Louise Butcher was 49 when she first realized that she had lobular cancer — a rare type of breast cancer that starts in the milk-producing glands of the breast. Within a matter of weeks, it spread dramatically.
“The areas that they found were tiny areas, but when I had my breasts removed, it was five centimeters,” Butcher said in an interview with People.
Before her cancer diagnosis, and subsequent mastectomy flap closure surgery without reconstruction, Butcher loved to run. The North Devon, England resident had started running in her forties to alleviate anxiety.
Post-surgery, it became a new way to heal — both mentally and physically.
With a new intensity, Butcher began training and completing marathons for the first time in her life. And she did it while running topless.
Without breasts, she said, she had to evolve “into something else.”
“When I started topless running, that made me accept it even more because of the way that I was empowering and accepting myself and showing other people myself,” Butcher said.
That’s when the Guinness Book of World Records reached out to her.
“What I wanted to do is to normalize mastectomy,” Butcher said “The records are there to be broken, so [Guinness] came up with the record that I would be the fastest woman with a double mastectomy.”
And she can’t wait for someone else to beat her record.
“That's what I wanted — that women might want to beat it,” she said. “It's just part of the normalizing of the mastectomy and not having breasts.”
At first, Butcher was frustrated by the negativity and stigma that seemed to surround mastectomies online, including “the loss of your femininity, the loss of your sense of self, [and] being a woman.”
“It just felt like there was no positive to it,” she said.
That’s when she started posting videos of herself running on her instagram account (@louisebutcher39) and she found an audience of women who had gone through similar experiences.
As she continued running — and went on to run in the London Marathon topless — she soon had over a thousand followers that she could share her journey with. As well as people she could talk to about the unexpected freedoms that came with a mastectomy.
“There were benefits, to be honest: Not wearing bras when it was hot. I wasn't sweating. And I thought, ‘I'd really like to show the positive side of it,’” she recalled.
“Especially the fact that you're living, you know,” she said. “You’re living. You haven't died.”
In July, Butcher looked back on the last two years, and everything that life had thrown her.
“[Cancer] really teaches you...that your body will always try and heal, and will always try and keep you alive,” she said.
“You become more aware of what your body does rather than what it looks like. I've got a better respect for my body now than I used to.”
