Someday, she hopes, she'll be able to wear them again. In June a routine mammogram revealed that Kashuk, a 47-year-old mother of two, had stage 1 breast cancer. Although the diagnosis was one for which Kashuk had long braced herself—her maternal grandmother died from the disease at 57, and both her mother and cousin are survivors—when her doctor called with the news, "all I could remember hearing," she recalls, "is, 'Oh my God.'"
Since then, Kashuk has rallied not only to battle her illness but to encourage other women to "face cancer head-on. If you approach it aggressively, it can be okay." For Kashuk, that has meant making what in some corners of the medical community is considered a controversial decision for a woman with an early-stage cancer in only one breast: After having a lumpectomy to remove a raisin-sized tumor from her right breast in July, she then elected to have a bilateral mastectomy, in which both her breasts were removed.
The surgery Kashuk opted for last month was "not considered medically necessary to save her life," says her surgeon, Dr. Leslie Montgomery of New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. But because Kashuk has a marker that indicates a high risk of developing breast cancer again and a family history—in fact, her older sister Sheryl, 51, underwent a preventive double mastectomy at age 26—the decision was one "I was completely comfortable with," Montgomery says. "She traded her breast for peace of mind."
For Kashuk, the trade was more than worth it. "I wanted to make sure I'd be around for my kids," she says. Indeed, "the hardest part of the ordeal," Kashuk says, has been confronting her own mortality while trying to raise Jonah, 12, and Sadye, 8, with husband Daniel Kaner, 44, a beauty industry executive. "Sonia was stoic with the kids," says Kaner, who attended Rosh Hashanah services with the children and Kashuk a week after the double mastectomy. "She didn't look sick or wounded. We didn't want to minimize it, but we didn't want them to think that something awful would happen."
Now cancer-free, Kashuk is back at work (her latest projects include a fragrance line) and undergoing reconstructive surgery, which involves expanding the muscle of the chest wall so that the space can accommodate implants. Until the process is complete, she is holding on to all her old bras—and all the hope that comes with them.
- Contributors:
- Jennifer Frey/New York City.
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