The Aerial Alchemist
Where circus meets storytelling, wellness, and the magic of movement. Hosted by Fallon, founder of In the Wings, this podcast explores aerial dance, creativity, and the rituals that help us stay grounded while reaching new heights. From artistry to resilience, community to self-care, each episode offers inspiration for living boldly, moving with intention, and finding your own alchemy—both in the air and on the ground. Always… happy flying.
The Aerial Alchemist
Episode 31: My Breast Cancer Experience
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Intro and Announcements
3:01 — The Diagnosis: A Personal Experience with Breast Cancer
11:07 — Navigating Treatment Options and Decisions
18:51 — Surgery and Recovery: The Mastectomy Journey
25:56 — Reflections on the Experience and Future Steps
If you have someone going through any kind of experience and you want to know how best to support them, this episode breaks that down.
Connect with Fallon
📧 info@inthewingsaerial.com
🌐 www.inthewingsaerial.com
Welcome to The Aerial Alchemist, where movement transforms into magic and stories take flight. I'm Fallon, dancer, aerialist, and storyteller, inviting you into a world where circus and dance meet creativity, resilience, and community. Whether you're here to be inspired, to learn, or to simply dream a little bigger, you found your place. I'm glad you're here. Welcome to the Aerial Alchemist episode number 31. Today, taking a bit of a turn from the last few weeks, today we're going to be talking about my breast cancer experience, which was prompted by a newsletter that I received recently. Before we jump in today, I gotta remind you that Flourish is coming up. We are less than two months out. Ha ha So excited. If you There's still time though. You can still do it. You can still get all the things. In fact, just today I applied, finished getting my global entry. I got it all done. So now I can zoom through security and customs, and I'm pretty excited for that. Yeah, a lot of people are like, well, is that even worth it? And I'm like, well, it's $120 for five years. So seeing as if you only take one trip a year and you get fast tracked, because it includes TSA pre checks, so it doesn't even have to be international. You get fast tracked. I'm like, that's twenty twenty dollars a time. That feels worth it, and I plan to travel more than that. So yeah, it's worth it for me. Anyways, so flourish, come to Italy, get your global entry. Apparently there's still time to do that. Mine happened in like a week, wild. And yeah, we're gonna be in the Umbria region of Italy, which is about an hour from Rome. And you'll take the train there. We'll pick you up at the Emilia Narni station, I believe. Don't take my word for it right now, if you're already coming. Pay attention to the WhatsApp group and the emails will be for sure on there. But anywho, we'll pick you up from the train station. We'll take you to Oasis Orgente, the retreat space. There will be three to four aerial rigs set up along the pool. And then we're gonna do all sorts of things like stargazing and watching movies outside and do an olive oil tasting and exploring the ruins nearby. So it's gonna be great. And then, of course, aerial. We're gonna be doing aerial. Leah's gonna be doing a bunch of technique type things, new pathways, different things. She's so good at all of the puzzles, and I will be leading the creation lab. So join us. It's gonna be a fantastic time. June 19th through the 25th. I'll put the link in the show notes as always, and we'll see you there. So let's let's get into the the meat and potatoes of this episode. So I wanna I started with I was typing it out, and I have been trying not to use the robots too often, but I use the robots to gather and structure my thoughts. I put my thoughts out and then and then they put it into a a cohesive order. And sometimes they'll give me like a title for the episode. And the title that it gave me was my breast cancer journey. And I started to type that out, and I was like, wow, that's not the language that I use. So I want to start that I don't use that language, my breast cancer journey that makes it sound like something nice, something flowery, like I chose to go on this journey. I did not. It was an experience that I had. I did not choose to go on a journey. I had a fitness journey that I chose to do. Yeah, a health journey. Health and fitness, that yes. Cancer journey? No. I don't accept that. So if you have someone in your life that is going through an experience, maybe be clear on what language they prefer to use when we're talking about it. Because that one just felt really bad in my body. So anyways, we'll back up. I'm gonna go in I don't really have much of an outline for today. I'm just gonna go the way it happened and maybe hit some points along the way. So it might feel a little more scattered than normal today, but here we are. So uh I was diagnosed in 2024. So I turned 40 in 2024, went in for my first mammogram screening. I am a nurse, so this feels like, yeah, you just do the thing. When it's time to get the thing done, you do it. Because I see what happens when people go don't go do the preventative care. And I'm not gonna be that person. