"I don't regret..." Abby Peoples, Survivor

Hillary Odom

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“I don’t regret my mastectomy,” Abby says. She lost her grandmother, father, and beloved sister Alicia Sanderlin to cancer, and tested positive for the breast cancer gene, giving her an 84% chance of developing breast cancer herself. But Abby took action, giving up her healthy breasts at 29 years old with a double mastectomy, hoping to beat the disease before it appeared.

“The cancer gene that my family has is just so aggressive,” she says. “I couldn’t sit back and wait on it to get me.” Now Abby is confident she’ll be around to watch her two-year-old daughter grow up.

“I saved my life,” she says. “I won’t say that I have not endured a lot of pain, because I have. I will not say I have not shed a lot of tears, because I have. But I will say I will soon be as good as new without the worry of having breast cancer and would do it all over again if I had to.”

-Aleigh Acerni