The brunette beauty, who is now on a mission to raise awareness on the importance of self-examining for breast cancer, opened up about her close encounter with the disease.
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Raising awareness
In an interview with the Sun Online, Gaffka explained that she wants to destigmatise chest check-ups as she believes some people still have apprehensions about it. She said:
It was really important to raise awareness because if I didn't know what to look for, and I didn't know what was abnormal or normal for me. I find that young women or anybody, there's a stigma about checking your chest or some who find it weird. So I want to take that stigma away.
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Early detection is key
She also went on to say that she herself had quite the cancer scare at only 19 years of age after finding a mass underneath her armpit area. Thankfully, it was only accumulated scar tissue and no presence of cancer was detected. Still, had she not taken the precautionary steps early on, things could have been very different had it actually been cancer. She said:
I think I found it pretty much the same time that my mum was finishing her treatment.So knowing how quickly my mum caught on that she wasn't well, kind of pushed me to go check myself, so I went to a GP pretty quickly.
And added:
I was very lucky to find that it was just it was basically like scar tissue, I've injured myself and my body was trying to fix it. If I didn't know that, that was a part of my body that could potentially have breast cancer.
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