Learning to live, love, and let herself be held

“I was a very strong woman — someone who saved everyone, helped everyone, and had a hard time letting herself be helped,” she says. “A Gynna who wanted to carry all the responsibilities — at home, at work, everything.”

That began to change in 2021.

“This is my life”

Gynna had first noticed a lump in her breast years earlier. At the time, doctors told her not to worry. But after she became sick with COVID-19 in January 2021, she realized the lump was bigger. Harder. “Like a rock,” she says.

Even though her mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer when Gynna was a teenager, Gynna was not worried. She was young, and the doctors had previously told her it was not concerning. Her sister, however, was uneasy, and urged her to see a doctor.

Gynna made an appointment with a general practitioner who ordered an ultrasound, but weeks passed before she had the exam. Gynna remembers that waiting period as time when the tumor kept growing.

In early April, after the ultrasound, Gynna was told the results were abnormal and that she needed to go to the emergency room. She went, waited for hours, and left with antibiotics for what she was told might be mastitis, a breast infection. She was also told to follow up with a breast specialist.

When she finally saw the breast specialist, the doctor examined her and said she needed a biopsy that day.

“That was the first time I heard the word biopsy and understood what a biopsy was,” Gynna says. “And that day was terrible.”

On May 19, 2021, at age 30, Gynna was diagnosed with breast cancer. At first, doctors told her it was stage III. Additional tests soon showed that the cancer had spread to her bones. Testing of the cancer showed that it was hormone receptor-positive and HER2-positive — often called triple-positive metastatic breast cancer. Those results would help guide her treatment.

“It felt like it wasn’t me — like I wasn’t the person they were telling,” she says. “I kept saying to myself, ‘No, this isn’t my life. This isn’t my life.’” The reality became clearer for her when, later, she entered the chemotherapy room for the first time. “That’s when I said, ‘Yes. This is my life. This really is happening to me.’”

The day after her diagnosis, Gynna gathered her coworkers on a virtual call and told them what was happening. Her boss had suggested she keep the diagnosis private, but Gynna knew that would not work. She was second-in-command. If she suddenly stepped away from work, people would not understand why. So, she told them about her diagnosis. Then she stepped away from work and began treatment.

Learning to be cared for

Treatment quickly changed daily life. Gynna initially received AC chemotherapy, sometimes called “the red devil” (in the United States). After doctors confirmed that the cancer had spread to her bones, they changed her treatment to the THP regimen: docetaxel (Taxotere) with the HER2-targeted therapies trastuzumab (Herceptin) and pertuzumab (Perjeta). Her doctor later added tamoxifen, a hormonal therapy she takes as a daily pill. Gynna says that understanding her HER2-positive result helped her understand why these medicines were part of her treatment and gave her greater confidence in the plan. She completed six cycles of docetaxel and continued receiving pertuzumab and trastuzumab, along with medicine to protect her bones.

Her hair fell out. Her digestive system became extremely sensitive. Nausea became one of the hardest side effects to manage. During the months of chemotherapy, Gynna experienced pain and sensitivity so intense that even ordinary things, such as pajamas, blankets, bathing, and eating, felt unbearable.

By September 2021, with one cycle of the strongest chemotherapy still left, Gynna wanted to stop. She remembers crying in her room while her sister tried to help ease the pain. Her father came upstairs and saw her crying.

“No, Papi,” she told him. “I can’t do this anymore. I definitely can’t do this anymore.”

She saw his eyes fill with tears. He left the room, then came back and took her hands.

“He said, ‘Please, Gynna, no. You only have one [treatment] left. Don’t give up. Talk to God, because He is the only one who can give you the strength to keep going.’”

Gynna had been raised Catholic, but she says her faith deepened after her diagnosis. She began praying not only for strength, but for her medical team — that God would guide their hands, minds, and decisions.

Gynna also had to learn something that did not come naturally: how to receive care. “The first step was letting myself be helped,” she says. “Understanding that I couldn’t do it alone.”

During treatment days, her brother and sister waited for her outside the clinic. On one especially long day, when Gynna had been there since early morning and had not eaten, her sister sent in a simple Subway sandwich: bread, cheese, and chicken, because Gynna could not tolerate much else. “That Subway tasted like the best thing in the world to me,” she says.

At home, her brother brought food up to her room, watched movies with her, and let her rest in his room while he played video games. Her grandmother, who lived across the street, brought vegetable soup with fish.

