MEMPHIS, Tenn. — What if one day, you woke up and your face looked completely different? Your eye lashes gone and your eyebrows barely visible?
For so many women, that is the harsh reality of battling breast cancer.
When chemotherapy takes away a cancer patient’s hair, it’s not just what’s on their head. They are also losing the hair on their face.
“When you first get diagnosed, it’s a kick in the stomach,” Fiona Binder said.
It’s a feeling she won’t ever forget.
In March, she got her annual mammogram. The next day she found a lump in her breast.
“My sister was diagnosed in November of last year, so as soon as I felt the lump, I knew that it was not good news,” Binder said.
She was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. Doctors told her the cancer had spread to her liver.
Binder started chemotherapy, which slowly started to take some of her identity.
“Obviously, I lost all my hair, I lost my eyebrows, my eyelashes, so it takes a little but more to try and make myself feel like me,” Binder said.
That’s why Delsin Depuy, a local make-up artist in Memphis, is helping breast cancer patients and survivors feel comfortable in their skin.
“Just being able to come here, give my time for an hour and maybe take their minds off of whatever they may be going through in life really is something that makes me feel good,” he said.
It’s part of Baptist Memorial Hospital for Women’s “Blossom Within” program.
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On Friday, Depuy held a special beauty class at the hospital, teaching women how to fill in their eyebrows and put on fake lashes.
He lost his grandmother to breast cancer when he was two years old.
“I feel like she’s in the room with us when we do stuff like this,” he said.
As Binder continues to fight her battle, she wants to remind other women to not give up hope.
“You just have to face every day as a brand-new day,” she said. “You know in your heart that you are going to beat this because there is not a scenario in my head where I lose, and I am not going to.”
Every two minutes, a woman in the united states is diagnosed with breast cancer.
Baptist’s Blossom Within program is offered four times a year.
It’s free to cancer patients.
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