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna get it done, it'll be normal, I'll go home, I'll get on with my life. It's fine. I wasn't worried about the mammogram going into it. I went in, I think my mammogram was scheduled for February 13th. Don't ask me why I remember that. Of course I remember that. 13 my is my lucky number, and it was just two weeks after my birthday. So I was I was not late. I was not late getting it done. A lot of people ask me that. No, I was right on time. And yeah, so I went in for my first screening mammogram. Didn't think anything of it. Everybody's like, Are you worried? It's gonna hurt. I'm like, whatever, how bad could it be? So they squish her boobies for a few minutes. Literally, how bad it could be. And it wasn't, it wasn't that bad. And before all this, I had very tiny boobies, so that was hard for them to get it all up in that machine, and your face is like squished it. Clearly, a man designed these machines. The a man or a very large-chested woman did it because it was definitely not someone with a small chest. I'm like, Where where's the room for my face in this? You're so anyways, it wasn't bad. It was fine. It just took a few minutes. The nurse, because I'd got it done at the hospital I work at, and I was like, Hey, can I see, can I see the pictures? I don't know what I'm looking at, but I want to look. I I look at different pictures in my department. And she was like, sure. And I was like, Cool, what is this? She's like, Well, you know, here's here's this. She's giving me the tour around my breast. And I'm like, cool. And she's like, and these spots are like, they could be calcifications, they could be, they're just like points of interest. Like, I want to be clear that they may call you back for this. I don't want you to freak out. It's perfectly normal on your first screening because we don't have a baseline. And so we're just getting to know your tissue. You, she's like, You have really dense breast tissue, and they may call you back. I don't want you to panic if that happens. And I was like, Cool, sounds good. So I didn't. And then they called me back and I still didn't panic. And they took more pictures that second time, more gramming of the mamos, and then they had me hold there for a minute and they said, We want to do an ultrasound just to be sure. Like, again, they didn't have me worked up and they bring me into the ultrasound room and they're doing it, and I'm watching the doctor, and she's not saying a lot. And I'm looking at the nurse and I'm looking at the interaction between them, and I'm I'm reading their faces, and I'm like, something's up. They're not saying something. And the doctor, she was fucking fabulous. Uh, I love that doctor so much. She said, I will I want to bring you back for a biopsy. And I said, Okay. And she was very cool about it. She didn't say you've got cancer. She didn't say she suspected everything, anything scary, but she also didn't not say that either. So she said, I'd like to bring you back for a biopsy of this. You know, the nurse was all good set up. Like, do you have any questions? And this is what we're gonna do. This is gonna look like I just want to look closer at this spot. And I said, Okay, cool. And it was when she left the room that I the nurse was still in there with me. And that's when I that's when I lost it. That's when I broke down because I knew I knew the look on their faces because I've had that look, the look when I've had the patients who we find cancer on and and they said, Oh, did you find anything? And as the nurse, I I can't say it. It's the doctor's role to do that, because they have all the follow-up answers, is why. So I just kind of have to be like, Oh, you know, the doctor's gonna come in and chat with you. Um, and I don't say one way or another. Um and so like I know, so I know. So I was like, Oh my god, I I fucking have cancer, don't I? And of course she can't say anything, she doesn't know at this point, but they see something very concerning. And yeah, I just I remember crying in that room with her. We had moved in, moved back home after rebuilding our house after the Marshall wildfire, two, three months before that. I'm like, I just finished rebuilding my whole life. I can't do another thing right now. Like, I need a break. Like, this is the cruelest joke. Like, who's what the what the fuck? There's gonna be a lot of swearing on this episode. Yeah, and she I just remember she just held space for me and she said, I can't I can't imagine, but