About Me

Hello! I am a 27 (almost 28) year old who is lucky enough to be married to a wonderful man, have 2 sweet children, 1 crazy dog, 2 mouthy cats, and 2 chickens. We live out in the country in the beautiful state of Oregon. I have a lot going on in my life right now, so I figured I'd blog to help me get it through it all :)

I love food, eating it and cooking it, so I will use the blog as a place to share my attempts, successes and failures. Hopefully if you try anything from here you will like it as much as we do (if it is a success that is!)

I also will be writing about my journey being a BRCA2 mutant. Everyone in the world has the BRCA genes, I just was unfortunate enough to be born with mine being mutated. My particular mutation is a deleterious one, meaning that the gene stops about half-ways through it, so it isn't complete. Now, this is a problem, because the BRCA2 gene is a tumor supressor gene, the protein that my BRCA2 gene creates (the tumor supressor stuff) is abnormal and doesn't function properly. Thus, when there are abnormal/messed up breast cells, my BRCA2 protein doesn't fix them the way that they should, causing me to have a stupidly high risk of getting breast cancer. Thus the prophylactic mastectomy that I will be getting later this summer :) Sidenote - if anyone knows more about this then me and I got this wrong, please let me know. This is my basic understanding of what is going on here ;)

SO getting to the fun stuff. Surgery. I will be having a prophylactic (preventative) mastectomy this summer, removing as much of my breast tissue as possible, in the hopes that it will prevent me from getting breast cancer. This is a really big step for me, because in the past 5 years of knowing that I had this mutation, I always thought that I would be a wait and see person, not getting preventative surgery. But in the past year, between my husband and I we have known of too many younger women - 30's, 40's - dying of breast cancer. And quite frankly, it scares me. I have two sweet little boys - Rowan is 4, Jack is 2 - and I want to watch them grow up. I want to see them graduate from school, get married, have children of their own. I want to share life with them. So this is my way of trying to make that happen. Am I scared? Yes. Do I really want to do this? Not really, but I will.

SO that is me, in a two compartment nutshell. I will probably also share about other things - adventures with the family, gardening, a little bit of sewing, who knows what. Me just rambling :) I tend to do that sometimes, SO I will try my hardest to not go overboard! Thank you for joining me on this journey, speak up and let me know who you are, lets make this ride as fun as possible.

~ J