Photo Credit: Sarah Raanan
- Gila Pfeffer is a humor writer who splits her time between NYC and London.
- The following is an adapted excerpt from her memoir, "Nearly Departed: Adventures in Loss, Cancer, and Other Inconveniences."
- It chronicles her journey as a cancer previvor and survivor, determined to reverse the cycle of death in her family.
Eleven years after my mother died in 1994, when I was 31, I learned that a simple blood test could confirm whether I was a carrier of a BRCA gene mutation. Named for the first two letters of "breast" and "cancer," a positive result would place my odds of developing breast cancer at 87%.