like we're gonna get through this and we don't know what it is yet, but but also she didn't say that it wasn't that. Like, she knew I knew, I knew she knew, and uh, and she she was she was fabulous. So I s after that, that was like the I came home and broke down with my husband, and I was like, I know I and he was he's always trying to trying to like be like, no, like you don't know that yet, don't worry. And I'm like, I know. And I was right. And after that, I I had like got it out as far as like the the crying for the most part from in the beginning stages, anyways. And then it was just like one one foot in front of the other, one, one step at a time. So I went in and I had uh the stereostatic biopsy done, which meant they um had me under compression, like in a mammogram machine while they did this biopsy. And the funniest part of that was that I told you I had small, I had small boobs, and the the nurses were like, Do we have a smaller paddle? No, hmm. And I was like, I don't know how you guys are gonna do this. And so um they got it done. They biopsied. It was on my um my left side, lucky lefty and rotten righty. My left side, they diagnosed me with DCIS, which is ductal carcinoma and psu, which means it's stage zero cancer. I want to be clear, that's still cancer. Stage zero is like great. You caught it at the best point that you could have. Just because it's in one place right now doesn't mean it's not gonna go other places. And sure, it might be like the best kind of cancer, but there's no good kind of cancer. So, you know, there's that. So then from there, I was sent to the breast surgeon where she walked in and she said, It's not often that I come in and say, Nice to meet you, mastectomy, but nice to meet you, mastectomy. And it was because I didn't have a lump. There was no lump to do a lumpectomy on. It didn't matter that it was stage zero the way, the way that my my beautiful friend Amy, who is also now a two-time breast cancer survivor, said, She's like, Oh, you had confetti cancer. And it was like confetti went off in in my boob. There's just like speckled everywhere. Um, and she was like, There's no way to do a lumbectomy. She showed me the pictures, she showed me like the extent of the disease and that like the whole thing had to go. So then it was deciding whether or not um I was gonna do bilateral or unilateral mastectomy. I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to do bilateral. I didn't I didn't like the idea of thinking that it might come back on the other side or I might get it on the other side. I didn't like the idea of coming in for mammograms for one side. Like, what just take them? Like, I didn't like the idea of being uneven. I had extremely symmetrical breasts before all of this. Even my breast surgeon commented after my double mastectomy that she was like, you had the most like they weighed the same amount. It was like 0.2 grams different or something silly like that. They were, they were pretty perfect until they tried to kill me. Anyways, so I knew I had wanted to do both pretty early on, but in the steps that followed, it was that it was no longer a choice to be made, unfortunately. So it was kind of good that I had already made the choice before I felt like I didn't have one because I don't remember what order things happened in at this point, but I did genetic testing and went in for an MRI. And I don't remember which ones came back first, but the genetic testing came back as BRACITU positive. I don't have anybody in my family that I know of with breast cancer, any other cancers. I am adopted from on my dad's side, so I don't know that side of my family, so I have to assume it's from that side. Anyways, so that came back positive, which gives you like an 80% chance of developing breast cancer. That seemed pretty clear that the other one was going to need to go, anyways. And then they send me for the MRI and that they found something suspicious on the right side. So then I had to go back for another biopsy on my right side, and that one came back as ILC stage one, which is invasive lobular carcinoma, stage one cancer. So that one had to go too, and it was the same thing on that side. There was no lump. It was just like everywhere. It's just everywhere. So they both they both had to go. And I'm I'm looking at the time and I'm looking at where I'm at today. This is gonna be like a several part thing, I think, as I'm getting into it. So I was gonna do all of this for like in October, like for breast cancer awareness. And I'll plug something when the time comes. But like I said, I saw this post from someone else and I was inspired to talk about my my scenario now. Anyways, I'll keep going. So we now have cancer on both sides, and then it was time to schedule the mastectomy. And before we did that, I had to make the decision on if I wanted reconstruction or not. So that