“I celebrate life every day”

In the morning, as she looked in the mirror, stopped short, Annette Hansen*: your right nipple seemed to be changed. Four months earlier she was at the annual checkup; her gynecologist had said it was all right. Nevertheless crept Hansen, now an evil premonition. Ten days later, in October 2015, she received in the hospital, the diagnosis: breast cancer, growing fast.

“I pulled away the ground from under the feet,” says Hansen. “I thought that was it.” A week later, good news followed: The cancer had not yet formed metastases. The Doctors said the chances of a cure were good. “It was like a holiday for me, it could be worse. I knew that I can do this.”

Approximately every tenth woman falls ill at least once in their life to breast cancer, a total of nearly 70,000 new diagnoses there are every year in Germany. The majority of patients have a good prognosis: five years after diagnosis, still alive, almost 90 percent of the affected women. Of course, however, depends on many factors: the size of the tumor, its location, or whether it has already metastasized.

After the initial shock, Hansen came up with the idea, their story in pictures. You wrote to the photographer Heike Günther, who had portrayed a few years earlier, another woman with breast cancer, and asked if she would help her. Immediately Günther said. “I had the naive idea that I can look at a year later, the photos and look back,” says Hansen. “It is going to end badly, no longer an option for me at this Moment.”

The first photo was taken shortly after the diagnosis. From now on, the photographer Hansen accompanied to all of the major stations: to the hairdresser’s, she got her wig, to chemotherapy, to radiation therapy. “It has strengthened me very much, because I always had someone there,” says Hansen. In addition, the photos opened new perspectives that you could see yourself in certain moments from the outside. Hansen was Günther in the one and a half years of everyday situations with the family to participate.

Hansen had to be at this time. With friends and her husband it was easy for her to talk about the serious illness, but was her six-year-old son. How do you say it to a child? Hansen and her Partner sought help at the Foundation phönikks, practiced, the boy gently to teach, but to be honest with him.

Not always, the environment was so that the family dealt so openly with the disease. “You must know your son, so many of the Details about your disease?”, the teacher of the boys asked. Others found it good that Hansen wanted to talk a lot about it, said that it was easier to like, with Hansen’s disease. Relatives and friends supported Hansen often, collected money for the wig, accompanied her to chemotherapy.

Six months the treatment lasted. “I was glad that I was finally able to do something, I no longer had to feel so powerless,” says Hansen. But: her hair fell out, you felt tired, “I have always had a bottle of vodka”.

For the relief of other symptoms such as Nausea and pain, she took cortisone. You binge eating got, could not sleep at night. It was increasingly worse, and you always had to accept more help. “As I’ve noticed, that the loss of control started and my body has given me terminated the friendship – that was bad,” says Hansen.

The fear remains

Again and again the thought flashed forth then, that you could die. “I was afraid that I would not be able to be there for my son since he has to leave – even if he has a great father,” says Hansen. “And I found the idea terrible that I’m eventually just a memory for him, a photo on the wall.” Quickly she tried to wipe those thoughts to the side.

Shortly after the chemotherapy, the breast surgery is followed. To minimize the risk for recurrence of disease, Hansen is also the second decrease. For they are not fixed quickly, that a breast augmentation was out of the question. Rather she wanted to be completely flat to have an artificial breast. If you today feel like wearing prosthetics, in the Sauna, she’s still “Only sometimes, when I feel very vulnerable, then I wear a swimsuit.”

After irradiation, Hansen needs to take a number of years, so-called aromatase inhibitors. This hormone production press, as her Tumor is hormone. Also, regular ultrasound examinations, blood tests and computer tomography images are used to follow-up.

“I don’t think constantly about the fact that I could die. It can always be done differently, but now it was the first time for this cycle. The awareness that everything is finite, has settled in and been strong for me,” says Hansen. “That’s why I celebrate life every day.”

*Name has been changed by the editors.