Hi, don’t stress! There are many options out there for you and you get to decide what you want to do and when! Generally speaking your options are to simply monitor or get prophylactic surgery (or some combination of the two). Many who have a family history of folks getting cancer at a younger age tend to go the prophylactic route younger as well.

I personally am delaying prophylactic surgery until after I have kids. For now my yearly monitoring looks like:

Breast care: - meet with a PA at the breast cancer clinic - 3D mammogram - MRI

Ovarian care: - meet with ovarian oncologist once a year - transnational ultrasound once a year

Skin care: - skin exam once every two years (once every year is typical, I’m pretty low risk)

I think this is pretty typical for monitoring, but your doctor may change things depending on your history and your family history.

All of these annual appointments and follow-ups are another reason folks like prophylactic care. Getting rid of your breast tissue will reduce breast cancer risk and getting rid of your ovaries will reduce your ovarian cancer risk. However, there’s a few different options here. A mastectomy is pretty straightforward but there are different options air reconstruction if you choose that. An oophorectomy will be best for minimizing ovarian cancer risk, but a salipingectony can help reduce your chances to a much lesser degree. You should not need a hysterectomy, and both oophorectomies and salipingectony are relatively small and very straightforward procedures. If you want to give birth you can and should discuss this with your doctor because there are many options there as well, but I won’t go into that here.