Most teenagers are not generally chronicling serious health issues on their Instagram feeds. For actress Miranda McKeon, though, her feed has served as a journal of a very early breast cancer diagnosis. The 19-year-old has shared her experience pre-treatment of freezing her eggs, going through multiple rounds of chemo, and now, she’s shared that she’s undergoing a double mastectomy.
On her Instagram, the “Anne with an E” star wrote, “Today is the big day!!! I’ve arrived in SF to have the surgery that I’ve been anticipating for almost 5 months.”
McKeon said she was opting for a sensation preserving mastectomy, which aims to avoid numbness often experienced by women after mastectomies. McKeon explained that extra care will be taken when cutting nerves, and nerve grafts will be used for reconstruction. She and her mother had researched all the options and felt confident that they’d found the best team and the best path.
She added the procedure “will get rid of any cancer and significantly decrease my risk of reoccurrence in the future. This also means that I will be cancer free!”
The mastectomy comes after a five-month stretch of medical procedures, dating back to McKeon’s diagnosis in mid-June. Throughout that time, she’s shared her experiences on her Instagram and her blog. That has included a post detailing the process of freezing her eggs, updates about her many chemotherapy treatments, and sharing all the emotions that she’s experienced along the way. She wrote that she chose to be so candid on social media partly to document the whole process in an “honest and authentic way.”
On her blog, she shared some of that authenticity when she wrote about how hard it is to always hear “you are so strong.” She compared her experience to being given a necklace to disentangle.
She wrote, “We are not strong because we have been given a knotted necklace. We are strong when we wear this necklace with pride; a necklace that will never be the same as when our grandmother passed it down to us, or when we purchased it brand new in one of those clear slip bags it comes protected in. Strength is wearing a necklace that may still have a kink in it, or is a bit worn, battered and tarnished from wear and tear. Strength is still finding the beauty in it. I think that is strength.”
Next up for McKeon is radiation. To follow along on her journey, you can visit her Instagram or her blog.