Catherine Gigante-Brown

Alexa is like a nosy neighbor: She’s always listening. That’s how she can respond when you ask her to do something. So, when you’re getting busy on the kitchen counter — Alexa’s listening. When you’re telling Capital One the last four digits of your SSN — Alexa’s listening. And who knows who else is.

That’s the thing about being a breast cancer survivor — it’s always there: it never goes away. The scars, the fear that lurks in the back of your mind like a boogeyman. You’re going along nicely, living your merry life, and you’re fine, until you’re not.

BCBs are loud and proud and refuse to go down easy. And quietly. We have things to say. We have things to teach. We still have life to live. And damn it, we are and we will. With one breast. With no breasts. With reconstruction surgery.

In the photograph, my great-grandmother, Margarita Cirigliano, is sitting at a small table on the front porch of the family home in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

I dreaded putting him back on Concerta in the fall but I knew I had to. Or did I?

"Bring over a meal—and leave. Breakfast, lunch or dinner, from soup to nuts. And coffee. Plenty of coffee."

Were you going to run into that cute guy John Williams on the way home? Would you see Anne Marie by the lockers and sort out what to do for the weekend? It was hit-or-miss, and that was the beauty of it. The breath-holding chance of it all. Now, our kids’ friends are as close as a keyboard stroke away. It’s too easy.

“It’s almost as though this niche was patiently waiting for us to find it.”

If the odds of getting cancer are like Powerball, why couldn't I be a scratch-off millionaire?

I immediately developed a hot-and-heavy girlcrush on the wild, wacky, brash, candid, feminist, rubber-faced comedian—and you should too.