07/19/2026
What a brilliant idea. A camp for patients dealing with breast cancer and the unique issues that come with that.
Four young women who had all met breast cancer far earlier than anyone expects to -- one of them diagnosed at just twenty-three -- took twenty-five women who were going through the same thing to the Poconos for a ski weekend in January of 2018. When they got home more than three hundred women had written to ask how they might come to the next one. They filed the nonprofit paperwork the following month. This June, five hundred women arrived at a campground in Pennsylvania for four days of Camp Breastie. The tickets had sold out in two hours.
More than 350,000 American women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year, and the disease has been climbing sharply among the young. Demand for the camp now runs far past anything the organizers can supply. "It's like Coachella," says Trish Michelle, one of the group's founders, of the moment the tickets go live -- women pull their cars over to the shoulder to buy them before they are gone. Next year the group will open a second camp on the West Coast and double the number of women it can take.
The women who come are survivors, and women living with Stage 4 disease, and previvors -- women who carry a genetic mutation and have had healthy tissue cut from their bodies to keep the cancer from ever arriving at all. The founders had been in their twenties and thirties when they were diagnosed, an age at which almost nobody is looking for it, and the support groups available to them were full of women decades older and at a wholly different point in life. The spaces that already existed, as they tell it, had divided them by diagnosis and by stage and by age and by background. This one divides them by nothing -- and its doors are open as well to women facing gynecologic cancers, and to the caregivers who carry them through it.
In most respects it is an ordinary summer camp: the campers arrive by bus and are cheered in, they sleep in cabins named for fruit -- Guava, Mango, Apple -- and on the first night there is a fire, and s'mores, and mosquitoes. Two hundred activities are on offer, archery and Zumba and yoga among them. What is not ordinary is that a number of the campers are bald, and some move with canes, and many have flat chests beneath their T-shirts, and nearly every activity begins with a few minutes of breathing -- and that alongside the archery there are geneticists and breast surgeons taking appointments, and mental health counselors standing by all week.
The first thing on the schedule each morning is a scream. The women who wanted to take part had to be down at the lake while the sun was still low, and before they screamed they wrote the names of their troubles onto small stones and threw them into the water: "Anger," wrote Shelby Jones, 33; "Fear," wrote Emily Tout, a 30-year-old single mother living with metastatic disease. Then Nancy Antoine, 51, who had been screaming into her empty house for years and never once in company, told them what to do with everything that was left. "Just release what you're carrying with you," she said, "and let the lake receive it."
Treatment has improved, and more women survive breast cancer now than did a decade ago, but the thing these women say almost nobody on the outside understands is that finishing treatment is not at all the same as being finished. The schedule that carried them from surgery through chemotherapy and radiation simply ends, and the doctors who were watching them every week stop watching. "Being in treatment is hard, but you know what to expect," says Tracy Lane, 45, of Fort Worth, who was diagnosed last year. "You're watched all the time and you feel very taken care of."
When she finished, in October, she had expected relief, and what came instead was a dread she could not put down -- who was watching her now, was it still in there, was it coming back. Nor had the woman she used to be survived the year. "That old me? She's gone. She doesn't exist anymore," Lane says. "She worried about dumb stuff. She bee-bopped through life."
Which is why the surgeons and the archery are not, finally, what the women come for. Brooklyn Olumba, a 34-year-old pharmacist from Houston, explains it as a car accident: everyone is frantic about you in the days right after the crash, and then you heal, and they stop thinking about it entirely -- "but you're still scared to drive," she says. "You're wondering if you'll get into another accident."
The people who love you want you returned to them as you were, and cannot follow you to where you have actually gone. "You come to camp," Olumba says, "and everyone's been in a car accident."
--> To learn more about The Breasties -- which runs Camp Breastie, year-round virtual meetups, a community app, and advocacy campaigns on access to breast reconstruction, access to IVF, and funding for Stage 4 research -- or to support their work, visit https://thebreasties.org
--> The group also publishes The Peak, a free online guide to navigating breast and gynecologic cancers, at https://thepeak.org
--> To read more about the women of Camp Breastie -- and to see the photographs of them at the lake, in the cabins, and on the dance floor -- visit The New York Times at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/well/breast-cancer-camp-survivors.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xVA.90ZT.5evQlDcwcqwj&smid=url-share
----
For a book for tween and teen girls focused specifically on breast health, we recommend "Taking Care of Your 'Girls': A Breast Health Guide for Girls, Teens, and In-Betweens" for ages 10 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/taking-care-of-your-girls
For two encouraging books about moms undergoing cancer treatment that were written to help kids understand what's happening during treatment, we highly recommend "Cancer Hates Kisses" for ages 3 to 7 (https://www.amightygirl.com/cancer-hates-kisses) and "Mama's Year with Cancer" for ages 4 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/mama-s-year-with-cancer)
For an insightful book that explores how women's health has long been neglected, we highly recommend "All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780063293014 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4lKkRoO (Amazon)
British medical historian Elinor Cleghorn has also written an important book about the historical and systemic reasons the medical system fails girls and women: "Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World" at https://www.amightygirl.com/unwell-women
And for Mighty Girl stories that emphasize the importance of hope, visit our "Hope & Optimism" book section at http://amgrl.co/1Iz1D1d
