When Hardaker’s sister was diagnosed with a faulty BRCA2 gene in 2016, it spurred her on to take the test herself.<\/p>\n
“You think you’re going to be ready for something like that, but actually, I don’t think I really processed it for a good several years,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It is a hard thing to carry. It’s heavy, and then it is also long, so it’s not something you can do about it immediately.” <\/p>\n
After deciding she wanted the surgery, the time taken to process the decision and delays due to the Covid-19 pandemic meant a wait of seven years to have the operation.<\/p>\n
“When I had carried a large burden for so long, I had loads of relief afterwards,” she said. “I felt like I didn’t have to worry about anything anymore.” <\/p>\n
She said the recovery process was “really hard”, she was unable to sleep flat for a month, and she had had to recognise that she had been through an amputation.<\/p>\n
Hardaker also chose to have breast reconstruction surgery at the same time.<\/p>\n
“For me, losing my breasts was an emotional thing; it felt like I was losing my womanhood,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It’s not for everyone, but I wanted to try and carry on and look in the mirror as if nothing had happened.<\/p>\n
“This has been a really positive surgery, and my risk of cancer is now 8%, whereas it was 80-90% before.<\/p>\n
“I want to look at it as a good thing, and it has given me hope for the future.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Hardaker’s sister was diagnosed with a faulty BRCA2 gene in 2016, it spurred her on to take…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":753440,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-753439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753439\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/753440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}