Philecia La’Bounty was living her best Southern California life in 2018 — hiking, traveling, modeling part-time — until she felt the lump.
She’d been at the movies when she adjusted her sports bra and felt a “marble-size"lumpin her left breast. When she got home, she asked for a second opinion from her boyfriend Brent Maggard, who agreed that something felt off.
Through an ultrasound, doctors found what they thought was a benign cyst. But La’Bounty wasn’t convinced: “It was not normal for me,” she says. When La’Bounty asked for amammogram, the public program denied her request. “I was told, ‘You’re 30, you’re healthy. You have no other symptoms, no family history of breast cancer.’ " She asked for the paperwork to be resubmitted, but it came back again as denied.
For the next several months La’Bounty tried to ignore the lump, but it kept growing. “It was massive — it was showing through my modeling dresses,” recalls La’Bounty, now 35. She insisted on another appointment, and this time, a doctor who felt the lump ordered a a mammogram immediately.
Courtesy Philcia La’Bounty
“I went back to work, and within two hours I got a phone call and was asked to come back to the facility,” she says. “The doctor had written the words ‘breast cancer’ on a paper with a referral to a breast center. I needed to get biopsied as soon as possible.”
She had 8 biopsies and another mammogram over the next few days, along with a CT scan and PT scan. While awaiting the results, “I was having a lot of anxiety,” she says. “I told Brent, ‘I can’t breathe. I just want to go to the emergency room.’ " There, she learned why she was short of breath: She had tumors on both her lungs. The cancer had also metastasized to a lymph node in her armpit and her sternum. “I started sobbing,” she says. “I didn’t want to die.”
Courtesy of Philecia La’Bounty, Instagram: @philecia | TikTok: @philecialabounty
What followed was months of being “poked and prodded,” six rounds of chemo and an “endless cycle of feeling not well.” She and Maggard had planned on having kids so they rushed a fertility treatment before she had surgery to remove her fallopian tubes and ovaries as a preventative measure. That threw her body into menopause. “It all happens so fast that you don’t really have time to process it,” she says.
To read more about Philecia La’Bounty’s cancer journey, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.
While her latest scans show no active cancer, “for right now, I’m on oral chemo for the rest of my life,” she says. “I have chemo brain, depression, anxiety, hot flashes, fatigue, muscle pain, joint pain.”
Through it all, La’Bounty says Maggard, 38, who works in the off-road vehicle industry, has been her champion. “Our life has been put on hold, from buying a house to having a family.” Since La’Bounty was able to freeze some of her eggs, the couple, who have been together nine years, hope to find a surrogate. “I’ll never be able to carry my own children,” she says. “Cancer took that from me.”
But the couple won’t give up. “He just keeps our life active and happy,” La’Bounty says. “We don’t lay down and die. We just keep trying to keep living the best we can.”
These days she is using TikTok to encourage other women to advocate for themselves — “telling someone they can’t have a test because of their age is asinine and unacceptable” — and to create awareness about the struggles of stage 4 cancer survivors. “I just answer people’s questions as honestly as I can, but only what other survivors and fighters can handle, because I don’t want to put too much out there and ruin someone else’s day.”
She adds: “I beat cancer, but I will be dealing with this for the rest of my life.”
source: people.com
