A 39-year-old breast cancer survivor decided to share her experience and her family’s strength by turning her home videos into a documentary film titled “I Remain.”
Filmmaker Tracy Grant captured her journey as she entered the hospital for a double mastectomy, and later reconstructive surgery. Almost every woman in Grant’s family for the last three generations had battled the same cruel enemy, and they have all survived.
“I knew there was a big potential of me getting breast cancer one day,” she said.
There is no doubt that breast cancer can be hereditary and it definitely runs in this family. Her mother Catherine is also a breast cancer survivor — along with three aunts, her grandmother, and almost every woman in the family.
“I don’t think I ever thought ‘Why us’?” Catherine said, “I think I just thought, ‘Well, here we go again.”
Grant’s documentary is a deeply personal and revealing look at her family’s experience with breast cancer, as well as her own diagnosis, surgery and recovery – filled with quotes about being strong and overcoming the odds.
“Why censor it?” she said. “This is the experience, this is what I’m going through.”
The film isn’t just about fighting breast cancer, it is also about beating it.
The family shares the struggle and now the scars. Joyce Wise, another breast cancer survivor, said that when they remove the bandages, and you look at your chest “it is not a pretty picture, but then you say to yourself, I’m alive.”
Grant hopes her film will be used by hospitals and treatment centers to give hope to new breast cancer patients.
“There’s people out there that are perhaps going through it by themselves,” Grant said. “But I want them to know that they can fight.”
WATCH this original GRIO report on triple negative breast cancer