I would like to dedicate this book to all my friends and my loved ones, And also to my family: my father, who taught me resilience, my mother who taught me to keep calm, and my beloved grandmother, who from my early years has been teaching me how to see wonders and beauty in every moment.

INTRODUCTION AND CHAPTER 0. BUSINESS SPRINT OF DIAGNOSIS

Hello everyone, and welcome.

My name is Kamilla, I live in California, I'm 34 years old, and in August 2023, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. While I am going through this experience right now, I am simultaneously writing this book one chapter by another. My goal is to share how this journey feels from the inside, and the balancing techniques I have used to navigate this period just like any other in life, staying optimistic and hopeful.

As of December 2023, my path is as follows:
✓ August 2023 - diagnosis (Stage I, invasive lobular carcinoma, hereditary cancer caused by mutation in the PALB-2 gene)
✓ September 2023 - gathering information for treatment, changing doctors in my medical team
✓ October 2023 - first egg freezing cycle, gathered information for treatment, choosing my plastic surgeon for the mastectomy
✓ November 2023 - tumor area and lymph node excision
✓ January 2024 - mastectomy preparation surgery (I'll explain down the road why is it taking several surgeries)

My next steps are:

• February 2024 - second egg freezing cycle to get enough oocytes to test out cancer in my future children
• April 2024 - double mastectomy
• October 2024 - implants

I would be very glad if you never have to go through what I am experiencing now as I write these texts, but if it happens – the more you know in advance, the more prepared you are to walk this quest gracefully.

I have divided the texts into several sections:

1. NOT LIKE IN THE MOVIES and THE DARK SIDE: life hacks and pitfalls in oncology, neutral topics in "Not Like In The Movies," challenging ones in "The Dark Side."

2. TREASURE GATHERER: psychological techniques to stay focused, gather information, listen to the gut, and make informed choices in any storm.

3. MY CASE: my personal experience of cancer, not always extrapolatable to the entire statistics.

4. DIARIES and NOTES IN THE FIELDS: sections about everyday moments, friendship persisting despite everything, jokes born along the way, and small details of California landscapes around.

Enjoy reading.

CHAPTER 0. BUSINESS SPRINT OF DIAGNOSIS

...Parallel to oncology in the summer of 2023, an infinitely important event happened in my life: I completed the first stage of business tracking and business process diagnostics training. Business trackers help startups in accelerators and advise companies during turbulence, stagnation, or when it's time to expand.

Funny enough, I have a feeling that I am actually doing the same thing as my fifteen years in language training – I come and carefully help fix systems so that everything works, grows, and develops beautifully. The difference is that now I have a much broader arsenal of tools, and the systems to fix are much more complex, which is much more curious.

Before the diagnosis, I led over 40 hours of practice, consultations, and diagnostics with various projects, from small startups to companies with a large staff and million turnovers. And when I received my diagnosis, on the second day, I sat down and conducted a business diagnosis with myself.

I asked myself what this whole experience reminded me most. Cancer is often described as turning your whole life upside down, but that statement didn't work for me: my work, my studies, my family (far away, but in touch), my creativity, my friends, the America I live in – all of it remained with me just the same.

Not that the call about the tumor found in the biopsy took away anything I used to have.

"So, what does it remind me of?" I asked myself.

And so I realized that for me, it's actually a story about a quantum leap in expansion. I felt like a company that, in a day, had enlarged by seven or eight departments with a bunch of tasks, unconstructed product lines, and strict deadlines that I had to organize everything and figure everything out at once (when you undergo a biopsy, the countdown begins because in two months, the test accuracy drops).

In breast oncology, besides the pain, lack of sleep, and stress, what overwhelms the most is this multidirectionality of all the new urgent tasks, issues, and questions that have suddenly fallen on you, and you have to solve them all at once, make decisions immediately, and understand everything in all directions. The old life doesn't turn upside down, but suddenly a huge number of sides grow in it that urgently need to be organized and integrated, relearning gravity and reference points.

In 2022, I helped organize the rapid growth of a nonprofit, so the case of swift growth and the need to quickly organize everything is familiar to me in practice.

So, sudden expansion and new departments with chaos inside. What are they? Oncology information collection department. Consultation and selection of doctors department. Communication and interviewing department for everyone who has gone through this experience. Additional accounting department. Balancing department. And so on.

I sat down and outlined sprints for myself for the coming months, three, a year, as if for a company. Directions, goals, priorities, timing, who to ask and ask for help, what else to find out. And with this map, I went forward.