Judy Blume
The author of young-adult titles including Forever and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t posted on her blog in 2012 that she’d been diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma, the most common form of breast cancer, right before a big trip to Italy. She reacted with shock. “Wait—me?” she wrote. “There’s no breast cancer in my family. I haven’t eaten red meat in more than 30 years. I’ve never smoked, I exercise every day, forget alcohol—it’s bad for my reflux—I’ve been the same weight my whole adult life. How is this possible? Well, guess what—it’s possible.” Blume, 79, who had survived cervical cancer 17 years earlier, opted for a single mastectomy with reconstruction. She also urged women like her with dense breast tissue to talk to their doctors about getting a sonogram; traditional mammograms had not picked up her cancer.
