When Kris Hallenga was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer – the most advanced form – at 23, questions swirled in her head: “Why didn’t anyone tell me to check my breasts? Why didn’t I know I could get breast cancer at 23?”
If she didn’t know she could have breast cancer so young, there was a very good chance others were just as uninformed, she said in a 2021 interview with The Guardian. She spent the next 15 years educating young people about early detection through her nonprofit, CoppaFeel, and in her 2021 memoir, Glittering a Turd.
On Monday, CoppaFeel announced that Ms Hallenga had died aged 38. A spokesman for the organization said she died at her home in Cornwall, England, of breast cancer.
“Survival was never enough,” he said he said during a publicity tour in 2021. “I don’t just want to survive, I want to be able to really look at my life and go, ‘I’m glad I’m still here and I’m getting the most of what I want out of 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, who were both teachers. according to the Times of London. When she was 9, she moved to Daventry in central England with her mother, Jane Hallenga. her twin sister, Maren Hallenga; and their older sister Maike Hallenga, all three of whom survive her. Her father, Reiner Hallenga, he died of a heart attack when he was 20 years old.
Ms. Hallenga first felt a lump in 2009 when she was in Beijing working for a travel company and teaching on the side. During a home visit in the Midlands in central England, Mrs Hallenga went to her GP. She told the Guardian that her doctor had blamed hormonal changes related to her birth control pill.
But the lump became more painful and a bloody discharge appeared. Another doctor gave her a diagnosis similar to the first — hormones and the pill. But since Mrs. Halenga didn’t know what would be considered normal, she had nothing to judge.
“I didn’t touch my breasts at all,” Ms. Hallenga said in 2021. “I didn’t know anything about them.”
But Ms 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 the tumor was found, Ms. Hallenga’s diagnosis was definitive. It had also spread to her spine.
After an aggressive round of chemotherapy, a mastectomy and hormone therapy, tests in 2011 revealed that the cancer had spread to her liver, he later told the Huffington Post. A year later, doctors found the cancer had spread to her brain and she underwent intense radiation therapy to remove a tumor.
But she continued to work through her illness. She wrote about her cancer diagnosis and advocacy 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 audience: young people.
The organization sent thousands of breast self-examination reminders via text messages, organized a group of women known as Boobettes who go to schools to talk about their experience with breast cancer at a young age, helped add cancer awareness in the educational program in Britain and broadcast what is believed to be the first nipple in a daytime television commercial who encouraged people to get to know their breasts.
It was all done in the hope that others could avoid a diagnosis like the one Ms. Hallenga made.
“Cancer so often comes with a package of terms – survivor, thriver, warrior – and it’s great if someone wants to attach their existence to those words, if it helps them get through the day – if it helps them gain perspective, great.” , Ms. Halenga she said when her memoir was released. “But for me, I could never resonate with those words. Because I say, if I’m not happy to be alive, then what’s the point of surviving?’
In 2017, Ms Hallenga stepped down as managing director of CoppaFeel to move to Cornwall and spend more time with her sister Maren. Last June, he gave a live 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 he wrote on Instagram after the event. “I have never felt such joy. I have never felt such a kinship with mortality. I’ve never felt so alive.”