When Kris Hallenga was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer – the most advanced form – at age 23, questions swirled through her mind: “Why didn't anyone tell me to check my breasts? Why didn't I know I could get breast cancer at 23?”
If she hadn't known she could get breast cancer so young, chances are others would have been just as uninformed. she said in a 2021 interview with The Guardian. She spent the next fifteen years educating young people about early detection through her nonprofit CoppaFeel, and in a 2021 memoir, “Glittering a Turd.”
On Monday, CoppaFeel announced that Ms Hallenga had died at the age of 38. A spokesperson for the organization said she died at home in Cornwall, England, and that the cause was breast cancer.
“Surviving was never enough,” she says said during a publicity tour in 2021. “I don't just want to survive, I really want to be able to look at my life and say, 'I'm glad I'm still here, and I'm getting the most out of what I want from life. .'”
Kristen Hallenga was born on November 11, 1985 in Norden, a small town in northern Germany, to a German father and an English mother, both of whom were teachers. according to The Times of London. When she was nine, she moved with her mother, Jane Hallenga, to Daventry in central England; her twin sister, Maren Hallenga; and their older sister Maike Hallenga, all three of whom survive her. Her father, Reiner Hallenga, died of a heart attack when she was 20.
Ms. Hallenga first felt a lump in 2009 when she was working for a travel company in Beijing and also teaching. During the day a visit home in the Midlands in central England, Ms Hallenga went to her internist. She told The Guardian that her doctor blamed the lump on hormonal changes related to her birth control pill.
But the lump became more painful and bloody discharge developed. Another internist gave her a diagnosis similar to the first: hormones and the pill. But because Ms. Hallenga didn't know what would be considered normal, she had nothing to judge on.
“I didn't touch my breasts at all,” Ms. Hallenga said in 2021. “I didn't know anything about it.”
But Mrs Hallenga's mother, whose own mother had breast cancer at a young age, insisted her daughter be referred to a breast clinic. By the time she was diagnosed, eight months after finding the lump, Ms Hallenga's diagnosis was terminal. It had also spread to her spine.
After aggressive chemotherapy, a mastectomy and hormone therapy, tests in 2011 showed that the cancer had spread to her liver. she later told The Huffington Post. A year later, doctors discovered the cancer had spread to her brain and she underwent intensive radiotherapy to remove a tumor.
But she continued to work during her illness. She wrote about her cancer diagnosis and her lobbying work in a column for her local newspaper, The Northampton Chronicle and Echo, and The Sun. But it was her work with CoppaFeel that reached her target group: young people.
The organization has sent thousands of breast self-exam reminders by text message, organized a group of women known as the Boobettes who go to school at a young age to talk about their experiences with breast cancer, has helped add Adding cancer awareness to the education curriculum in Great Britain and broadcast which was supposedly the first nipple in a daytime television commercial that encouraged people to get to know their chest.
All of this was done in the hope that others could avoid a diagnosis like Ms. Hallenga's.
“Cancer so often comes with a package of terms – survivor, thriver, warrior – and it's great if someone wants to hang their existence on those words if it helps them get through the day – if it helps them gain perspective get it, great,” says Mrs. Hallenga said when her memoir was released. “But for me, I could never really resonate with those words. Because I say, what's the point of surviving if I'm not happy to be alive?'
In 2017, Ms Hallenga stepped down as CEO of CoppaFeel to move to Cornwall and spend more time with her sister Maren. Last June she gave herself a living funeral at Truro Cathedral in Cornwall. The dress code was YODO: you only die once. Dawn French, who played a village priest in the BBC sitcom 'The Vicar of Dibley', led the celebration of life.
“I have never felt such love,” Mrs. Hallenga wrote on Instagram after the event. “I have never felt so much joy. I have never felt such a kinship with mortality. I have never felt so alive.”