Sister Saturdays – Allison Hadden
Ali is a lifelong athlete and adventurer, marketing executive at 3 tech companies that scaled to billion dollar exits, and a passionate wellness advocate that got diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018 at 38 years old. She had no idea the ride she was in for…
What is your current treatment plan?
I was first diagnosed with Stage 3c Triple Negative Breast Cancer in Sept 2018 at a fit and seemingly healthy 38 yrs. old. I completed 5 months of chemo before travelling to Boston for my mastectomy at Dana Farber. After recovering, I started 6 weeks of daily radiation back in my town, followed by six months of oral chemo. My last pill was on Christmas of 2019, totaling 15 months of treatment.
After 18 yrs. in California, I moved to start a new chapter in Boulder where I worked remotely as a VP for Mindbody, I got to snowboard during the week as a Coloradan local, and I was invited to speak at events in places like Amsterdam and Mexico, sharing my cancer story and motivating audiences to live like there’s “No Time to Waste”. I was living the dream at the start of 2020 🙂
Then Covid hit in March, just as I was beginning to have cognitive processing challenges. Mentally, I was moving slower than usual. Word finding started to become difficult. I knew what I wanted to say but I just couldn’t communicate it. As it became harder to engage with people, I became increasingly frustrated and then, I began to withdraw and isolate. Friends and family started to get concerned.
Turns out, I had a metastatic brain tumor the size of a lemon in my frontal lobe. Luckily, we found it and it was successfully removed in emergency surgery in late April. I had stereotactic (hyper targeted) radiation in June to remove any remaining cancer in my brain, and now I just go back to crushing life again. I’ll get scanned every few months for the next few years, but the hope is that the now Stage IV cancer won’t show up again until I’m old and wrinkly 🙂
What is the hardest part of all this?
Hands down one of the hardest parts has been the physical changes I’ve experienced as a result of cancer. First, I lost all my hair (and my eyebrows and eyelashes) thanks to chemo. Then I went into early menopause which transformed my body despite staying active throughout treatment, adding 20 lbs. and stripping me of all my lean muscle, so I no longer felt like an athlete. And most recently, the radiation to my brain resulted in significant hair loss around the site – right at the front of my head – and I’m still grieving that loss because it’s permanent. Losing touch with my physical body and realizing that I will never look like my pre-cancer self has been really difficult for me to accept. I try to stay in gratitude though, because at the end of the day, all I really want is to live a long life.
What is the easiest part of all this?
Weirdly, my recently metastatic diagnosis isn’t awesome, but I’m convinced I’ll live another 30 years, so I’m not actually worried about that most days.
Do you practice yoga or meditation?
Being active in the outdoors is my daily moving meditation. It’s when I’m able to take in the beauty of nature, tap into a universal life force and feel most connected to the athlete that lives inside me, no matter what I look like on the outside. When I was first diagnosed, one of first responses was “but what about ski season? We just booked a trip to Telluride!” and I convinced my Oncologist that I needed to plan a ski trip for the small window I’d have after finishing chemo, before my surgery. (We squeezed in a few days at Jackson Hole and it was everything) Now in the summer, I’m so grateful to get to explore Boulder, trail running, hiking and getting reacquainted with my road bike. In my experience, nature most definitely heals.
What’s the biggest thing you have learned about yourself through all of this?
I feel like I’ve been given a gift – a gift I never asked for – but coming face-to-face with death as a result of cancer has enabled me to live a richer, more meaningful life now focused on gratitude, human connection, and joy which I shared in my recent TEDx Talk “Confronting Death to Live a Fuller Life”.
What would you tell another woman who is about to embark on this journey?
Mindset is everything. Do whatever you need to do to stay in a positive headspace and after you figure out what brings you happiness and joy, protect that at all costs because it’s a matter of life and death. I talk about creating a Life List in my TEDx Talk and would recommend everyone start one right now on their phone. Identifying the big things – and the little things – that spark joy in your life is the first step, and then making it a priority to start checking things off is next. Staying positive, avoiding researching shit online, and leaning into the joy you can find on this journey will help you stay in front of the tears, but when you do have those bad days, reach out to your squad and learn to accept their support. You are stronger and more resilient than you think, and our bodies can do incredible things. Trust that.
