The right option at the right time

Fresh off a beach day in Grand Bend in summer of 2015, Lea Seguin suddenly felt pain in one of her breasts. Chalking it up to sand irritation from her day by the water, and with the pain going away with her menstrual cycle, Lea didn’t give it too much thought – until it returned the next month. When a breast self-exam resulted in Lea feeling a lump, she scheduled a doctor's appointment and received a mammogram and an ultrasound. A week after that, Lea had a biopsy that confirmed she had breast cancer. Just six days later, on September 15, she was on the operating table for a bilateral mastectomy, and in November she began the first of 12 rounds of chemotherapy.

In October of that year, alongside her sister, Lea attended her first Breast Reconstruction Awareness (BRA) Day. She hadn’t started chemotherapy yet and had just had her surgical drains removed from her mastectomy.  

BRA Day is an annual event hosted at St. Joseph’s Health Care London (St. Joseph’s) that helps patients discover if breast reconstruction after mastectomy is right for them. The event features information booths, presentations by surgeons, a Q&A period and even a show and tell lounge, where attendees can see examples of reconstruction options on past patients.

Lea found herself overwhelmed at her first BRA Day. “I remember sitting there being very uncomfortable and looking at it all and going, I don’t know if I can do this again, another major surgery,” says Lea. Now, she says she probably attended BRA Day for the first time too soon. “I was just learning to lift my arms again, it had only been around six weeks for me to absorb everything that happened to me.”  

Lea’s chemotherapy finished in March of 2016, and that next October she went back to BRA Day. Her sister came again, as did her husband – the two individuals who provided her the most support during her breast cancer journey. At the time, Lea still felt she wasn’t ready for reconstruction. Chemotherapy had hit her hard. “I was off work for 15 months with chemo, I struggled to recover, at one point I was in a wheelchair...I wasn’t ready to be off work again.” Despite her hesitancy, Lea did ask for a referral for reconstruction, knowing she’d have options if she decided to move forward.

Between BRA Day 2016 and 2017, something changed for Lea that opened her up to the idea of reconstruction. She had lived flat for two years post-mastectomy – the term for choosing not to have reconstruction and allowing your chest to heal in a flat shape after surgery – and had worn prosthetics. Lea and her family were at a pool party that summer, and the children were playing with water balloons. At one point, a child held two up to their chest. Lea’s young son asked her if they were making fun of her.  

“I said to him, ‘no, they’re not talking about me, they’re just trying to be funny,’ but that was an awakening for me. My son said, ‘do you think you’ll ever look the same?’. That was hard,” says Lea.  

With the support of her sister, husband and mom, Lea returned to BRA Day for the third time and chose to move forward with a Deep Inferior Epigastric Artery Perforator (DIEP) Flap surgery. A DIEP Flap reconstruction uses the skin, fat and blood vessels from the lower abdomen to create a breast mound, rather than an implant.  

“I would do it again,” Lea says. “I wouldn’t change my decision.”  

Today, Lea is seven years post-reconstruction and attending BRA Day at St. Joseph’s this year for a different reason – to be a model in the show and tell lounge, a full circle example of her reconstruction journey.  

“When I left my first BRA Day, I thought I would never get reconstruction done and I would live flat. I didn’t think it was necessary,” says Lea. “I tell people it’s okay to feel that way, and it’s okay to change your mind, because how you feel today is not going to be the same as how you feel when your treatment is done.”