More than two decades have passed, but Erika Archer Lewis clearly recalls the fear, uncertainty and struggle required to bring her 42-year-old mother back from the edge of stage 4 breast cancer. Lewis, a senior studying at the University of Texas when her mother was diagnosed, shuttled between Austin and Houston, supporting her through surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and, later, reconstructive procedures.

“It was a four-year ordeal,” Lewis recounts, sitting beside her husband one autumn morning in a sandwich shop north of Houston. Her own breast cancer risk, always a nagging worry, didn’t assume centre stage until 2013 when, then 42 and a mother herself, she had a series of breast-imaging callbacks. Her routine screening mammogram was abnormal, which led first to an ultrasound, then a MRI and then a biopsy of several worrisome areas before cancer ultimately was ruled out. “God, it felt like forever,” she says.

Determined to no longer live in a cancer limbo, Lewis got tested later that year for the BRCA gene mutations that can run in families and significantly raise a woman’s risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer. And when the results came back positive, she moved quickly. In early 2014, a surgeon removed both of her breasts and she recovered with the help of her husband, Jerry, and her mother, who recently celebrated 23 years free of cancer.

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