Lourdes Monje moved to Philadelphia at age 25 to switch careers and become a teacher. But then a trip to the doctor to investigate a lump, turned into a stage 4 breast cancer diagnosis.
“Everything shifted from that point on,” they say. (Monje identifies as nonbinary.) “Everything became about making sure that the cancer didn’t keep spreading, knowing that it had already spread so quickly.”
Monje felt devastated, but their oncologist explained that new treatments were much more effective than a generation ago, and that proved true: The new targeted therapies for breast cancer started working. The drugs have beaten back all but one tumor in Monje’s lung…