For most of Abigail Simon’s life, trusting her body was part of her job.
The professional ballerina had spent decades building a career around movement, performing with American Ballet Theatre and The Joffrey Ballet and touring internationally with Broadway’s An American in Paris. A typical day could mean eight hours of dancing — breakfast, ballet, lunch, more ballet, then a performance at night.
“I’ve been a ballerina for a very long time,” Simon says. “I just turned 40. I had a baby when I was 36 … and when I was 37, I was diagnosed with cancer … that was a big change in my life. Ballet is no longer my full-time job.”
Her breast cancer diagnosis came when her son was just 11 months old. But Simon had been paying attention to her breasts long before that.
She says doctors had previously attributed their lumpiness to dense breast tissue, something she was told was common among dancers. Simon was not comfortable leaving it there. Her mother had survived breast cancer. So had both of her mother’s sisters.
“I said, ‘Well, my mom had breast cancer and both her sisters. So, I’d like to really push to make sure that I get mammograms,’” she recalls. “I got the feeling I had to really push for it.”
After giving birth, Simon noticed that one lump had changed. This time, the clinician who had delivered her son urged her to get it evaluated quickly. She was ultimately diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer that had reached a lymph node.
It was the beginning of a lesson Simon would relearn throughout treatment: Knowing your body is one thing. Making sure your concerns are taken seriously is another.
Learning Not to Take a Backseat to Her Care
Today, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends mammograms every other year beginning at 40 for women at average risk. Simon was 37. But age-based screening guidelines are only one part of assessing breast cancer risk, particularly for women with a significant family history. The American Cancer Society (ACS) says some women at high risk should receive both a mammogram and breast MRI every year, typically beginning around age 30, depending on their individual risk factors.
Family history can also raise questions about genetic counseling and testing. Mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 may be the best known, but inherited changes in genes including PALB2, ATM and CHEK2 can also increase breast cancer risk. Having multiple close relatives with breast cancer — particularly when cancers occurred at younger ages — is among the factors clinicians consider when deciding whether genetic counseling or testing may be appropriate.
Then there is breast density.
Dense tissue can make cancer harder to detect on a mammogram and is itself associated with increased breast cancer risk. Since September 2024, mammography facilities nationwide have been required to tell patients whether their breasts are dense and encourage them to discuss what that means for their individual risk and screening plan.
For Simon, those conversations are no longer theoretical.
“Even from that first time when the doctor dismissed me, and I pushed for the mammogram,” she says, “it was a hard but important lesson early on, like, ‘Oh, I can’t take a backseat to my care.’ … I’ve got to be kind but direct. I’ve got to advocate.”
The Body She Got Back Was Different
At first, Simon’s goal was straightforward: Get through treatment and get back to dance.
She underwent a double mastectomy with reconstruction, followed by chemotherapy. What she did not anticipate was how profoundly surgery could change the body she expected would carry her back to the studio.
Simon developed post-mastectomy pain syndrome, persistent pain that can occur after breast surgery. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) lists lasting pain or discomfort, along with arm and shoulder pain and stiffness, among the possible risks of mastectomy.
“I ended up with post-mastectomy pain syndrome for two years,” Simon says. “They kept telling me, ‘You’ll get back to dance as soon as we take out the expanders and you do the reconstruction. You’re going to be fine.’ And I woke up … and all of a sudden, it was this zoom, zoom, zoom pain everywhere. Just throbbing. I’d just be sitting on the floor crying.”
She also developed cording, or axillary web syndrome, a side effect of breast cancer surgery in which a tight cord of scar tissue forms under the arm and can restrict movement. Research suggests stretching and other physical therapy approaches can help restore movement in patients experiencing it, but recovery time can vary from person to person; some patients undergo month of treatment before noticing any improvement.
For most people, losing some range of motion is disruptive. For a ballerina, movement was Simon’s vocabulary. She eventually found a way to stay connected to ballet by coaching young dancers, but the cording still affects what she can physically demonstrate.
“In ballet, we have something called allongé. Stretching. So my arms used to go back this way, but now I can’t anymore,” she says. “I can literally see a … web. So, it’s really hard for me to show certain things to my students.”
Simon wishes rehabilitation had been addressed much earlier.
“I feel that when you have a surgery, physical therapy should be automatic right away,” she says.
She fought her way back to performing, but eventually had to confront something harder than getting back onstage: Her new body could no longer reliably sustain the career she had built.
Grieving the Ballerina She Had Been
Cancer survival is often framed around what remains: You are here. Treatment worked. Be grateful.
Simon is grateful.
She is also grieving.
“Sometimes I can’t understand why I’m sad, and it’s like I woke up, I ate breakfast, I danced, I had lunch, I danced. And then, I performed at night, and it was a big part of my identity, and I’m grieving for that loss,” she says. “And when I speak to people who tell me, ‘Well, that shouldn’t be your identity,’ well, it really is. It’s part of you.”
That distinction matters. Surviving something does not require pretending it took nothing from you.
In her conversation with fellow breast cancer survivor and patient advocate Trish Michelle, Simon found someone who understood that survivorship does not begin where grief ends.
“Everyone thinks you get cancer, you go through treatment, you ring the bell, you either live or you die, and if you live, you live happily ever after. The end,” Trish Michelle says. “And it’s not like that at all.”
Cancer-related distress can persist well beyond active treatment, encompassing anxiety, sadness, changes in identity and fear of recurrence. The NCI notes that people experience widely varying levels of distress after cancer, and some benefit from professional support.
Simon sought therapy on her own when she felt the mental health resources available through her care team were not enough.
“It’s OK to feel and to be frustrated and just go through the grief of all of it,” she says. “And that’s what I’m working on.”