was actually like one of the hardest things. The breast surgeon that I had been referred to was phenomenal. Like I didn't, I went in like, like, I might need a second opinion. I might not like her and I'll go see somebody else. And I felt so extremely comfortable with her from the minute of meeting her. She has phenomenal bedside manner. And every CRNA and person I talked to in the hospital that I work at was like, oh, she's a fabulous surgeon. So I was like, okay, done. I don't need to see anybody else. That's great. The plastic surgeon, on the other hand, was a little bit of a trickier thing. Hey, wherever I can, I like to see female doctors and providers. Specifically being female, we are less likely to die at the hands of a female provider, and we are more likely to die in a male provider's hands. So when I can, I find a woman. Turns out in my area, not a lot of female plastic surgeons, most of them men. And the I think I had only heard of one, and she didn't work like in my hospital where I wanted to have it done where I felt comfortable because I got to pick my whole OR team and also was booked out forever. And also I hadn't got mixed reviews about that surgeon, anyways. So I was like, okay. So the first plastic surgeon that I had met with was pretty clear I had done some research going into it. I was pretty clear that I wanted to do pre-prepectoral implants. And the reason being because being an aerialist, I was like, Don't you touch my pecs? I use those all the time and I need them. Don't you touch them? And I went in and I met with him and I said, like, this is what I want to do. He went through and like, he was very good. He was very thorough. He like did the exam, um, did my intake, looked at me physically, like, you know, what he was starting with, and and then went through like the options for surgeries. And what he was recommending was a postpectoral or an under the muscle implant. He said that women are typically happier with them because there aren't, there's not like rippling that you can see. And then I said, But I don't want you cutting into my muscle. I don't want my muscle cut. Like there's already gonna be enough trauma done to my chest. I don't want any more. And he said, Oh, well, the way that I do it is I actually don't cut the muscle. I lift and separate it. So I actually don't do that much damage. And most women get like 90% of their range of motion back afterwards and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay. And so I left that. And he was like, you know, do your research, meet to meet whoever like other surgeons, like, and we're here, you know, if and when you decide to like move forward. I said, Great. So I was like, I was like, if I had to go with him, I felt comfortable with him. That's how I felt in the moment. If, but I was like, but I want to talk to other people because I'm not sold. So I went and talked to another plastic surgeon, and he was like, I would not go under the muscle with you. I would definitely go over the muscle with, you know, the kind of work you do. He's like, that would be ridiculous. It's got to be over the muscle. So I did like that guy a lot better. I liked what he was saying. It was more in alignment with the research that I had been doing. And when I spoke with the CRNAs that I worked with, I was like, What do you what do you guys think about these surgeons? They had were hesitant about that surgeon because he had had a few complications, like post-surgical complications, come back recently from some of his surgeries. And they're like, I'm like, they were like, he's not bad. He's got a terrible bedside manner. And I was like, you know, when it comes to surgeon, I don't need a good bedside manner. I need you to do really good surgery. And you don't need to be nice to me. I don't care. But that's me in and being in the healthcare field and knowing that surgeons are not people who are good talking to people typically. So I'm like, no, I just need a good surgeon. But if he's not a good surgeon and we're having complications afterwards, like, I need not that because I made the decision from day one through all this that my breasts are not that important to me. What's important to me is being able to continue doing my work, doing aerial, performing, be an artist. And if there are any complications with this, take them out. Take them out. I don't, I don't need it that bad. So I was like, Well, I don't know, I don't like this. And there was one surgeon that kept getting recommended to me. And unfortunately, he was booked for months and months, and my breast surgeon was not gonna let me wait that long, and he couldn't get me in. Every time I called, they were like, No, he can't get you in until September. And she was like, I don't want you going really past June or July. And I was like, Okay. So I talked to one of the CRNAs that I worked with, and I was