Becoming the "Boobies Girl"

I wasn’t always known as the “Feel Your Boobies girl” who drives around in the Boobies Bus. Sometimes it’s hard for even me to remember my life before breast cancer. In just 7 years, I went from being an carefree upwardly mobile 30 something who was blissfully ignorant about breast cancer to resigning from the corporate rat race, becoming a urban extract/small town returnee, and a young breast cancer survivor running a national breast cancer non-profit called Feel Your Boobies®. These life changes were as unexpected and unconventional as the non-profit’s mission I’ve created and I’m thankful everyday for the experiences breast cancer has brought my way.

You see, in my early 30’s I was single and living in NYC, working a pretty kickass corporate job, running marathons and pretty much loving life. When I felt a (little) lump in my (little) breast I didn’t think too much of it because, well, frankly I didn’t think too much about breast cancer. It didn’t run in my family so I felt certain it wasn’t something that could happen to me. This feeling of being invincible was reinforced by the fact that doctors didn’t notice the lump during my annual exams. Well, not until I brought it too their attention by placing their hand directly on the area of suspicion. Then they felt it, but showed little concern. “See, I knew it was nothing,” I thought. “Even the doctors said so.”

Long story short, it was something. Two years later, following a mammogram, ultrasound and biopsy at the suggestion of a nurse practitioner/angel, I learned that I wasn’t invincible afterall. I was 33 and I had breast cancer. No way! “So now what?” I thought. “I was planning on finding prince charming, getting married, having babies and living happily ever after. This breast cancer thing is really screwing the plan up.”

Sharing my story through Feel Your Boobies®.

That was April 2004 and I can remember it like it was yesterday. Soon after my diagnosis I realized that the only way my lump was detected was because I was “feeling my boobies.” The doctors didn’t feel it and I was too young for mammograms so it really was a situation that I need to take into my own hands, literally. Even though I didn’t do traditional self-breast exams I still knew when something felt different. I wanted to make sure other young women were ‘feeling their boobies’ too!

So I enlisted a couple of friends to help me make some fun t-shirts for my friends and designed the “feel your boobies” logo. I wanted to remind everyone about an action that had saved my life, but I wanted the message to be fun and lighthearted. I initially bought 100 shirts, put up a one-page website, and the rest is history.

7 years later, what started as a fun t-shirt project has evolved into an international non-profit media campaign that runs out of my little pink garage in Central Pennsylvania. The mission of the Feel Your Boobies Foundation is to utilize unexpected and unconventional methods to remind young women to “feel their boobies.” With a background in media strategy and technology design, I decided that using new media (like social media) was a great way to make the message interactive and friendly. I also believed that the key was to identify ways to put this reminder is places where you wouldn’t normally expect to see it and maybe we could get their attention. From that our guiding principle was born, “A friendly reminder when you least expect it.”

As the campaign has grown, operations have gone from my retired parents doing all of the packing and shipping to today where I have three workers to help manage the volume of orders and requests we get through our website. We still operate out of my little pink garage in Pennsylvania (aka Boobies Central) and have been able to reach over 2 million followers on Facebook with our campaign, which makes us one of the Top 30 largest charities on Facebook. And we’re proud that we’re more than just a funny slogan, we actually promote and ACTION that can save your life. Just check out our testimonials from young women who credit our campaign with the reason they found their own breast cancer.

Like what we’re doing?

The Feel Your Boobies Foundation is funded through donations and merchandise sales through our website. (Check out our STUFF). 100% of all donations and sales are used to help us continue to create cool media campaigns to remind the younger audience to be proactive with their breast health.

Each October, we also host National Feel Your Boobies Week, where we use a creative technology solution to allow people to interact with and share our campaign. This year's promotion is a Remind-A-Thon on Twitter and our goal is to remind 1 million people to "feel their boobies" during Nat'l Feel Your Boobies Week (Oct. 14-21). Check out this video to find out more.

Feel Your Boobies! Are You Doing It?

Learn more about the Feel Your Boobies campaign

Read more about Leigh's Say Something Big Speaking Series

Keep it simple...silly!

It’s taken me a long time to really “trust my gut”. You know, the “gut feeling” you get down deep in the most inner part of your soul that just tells you when something feels right or wrong. Being the analytical person that I am, I spent the majority of my teens and twenties suppressing these simple raw emotions with complex rational thought patterns. I guess I figured my gut needed to learn a few things.

You see, growing up things were pretty simple. Do well in high school so you can go to college, then do well in college so you can get a good job. Ok, so I did that and even a bit more…but then it all got so complicated.

As I began to embark on my adult life, I started to realize there were opportunities coming my way that I just couldn’t pass up. I mean, really…once in a lifetime types of things. The world was wide open to me and soon there were more options than I ever imagined. How could I possibly decide which path to take? That’s simple, I just came up with a clever little formula for judging my options objectively. Well how else could I decide, silly?

Not so fast. Over time, the voice down deep inside me started getting in the way of my objective and practical decision-making. (That wasn’t supposed to happen, by the way!) I started to realize that just because I was able to do something, didn’t necessarily mean I that I wanted to do it. One of my earliest memories of this realization was in my consulting job. It wasn’t long into my career that I knew that even if I could make partner someday, that it was something I didn’t want to do.

All of the sudden my clever formula was out the window. Oh &##^*, that really complicates things! Or does it? And therein lies possibly the most profound lesson I have learned in my 39 short years of life. It’s not your emotion that complicates things, it’s your head. And once I learned that my “gut feeling” was something so pure; something that didn’t need to be rationalized or explained, things got really simple.

Now don’t get me wrong, my brain and my gut still go to war sometimes…I suppose that is just part of my makeup. But the enlightened me understands that the less I interfere with the process, let go, and trust the clarity of my most inner voice, the simpler my life becomes.

(c)Copyright 2009, Leigh Hurst

Putting pen to paper - finally

So I've been writing articles and various pieces focus on various aspects of my experience with breast cancer as a young woman as well as my thoughts on starting the Feel Your Boobies Foundation and the mission that has changed my life. Here I will begin to put these thoughts down and continue to explore just what it means to "Say Something Big." It's a work in progress...welcome.

I never really planned to “say something big”. What does that mean anyway? After all, at 5’ 2” there has never been anything “big” about me. Though I can assure you I’ve never been called shy, and most certainly have been called blunt, but “saying something big?”…that’s just not something I set out to do.

“Saying something big” is about affecting others. It’s about taking your own experience and making it meaningful to those who may never know you but who can relate to what you’ve been through. We all have life changing things happen to us and we have the ability to recognize those moments and use them to create substantial “movement” in ourselves and others if we really want to.

Sometimes the most seemingly insignificant moments in your life result in very profound change and it’s only in retrospect that we can actually realize the true significance of that moment. For me, big change has come from many small moments. Some big changes (moving to New York City without a job) resulted in a small amount of true “movement”, while other very small moments (feeling my boobies) have resulted in a total life change and a large social movement.

www.saysomethingbig.com