October 2023

While breast cancer is commonly regarded as something to be proactive about after 40, on this series, Breast Cancer At Any Age, we speak to women who had scares or battled breast cancer at a much younger age than expected. “Generational.” That’s how Ashley Dedmon would describe cancer and the impact the disease has had on her family. “On my maternal side, my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother were diagnosed with breast cancer,” she tells ESSENCE. Her mother was 49 when she was diagnosed with metastatic or Stage 4 breast cancer, dying from it on the age of 52. She passed in early 2007, and months afterward, Dedmon received a call that may turn her world the other way...