“Hearing that I had breast cancer was one of the hardest things to hear,” she remembers.

Although genetic testing did not identify a hereditary link, breast cancer was not entirely unfamiliar to her family. Her Aunt Pauline, her mother’s sister, had also experienced breast cancer and undergone a mastectomy.

Additional testing determined that Monique was not a candidate for chemotherapy or radiation at the time. But because of the tumor’s location near her chest wall, her oncologist recommended a total mastectomy rather than a lumpectomy.

“That hurt too,” Monique says. “I cried a lot about that.”