like, Hey, who would you recommend? And he says the same surgeon. He's like, I'd I'd recommend Rosner. Hopefully he's okay with me saying his name. He may not even ever hear this. And I was like, Well, that's what everybody keeps saying, but I can't get in with him. Like, and he's like, What do you mean you can't get in with him? I said, He's booked. They don't even have they don't have any slots for like the breast cancer patients, which they save extra for, but that's they're they're all booked, and I can't get in with him. And my coworker, he goes, Let me talk to him. He basically said, Hold my beer. He didn't say that, but that was the gist of what he said. And he, this was on Friday before Memorial Day. My coworker went over to the OR, talked to the doctor, and by Wednesday I was in his office. And when I went into his office, he's like, You got a lot of people pulling for you over there. Because I guess when my coworker had gone into the OR, all my other co-workers were like, You gotta get her in. What do you mean? She's one of us, you gotta get her in. Just do it, find the time. And he did, and he is phenomenal. And he went through and he saw me as a whole ass person, which I think is so important when you're going in and speaking to any healthcare provider. Uh, especially in this scenario, he looked, he knew what I did for a living. He knew what that meant because he works in Boulder and there's a lot of aerialists in Boulder. So it's hard to live here and not know who we are and what we do. So he had that. He did also agree with going above above the muscle. He's like, I wouldn't and do that. And we can do a fat transfer for rippling. And I was like, I'm not even really concerned about rippling. Like, if you're concerned, fine, but I'm not. I don't care. And he also suggested another surgery, which is the deep flap surgery where there is no implants. They take your tissue from other places and they like reconstruct it in your chest and they pull an artery from elsewhere to like feed the blood. It's such a cool thing. Medicine is awesome. Um, but he's looking at me and he's like, first of all, you don't have a lot of tissue we can pull from. There's not there's not much to take. He's like, and second of all, like, we're gonna pull from back here and it's gonna it's gonna mess up your tattoo. And he's like, and I don't know if you care about that, but I I'm assuming you do, because you cause you caught the tattoo and you probably don't want to mess it up. And so he's like, if it were me or if it was my wife, I would tell her to do a prepectoral with a fat transfer. And that's what we ended up doing, which was a by the way, a delayed reconstruction. There's so many different manners like drinking like from the fire hose when you're diagnosed. There's just so much information being thrown at you. So these were just like the first steps. So this gets you through July essentially. July of 2024, I went in for my double mastectomy with delayed reconstruction, which means that um my breast surgeon came in and she took out my breasts. And behind her, I think maybe even at the same time, unclear. I don't know if one was working on one side while the other one started on the other side. I don't know. I was really asleep. My good friend Molly was my nurse. Anesthetist and she gave me the best nap. I woke up feeling fabulous from my six and a half hour surgery. Just the twinge of nausea. And then once I had a cracker, I was fine. I think I was just hungry. Yeah. So, anyways, I was asleep for it. So the breast surgeon took out my breasts. The plastic surgeon came in behind her and put in um tissue expanders. Um, and those are like implants that are fillable from the outside. Um, so they have a port um on the like chest wall where like your nipple would have been, or if you still had nipples, but I had a skin-sparing mastectomy, which sounds nice. It's like there's sparing things, but that's opposed to a nipple sparing. So they took my nipples. I just have really cute Barbie boobs now. And I don't ever have to wear a bra because it doesn't matter if it's cold. Yeah, so the tissue expanders started off small. He put in a little bit of air at the beginning, closed me up, and then I saw him in a week where he took the air out and started putting saline in. And then every week I went and got my my braces tightened, if you will. It would start feeling better, and then I'd go in and he'd put a little bit more in, and it would be all tight in my chest again and sore until I looked down and looked in the mirror and went, that's big enough. And that looks about right. And then we stopped until it was time to do my tissue or my yeah, my tissue expander exchange or my implant extate exchange. So that was the first chunk of everything. I feel like it's a good stopping point. I will give you a little bit of like a little bit of gist of