancer isn’t just something that happened to her — it’s a trauma she’ll carry for the rest of her life, but it’s one she doesn’t have to carry alone.
