Hannah Low is my big sister. She’s only older than me by four years, but for my entire life she’s been so much more than a sister to me. She’s been my best friend and my biggest supporter. She’s been through a lot recently and I’m hoping to be able to show her some of the same kind of love and support that she’s given me and so many others over the years.

 

She had a preventative double mastectomy and a TUG (transverse upper gracilis) flap reconstruction surgery done on December 14th at the UC San Diego hospital in California. Earlier this year she found out that she has the BRCA-2 gene mutation which means she has an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer (amongst others) by up to 90%. A double mastectomy significantly lowers that risk, and it was especially important after an MRI found a lump in her right breast this summer, and because we have a long family history of both breast and ovarian cancer. To prevent ovarian cancer, she’ll also have a total hysterectomy done at age 35.

 

The surgery itself went really well, she was expected to be under for somewhere between 12-15 hours and her surgeon was done around the 10 hour mark. They removed all of her breast tissue and grafted skin, muscle, and fat from her thighs for the reconstruction. Then they connected each of the blood vessels from her chest to the blood vessels in the grafted skin, reattached her nipples, inserted drains into each incision site, and sutured them closed.

 

She was in the hospital for 4 days with nurses checking her chest every hour to make sure there was adequate blood flow. She’s recovering at home now and she’s tough as nails, but the 4 large incisions and 8 drains in her chest and thighs are immensely painful, and she still has 10 more weeks of recovery time ahead of her.

At 12 weeks post-op, she’ll have a smaller surgery done to make important revisions that will decrease the chances of experiencing nerve pain in her chest overtime with another 2-4 weeks of recovery time after. Depending on the results of that, her doctors have told her to expect the possibility of needing 2-4 more surgical revisions every 8-12 weeks that would each have a 2-4 week recovery time.

This is a long and difficult process that’s not for the faint of heart but is absolutely vital for her longterm health and well-being. Her entire story is too long to be able to cover all of here, but the journey she’s been on with other complicated and painful auto-immune related health issues for the last two years and the lengths she’s gone in learning how to heal her body is nothing short of extraordinary.

 

Hannah radiates love and spreads kindness, warmth, and generosity everywhere she goes. She is an incredible mom to the coolest 12 year old in the universe and has done an amazing job raising him on her own. She’s fiercely independent and determined, and she lives to help others but doesn’t ever ask for it for herself. She’s getting stronger by the day but has had a few minor complications and is fighting an infection in one of her surgical sites. My hope is just to be able to lessen her stress as much as possible so she can focus on healing and on taking care of Channing.

 

Money from this will be going towards her medical expenses, ongoing post-op care,

and her and Channing’s living expenses while she is healing. If you want to (and are able to) donate but prefer not to go through Go Fund Me, her Venmo is @palowmino. If you got this far, thank you so much for taking the time to read this and for supporting my beautiful, badass sister.

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!

— Elyssa 

Pictures of Hannah in the hospital.

[TW: mildly graphic photos.]

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Hannah & Channing this summer :)