what like surgery itself looked like and the recovery looked like. It was six weeks of nothing essentially. Like he let me go on short walks. And then um a few weeks in, he let me like do some very isolated. I think a few weeks in I was able to like do squats, but like, do not get your heart rate up at all. No heart rate up. So it was two weeks later. I think it was two full weeks before they took the drains out. And I hated every moment. The drains were maybe the worst part. Those are wild. You can go back on my TikTok, I'll link it if you want to see the nonsense that they do. But the drains, they put them in, they like kind of curve up and around your implants or your expanders and come out like on your rib cage, like underneath your armpits, and like they're literal tubes coming out of your body that are like sutured in. Um, and if if you tug on them like it hurts. So you just have to be really gentle and ginger with them, and then they just feel awful inside of you. You're like, get this shit out of me. Which two weeks later they finally did, which was a wild feeling, did not hurt, but so weird. Them just like yanking them out. You could feel it come all the way out. Weird. Yeah. So six weeks completely off of everything. The first I think I was off of narcotics within about four or five days, and then just on ibuprofen for another couple weeks. And then everything was just kind of like sore and and and kind of pain, like sore, painful, but nothing too, like nothing an aerialist can't handle. We're so used to just random aches and pains and ouchies. So yeah, um that that was that recovery. At the end of that, we got pathology back. I learned what my next treatment steps would be, which was ended up being yes to radiation and no to chemo. Um, I had a low onchotype score, um, which means that it wouldn't have responded to chemo. So I didn't have to have that, which was great. But they didn't get clear margins, unfortunately, because of the extent of the disease on the right side, it was so close to my skin. There was no way to get clear margins in that spot. They had taken it to tumor board several times just to be sure that they couldn't go back in and surgically get it, which meant that I had needed to have radiation. So I had 33 rounds of radiation, which I will get into next time of what that means, because that is a thing. Yeah. So that was the big, the big stuff. The big stuff. Yeah, I think that I answered the general questions of like, did anybody in your family have it? Were you late? Uh, did you feel a lump? Did you feel anything? No, no, no, no, no, no. Nope. Nobody felt anything. Even my doctors couldn't palpate anything. So if if you're 40 or you have a family history and you're younger, like go get your mammogram. Get it done early. Um, because you want to catch it early. You can't prevent it, but you can catch it early, and then treatment can be better and your life can be longer and more fulfilled. So all of this was stemming from um Rain Anya from Paper Doll Militia, who is someone that I have admired and followed from my baby aerialist days, sent out a newsletter talking about how she was diagnosed with breast cancer last year and a little bit about her experience with it. And it's something that when I was newly diagnosed, I was looking for any other aerialist who had been through this because I I wanted to know what it was going to look like for my aerial career. Um, and I couldn't find anybody. And I've tried to be up front on my social media and talk about it, but it was a while before I was able to come out and talk about it publicly because there were some people in my life privately that I didn't want to know about it and that still don't know about it. I have since blocked those people so they can't see um what's going on with me. And now I can share it and hopefully be a resource to other people who find themselves in this situation. So I want to thank Rain for inspiring me and reminding me that I need to continue to talk about this and tell people that I'm here. If you find yourself in this position, please reach out to me. I'm happy to talk to you about it. Happy to talk you through it. Be a sounding board, just listen and just be someone who's who's also been through it and knows how horrible it is. So that's all for today. We'll talk more next week. Thank you for sticking with me through it. It's a lot to talk about and hear about. I'm sure maybe it's harder for me than you. Um, I want to thank my patrons on Patreon for supporting me always, always in what I do and in everything. Couldn't do it without you. If you have requests for future episodes, please send me an email or shoot me a DM. I am at In the Wings Ariel on all the social medias and at in the wings Ariel on Patreon. And until next week, this has been the Ariel Alchemist. Now go create some magic of your own. Happy flying.