Video: Battling Breast Cancer – One Year Later

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COLUMBUS, Miss. (WCBI) — All month long, you’ll hear stories of brave women who’ve battled breast cancer. This time last year, a Columbus woman named Keneisha Petty was fighting the disease. Thankfully today, Petty calls herself a breast cancer survivor.

“Well my motto, I guess now I say, early detection saves lives,” says Keneisha Petty, a breast cancer survivor.

Just one year after being diagnosed with breast cancer, Petty is healthy and breathing a sigh of relief that she is cancer-free.

“I was excited, overjoyed, just glad to finally be done taking treatments because radiation treatments were everyday,” says Petty.

36-year-old Petty continued to work at Gentiva Home Health in Columbus while getting her daily chemo-therapy treatments. Going to work allowed her to keep a sense of normalcy in her life.

“We just wanted to be a supportive base for her. She has exemplified extraordinary strength. She still remained a productive employee as she left and did her treatments, took her lunch breaks, came back in and still performed to the best of her ability,” says Cassandra Bogan, Petty’s supervisor.

Petty says women must know their bodies and perform regular self-breast exams. Though she’s beaten breast cancer, she knows her health and life could still be at risk.

“Reoccurrence. I think about it. I think that’s just human nature but I know that I’m good. I know God has me. He hasn’t brought me this far to leave me. So with that being said, every three months for the first year, I have checkups. I get kind of tense but I still in the back of my mind, know that I’m ok. I’m fine,” says Petty.

Petty has also become a breast cancer awareness activist. She’ll be speaking to students at Mississippi State and other local groups about breast cancer throughout the month of October.

According to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, there are more than 3 million breast cancer survivors worldwide.