Slowly, she also began redirecting the intensity she once poured into performing.
“I really love coaching, so I’m pouring my heart, what I used to give to dance, into coaching,” she says.
While her students have not replaced ballet, coaching has given her another way to remain inside the world she loves.
“Not just a mother,” she says. “I’m a mother of many, many dancers now.”
The Side Effects That Followed Her Home
Some of the changes Simon struggled with most had little to do with what people typically picture when they imagine chemotherapy.
Treatment pushed her into menopause years earlier than she expected, changing not only how her body felt but her sexual relationship with it.
“They didn’t say, ‘Listen, you’re going to lose all sex drive,’” Simon shares. “I’m a very honest person, and I’ll tell you: I can look at any man and not feel a thing now. And that is a very strange place to be at my age. I’m supposed to be having more babies.”
Certain cancer treatments can lower estrogen, disrupt ovarian function and cause symptoms including hot flashes, vaginal dryness and sexual changes. The NCI encourages women to ask proactively about how treatment might affect sexual health because some effects can persist after treatment ends.
Those conversations also intersected with the future family Simon thought she had protected.
Before chemotherapy, she underwent fertility preservation and froze nine embryos. She believed the hardest part was safeguarding the possibility of another pregnancy.
Then, her plan changed.
“We can talk about, of course, the embryos … I happened to get nine. But no one told me that there was a huge chance that I wouldn’t [be able to] carry,” Simon says. “In my mind, I went through every step thinking, OK, get through this and then you can use the embryos and have another baby.”
Her medical team later recommended that she pursue surrogacy rather than interrupt ongoing treatment to carry another pregnancy.
“Well, no. I’m sorry, you can’t. You have to find a surrogate,” she recalls. “I wish they had just kind of spelled it out for me in the beginning so that I could mourn and make peace with it. It was like a roller coaster.”
Fertility and pregnancy decisions after breast cancer are highly individual. Chemotherapy and endocrine therapy can affect ovarian function and fertility, which is why fertility preservation should ideally be discussed before treatment begins. Research is also continuing to clarify when some patients may safely pause endocrine treatment to pursue pregnancy.
For Simon, the pain came not simply from needing a different path to another child. It came from learning about that possibility one piece at a time.
As Trish Michelle explains “Options are important to give, and not having options can truly put you in situations where you’re now deeply grieving something that maybe you didn’t have to be.”
When Cancer Interrupted Motherhood, Too
When Simon was diagnosed, her son was still a baby.
After surgery, nerve pain and limited movement made some of the most ordinary parts of early motherhood impossible without help.
“I [couldn’t] hold my own child. Everybody in my family is taking care of my kid. I have a full-time nanny supervising me at a Mommy and Me class,” she says. “What was my purpose again? Couldn’t dance, couldn’t be a mother … You feel so powerless.”
Her husband became what Simon calls her “rock,” even as cancer strained their relationship in ways neither of them knew how to navigate.
“I love him, and I have my frustrations, but I have to remember he was going through something as well,” she says. “And he was my rock. I’ll never forget that.”
Cancer clarified other relationships, too. Simon says some friendships fell away, while the people who simply stayed close became impossible to forget.
“When you’re sitting in a chair and you’re recovering from a big surgery, the people who really just show up … it speaks volumes,” she says.
Her relationship with her son has changed as well. As he has gotten older and Simon has recovered, she says they have begun finding the closeness she feared she had missed.
Putting Recurrence Fear in Its Place
Even as Simon rebuilds, one question remains difficult to put down: What if the cancer comes back?
“Hearing these stories about women who have recurrences, and I haven’t made that five-year mark because they say, ‘Oh, once you’ve made five years, you’ll stop worrying so much,’” Simon tells Trish Michelle. “Is that always a fear? Are you always scared that there’s going to be a recurrence no matter what?”
Fear of recurrence is one of the most common emotional challenges cancer survivors report. There is no single milestone that makes it disappear, and an individual’s risk depends on characteristics of the original cancer and other factors. Staying informed about personal risk, following the care plan developed with an oncology team and discussing new concerns can help survivors regain some sense of control.
Trish Michelle, now a decade beyond her own diagnosis, understands the hypervigilance.
“It was all-consuming,” she says. “And then, you have to stop. What I say is like, ‘All right, I’m putting cancer in a drawer right now.’ I need to put it in a drawer because now it’s affecting my enjoyment of the now.”
The drawer does not mean ignoring her health. It means refusing to let fear of tomorrow consume today.
Simon is learning a version of that balance for herself: Staying engaged in her care, asking about options and recognizing that advocacy is not the same thing as living in constant alarm.
“Because people said at first, ‘You have to advocate for yourself.’ And I was laughing. I was like, ‘Of course. I would advocate for myself,’” she says. “But now, I really see it. What it means to be an advocate.”
Her life no longer looks the way the ballerina training eight hours a day imagined it would. She has lost things cancer survival rhetoric can be too quick to skip over: physical abilities, pieces of a career, reproductive choices and moments with her baby she cannot get back.
But Simon has not stopped moving.
She coaches. She mothers. She loves. She advocates. And occasionally, she dances.
At the end of their conversation, Trish Michelle gave Simon a bracelet as a reminder of the community that can exist on the other side of cancer’s isolation.
“I want you to wear this and think of me and think of everything you’ve been through and all that you have yet to do in your life,” Michelle tells her. “I want you to still find your joy and still choose yourself every day.”
For Simon, standing up for tomorrow started much earlier than she realized.
It started when she was 37, knew something about her body deserved a closer look and decided that being nice did not mean staying quiet.
Content was independently created by SHE Media with funding from Novartis Pharmaceuticals.