Putting Flat Closure on the Map with Sondra Price
This week we’re sharing a favorite episode from the archives as we take a pause from our regular podcast schedule to enjoy a spring break with our loved ones. Production assistant Monica Haro selected this episode from January 2022 to reshare. Enjoy!
Sondra Price was diagnosed at 20, 24, and 28 with malignant phyllodes tumors that led to two lumpectomies, a bilateral mastectomy, implant reconstruction, and an explant to flat closure. She found her way to flat closure on her chest the long way around, and because of that, she’s now a fierce advocate for others to truly know what their breast surgery options are. Because the truth is, if you don’t know your options, you don’t really have any. In this episode, Sondra reads her piece “The Road to Advocacy” from Wildfire Magazine’s 2020 “Changemakers” issue.
Today’s storyteller reflects on receiving a breast cancer diagnosis at 28 and the lasting emotional imprint of survivorship more than a decade later. Moving between past and present, she explores the survival mindset that carried her through treatment and the gradual return of feeling after years spent simply trying to stay alive.
This conversation explores memory, identity, inner resilience, and the relationship between who we were before cancer and who we become afterward — revealing how pain and love can coexist in the same story.
Today’s storyteller reflects on her relationship with her grandmother against the backdrop of a family deeply marked by cancer. As relatives fall ill and pass away, truths are hidden and grief moves quietly through generations.
This conversation explores memory, cultural silence, substitution and survival, what it means to be mistaken for someone who is gone, and how presence itself can become an act of love. It’s a meditation on mortality — and on what it means to remain.
In this episode, today’s storyteller, Hannah Morales, shares a vivid account of the days surrounding her mastectomy and the moment she first saw her changed body in the mirror. Expecting grief and resentment, she instead discovered pride, relief, and a deeper sense of identity that extended beyond appearance.
This conversation explores body image after cancer, surgical loss, motherhood, scars as story, and what it means to define boldness, beauty, and confidence on your own terms — not society’s.
