In September of 1988, Susan Winn received the news she had been half-expecting, with dread, for many months. She did have cancer, and her breasts had to go. Susan was thirty-two years old.
As a member of the medical community, Susan researched the history of hereditary cancer in her own family. Her maternal grandmother died of cancer, and so did her mother and four of her mother’s sisters. Two of Susan’s aunts and four of her own sisters had bilateral mastectomies.
My name is Susan and I'm a thirty-two-year-old mother of four young children, recently diagnosed with breast cancer. I want to share my story with you and the incredible things my family has experienced, and, most of all, how I survived the diagnosis.
I was going to wait until the year 1996 to write this book; in the final chapter I would have finished the one-hundredth Boston Marathon at age thirty-nine. However, I must share the story now because I'm afraid I won't be alive in the year 1996. I really don't think I will die of cancer. I'm afraid I'll be killed on one of the Kansas City interstates driving to my weekly chemotherapy treatments.
The people of Kansas City are generally wonderful, but behind the wheel of a vehicle I've observed them to be dumb and rude. I can only compare them to the Minneapolis drivers (where I lived the first thirty-one years of my life). Compared to Minneapolis drivers, they are dumb and rude! It's a practice they self-describe as "sleep driving."
