It’s always difficult to describe the sorrow you feel when someone dear to you is diagnosed with cancer, or when the disease afflicts you firsthand. Gisella, 57, of Richmond Hill –whose parents hail from Abruzzo, Italy, went through both these terrible experiences.
Breast cancer struck her and other family members with a vengeance. She is now committed to regaining her faith in life, seeking out the things that make her laugh.
When contacted by Corriere Canadese/Tandem for her story, Gisella began with the loss of her sister: “She was diagnosed with a breast tumour in 1986, at the age of 26. She died after just six months, leaving behind two small kids, even though she never had any health problems. In those days, one didn’t even think about these types of cancers.”
About 10 years later, it was Gisella’s mother’s turn, who, however, escaped the disease’s fury thanks to treatment – the same treatment though, that was not able to save the life of Gisella’s aunt who had been diagnosed with the same cancer and died two years later.
“Even one of my mother’s cousins who lives in Italy was struck with breast cancer, and died young, at just 40 years of age,” Gisella says. “And seeing how my family has suffered, I expected that sooner or later it would also hit me.”
And then it happened – the nightmare Gisella feared struck her in 2007. “I was prepared, I went through the treatments, then I was fine,” she says. “But just two years later, doctors told me that the tumour grew back and the only solution was to remove the breast completely.”
The reappearance of the disease caught Gisella by surprise. While she was prepared and ready to fight in 2007, last year she went through a truly difficult time: “I wasn’t ready. The tumour grew back very fast and the fact that doctors insisted doing a complete mastectomy of both breasts to avoid further complications really destroyed me.”
The fear and those difficult moments are still apparent in her voice as she recalls that just two days before the operation, she decided to undergo a mastectomy for just the right breast.

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