When Kris Hallenga was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer – the most advanced form – at the age of 23, questions came to mind: “Why didn’t anyone tell me to check my breast cancer?” breasts? Why didn’t I know I could get breast cancer at 23? »
If she hadn’t known she could get breast cancer so young, there was a good chance others would be just as misinformed. she said in a 2021 interview with The Guardian. She spent the next 15 years educating young people about early detection through her nonprofit, CoppaFeel, and in her 2021 memoir, “Glittering a Turd.”
On Monday, CoppaFeel announced that Ms. Hallenga had died at age 38. A spokesperson for the organization said she died at her home in Cornwall, England, and the cause was breast cancer.
“Survival was never enough,” she says. said during a publicity tour in 2021. “I don’t just want to survive, I want to be able to really look at my life and say, ‘I’m happy to still be here and I’m getting the most out of what I want out of life.’ .’”
Kristen Hallenga was born on November 11, 1985 in Norden, a small town in northern Germany, to a German father and an English mother, both teachers, according to the Times of London. At the age of 9, she moved to Daventry, central England, with her mother, Jane Hallenga; his twin sister, Maren Hallenga; and their older sister Maike Hallenga, all three of whom survive her. His father, Reiner Hallenga, died of a heart attack at the age of 20.
Ms. Hallenga first felt a lump in 2009, while she was working in Beijing for a travel agency and teaching on the side. During a visit home In the Midlands, in central England, Ms Hallenga went to her internist. She told the Guardian that her doctor blamed the lump on hormonal changes associated with her birth control pill.
But the lump became more painful and bloody discharge developed. Another internist gave him a diagnosis similar to the first: hormones and the pill. But because Ms. Hallenga didn’t know what was considered normal, she had no starting point to judge it.
“I wasn’t touching my breasts at all,” Ms. Hallenga said in 2021. “I didn’t know anything about it.”
But Ms Hallenga’s mother, whose own mother had breast cancer at an early age, insisted that her daughter be referred to a breast clinic. By the time the diagnosis was made, eight months after discovering the lump, Ms Hallenga’s diagnosis was terminal. It had also spread to his spine.
After an aggressive round of chemotherapy, a mastectomy and hormone treatment, tests in 2011 revealed that the cancer had spread to her liver, she later told the Huffington Post. A year later, doctors discovered the cancer had spread to her brain and she underwent intense radiation therapy to remove a tumor.
But she continued to work despite her illness. She wrote about her cancer diagnosis and her advocacy work in a column for her local newspaper, The Northampton Chronicle and Echo, and The Sun. But that was his work with CoppaFeel…
