Cancer is supposed to end when the treatment ends. That’s what everyone thinks. Hair grows back, you ring a bell, you get a certificate, you move on. Right?
Leanne wishes it were that simple.
After 20 weeks of chemo, 36 rounds of radiation, and surgery for triple negative breast cancer, she was technically “done.” But life after cancer wasn’t a clean slate. It was a weird, half-finished, slightly burnt pancake of an existence: edible, sure, but definitely not what was on the menu.
“Life after cancer is weird,” she says. “There’s no bell ringing ‘you’re done!’ and everything goes back to normal. Cancer ends, but the aftermath doesn’t.”
Physically, she’s still piecing herself back together. Leanne now works with an exercise physiologist and does Pilates to rebuild the body that, as she puts it, “pulled the middle finger up to me and said, ‘Yeah, let’s just shake things up with cancer, ya know.” She’s also started running and signing up for charity events, despite absolutely hating it. “I keep signing up for 10km races because at least my heavy stomping on the ground serves a purpose — I’m trying to save my bones!”
Early menopause at 41 has been another delightful souvenir from chemo. “No estrogen, no balance, unhappy vestibular system… I’m basically a walking public service announcement for bone health,” she jokes. But still, she keeps moving. Movement saved her during treatment, and it saves her now; one determined, slightly grumpy, footfall at a time.
Emotionally, it’s heavier too. Life feels sharper, lonelier, and permanently altered. “I’ve let go of people,” she says. “I’ve become a very ‘on the surface’ person. There’s a shift in perspective and emotion that you can’t explain to people who haven’t been through it.”
The grief runs deep. “I grieve the life I thought I’d have, including the chance to have children, something chemo quietly took from me.” It’s not the kind of grief people see or talk about much. It’s quiet, constant, and layered under the everyday wins, a reminder that survival often comes with a heavy cost.
Fear hasn’t magically disappeared either. For triple negative breast cancer survivors, the highest risk of recurrence is in the second and third years post-treatment, and that’s exactly where Leanne is now. Every clear scan brings temporary peace. Every upcoming scan is a battle between rational thought and full-blown panic. “The future still scares me,” she admits. “But I live. Fully, consciously, and with occasional sarcasm. That’s the real win.”
And Leanne isn’t just surviving; she’s stepping up and speaking out. Later this month, she will deliver a speech titled “Get It Off Your Chest” at her local high school’s Pink Breakfast event, talking to students, parents, and teachers about what it really means to listen to your body and to advocate for yourself.
She’s not delivering a sugar-coated message. She’s bringing the full story: the awkwardness, the fear, the radiologist’s brutal mic-drop moment, the isolation, the ridiculous, the deeply human parts of having your life turned upside down by a disease you didn’t “deserve.”
“There’s no medal for being polite while your body is plotting against you,” she says. “Know your body. If something feels weird, a lump, bump, rash, swelling, smell, say something. Make noise. Ask for the scan. Loudly.”
It’s not lost on Leanne that standing up and telling her story—raw, honest, funny, furious—is itself an act of defiance. Cancer took a lot from her, but it didn’t take her ability to tell the truth with a glint in her eye and a head full of sarcastic one-liners.
Life after cancer is messy. It’s full of contradictions: gratitude and grief, hope and fear, strength and exhaustion. It’s learning to carry both the trauma and the triumph, sometimes in the same breath.
Leanne is living proof that surviving cancer isn’t about neatly tying it up with a pink ribbon. It’s about continuing to stomp forward, hair regrowing, bones strengthening, heart guarded but beating strong, one brutally honest, gloriously imperfect step at a time.