One in eight women will develop breast cancer in their lifetime. According to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, half of all American women diagnosed with breast cancer are aged 62 or younger. That means breast cancer has Gen X square in its sights — and any one of us could be next.
I know this firsthand. I’m Cara Lockwood — author, advocate, and an award-winning USA Today bestseller — and this is how I found out I had breast cancer at the age of 50.
Excerpt from “There’s No Good Book For This”
“Cara? Hello. I’ve got the results of your biopsy,” said the radiologist on the other end of the phone line as I stood in my kitchen, cell phone pressed to my ear, half listening because I was already trying to think about what the hell I was going to make for dinner.
This was never an easy thing because we have a blended family of five children: three teens living with us and two twenty-somethings out in the wild. Among them: one vegetarian, one pescatarian, one carnivore, not to mention the one with tree nut allergies, one with peanut allergies, and one with both.
Making dinner felt like entering the Thunderdome: seven people enter, and everyone leaves complaining. When my husband and I found a dish everyone would eat (jambalaya, for instance), then we’d make it so often they’d all hate it within three months.
“Yes?” Of course, I’d been slightly worried. But honestly, I wasn’t really expecting bad news.
I wasn’t supposed to get cancer. Nobody in my family had cancer, except my Japanese great-grandfather who died of throat cancer, but he smoked more than a pack a day.
Most people in my family died of heart failure or strokes. But cancer? Nobody got that. I was under the false impression that if I stayed fairly healthy and avoided cigarettes and other known carcinogens, I’d probably be fine. So, I dutifully scheduled my mammograms roughly every year, not because I was worried I’d get cancer, but because I fully expected them to be negative and benign.
I’d always needed two mammograms because I have dense breast tissue, so every year it was a scare. Every year they’d tell me my boobs were dense (it’s a nice way of saying they weren’t going to make the honor roll this year), and I needed to have a scary second mammogram, where they’d make me wait for instant results because it was all so dramatic.
Even the week before I got the results of my biopsy, I sat with friends on their patio, drinking a glass of wine on a warm fall evening and swatting away mosquitos, lamenting about how we all had dense breast tissue. How it was all such a production, and how it stressed us out, only to get a “You’re all clear!” at the end.
We laughed about it and other indignities of being a middle-aged woman. We made jokes together because a man almost definitely invented the damn mammogram machine, and they would’ve made it better by now if they had to stick their testicles in it.
But then came the phone call about my biopsy results.
“The tumor is malignant,” the radiologist said. “It’s cancer.”
As soon as he said the word, “cancer,” my mind went blank.
Have you seen Season 3 of Only Murders in the Building? Steve Martin’s character has to do this really complicated singing number for a new musical that Martin Short’s character directs, and every time he tries, he gets stage fright. He just goes into a blank white room in his mind.
The doctor said “cancer,” and I marched straight into that white room, where the only sound I heard was a high-pitched whine. I didn’t hear anything else. I mean, I heard words. I held the phone to my ear. I pretended like I was there, but I wasn’t. When I hung up, my husband, PJ, walked into the kitchen, asking who was on the phone. I said it was the doctor.
“What did he say?” PJ asked.
“Cancer.”
“What? Seriously?” All the blood drained from PJ’s face. He pulled me into his arms and hugged me.
“What stage is it?” he asked my hair.
“Uh. . . he said early?” What did he say again?
“How early? Stage one?” PJ was getting more frantic, more upset, as he broke the hug.
“I don’t know.” I know the doctor said things. I couldn’t remember a single thing.
“What do we do next?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” This was not like me not to know. I made it my business to know. I’m almost as Type A as you can get. I earned the achievement of being the only classmate of my Dallas suburban public high school class to get into the Ivy League. I’ve published more than thirty-eight novels (and counting), dog paddling furiously to stay relevant in a publishing industry that LIVES to chew people up and spit them out. I always did the extra credit. I never left things to chance. The fact I didn’t know what was happening goes to show exactly what kind of Mack truck had just run me over.
He said something about precancerous and something about cancer.” I seemed to remember that bit. Something about in situ, and whole bunch of jargon like I’d fallen onto the set of Grey’s Anatomy, except there was only boring medical terminology and no hot doctors.
“Precancer?” P.J. sounded hopeful. “If it’s just precancer, then it’s not cancer, and maybe…”
“No, he said cancer. He definitely said cancer.” I didn’t go into the white room for a false alarm.
“Is it okay with you if I call him back and we ask questions?” P.J. was dying to call. He felt this must be some mistake, too. If we just talked to the manager, surely, we could get this all sorted out. I knew how he felt. I wanted this sorted out, too, because, again, I wasn’t supposed to get cancer.
I nodded. Actually, I felt relieved. Yes, let’s call back. Maybe I had heard wrong. I had been staring at the contents of my fridge wondering what the hell my kids would eat—can you have Mommy brain when your kids are fifteen and sixteen?
So, we called back. The doctor wasn’t surprised we’d called back.
“This happens a lot,” the doctor said.
I wasn’t the only one who got waylaid in the white room then.
And it turned out, it wasn’t precancer anything.
It was cancer, all right.
Malignant AF.
Reprinted with permission. Copyright © 2025 Cara Lockwood
Cara Lockwood is the USA Today bestselling author of more than 35 books, including the USA Today bestsellers “The Takeover” and “I Do (But I Don’t),” which became a Lifetime Original Movie starring Denise Richards. Her latest, “There’s No Good Book for This But I Wrote One Anyway: The Irreverent Guide to Crushing Breast Cancer” (Oct. 1, 2025), blends memoir, humor, and practical advice for navigating diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. A breast cancer survivor, Cara endured a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, and reconstruction before going into remission in 2024. Half of all book proceeds benefit breast cancer research. A native of Texas, she lives in Chicagoland with her family and pets. Learn more at theresnogoodbookforthis.com and caratheauthor.com.