“I started to let go of that guard I always kept up when I understood that my siblings could also help me and support me,” she says.

Cancer sisters who get it

A psychologist encouraged Gynna to find support outside her family, especially from other young women who could understand cancer in a different way. Gynna searched Instagram and found a foundation in Colombia that invited her to a workshop for women with cancer.

When she walked in, she was bald and wearing a turban. Other women were bald, too. Some removed their turbans as soon as they sat down. By the end of the workshop, Gynna had taken off her turban, too.

That day, Gynna found her “cancer sisters” — women who understood the experience of treatment without needing long explanations.

“It isn’t the same to tell a healthy person, ‘This hurts,’ because they won’t understand it at the same level as someone who is living it, too,” she says.

With them, Gynna says she could laugh about the hard parts. She could cry without being judged.

“You don’t need anyone to solve it,” she says. “You only need someone to listen.”

Living with the weight of MBC

As Gynna continued living with metastatic breast cancer, her hair grew back. She looked well. To people who did not know her medical history, it could seem as if nothing was wrong.

“People like me, who have to live with treatment — that is a completely different world,” she says. “It is learning, literally, to continue life with something that weighs on you. But it is also learning not to lose faith, to hold on to the things you love, to keep dreaming.”

Her first follow-up PET scan, in December 2021, showed that the cancer was controlled. Because everything remained stable, her next PET scan was scheduled 2 years later. When her oncologist reviewed those results in January 2024, the scan showed a new tumor in her pelvis. Gynna received radiation therapy to treat it.

Then, in January 2025, she began experiencing pain. A PET scan in June brought even harder news: The cancer had progressed in her pelvis, and there was a new tumor in her sternum. Gynna underwent radiosurgery to both areas. Her bone-strengthening medicine was also changed from zoledronic acid to denosumab.

“To be completely honest, 2025 broke me like never before,” she says. “I can’t even compare it to when I was first diagnosed in 2021.”

The progression and treatment were physically and emotionally devastating. Gynna calls this period her true “storm,” a time when she experienced profound grief and could no longer hide behind “the mask of strong Gynna.”

But a PET scan in December 2025 finally brought encouraging news: The cancer had shown a partial response, with a 30% reduction. The result gave Gynna something she had not felt in a long time — emotional peace and enough space to begin looking forward again.

A wish for love fulfilled

Before that especially difficult year began, Gynna had made a playful wish for love. On Dec. 31, 2024, she and her cousins climbed under the dining room table just before midnight — part of a tradition said to help people find love in the new year. Gynna mostly did it to keep her cousin company.

But when the cancer progressed and treatment became more intense in 2025, thoughts of dating were put aside. Her focus was entirely on her health.

That year also showed Gynna who was truly willing to remain beside her. “Cancer filters people,” she says. By late 2025, she was surrounded by a close, loving circle of family members and friends who had become her safe space.

They were also the ones who teased her about being single: How was love supposed to find her if she did nothing?

After the encouraging news from her December PET scan, Gynna finally felt ready to download the dating app Bumble. She had a few disappointing conversations and was just about to delete the app when she saw Diego’s profile on Christmas Eve.

They connected on Dec. 24, 2025, almost a full year after Gynna had climbed under the table to wish for love.

She told Diego about her diagnosis and treatment. She told him she was not interested in wasting time. She was looking for something real. His answer was simple: He wanted to get to know her.

Their connection grew quickly. On one of their early dates, Gynna gave Diego a book by a Colombian author he had mentioned wanting to read. She included a note.

“Why are you like this?” he asked her.

For Gynna, giving the book was a way of showing Diego that what mattered to him mattered to her, too. Later that day, sitting together with his cats curled near her, Gynna asked him directly if he wanted to be her boyfriend.

He did.

“The Gynna after the storm”

Being loved in this new way has brought up emotions Gynna did not expect. Sometimes, after happy days with Diego, she goes home and cries. Her psychologist has helped her understand why: After years of surviving, her brain does not always know what to do with peace.

Gynna told Diego something important early on: If she cries, he does not need to fix her.

“I don’t need you to fix me,” she told him. “The only thing I need is for you to hug me.”

For Gynna, learning to receive Diego’s love is an ongoing process. It can be hard to believe that someone outside her family and circle of lifelong friends — someone who did not know her before cancer — can love her fully while embracing the reality of her health.

Diego arrived at a time when Gynna had learned how to let herself be seen. He knows, she tells him, “the Gynna after the storm.”

That does not mean the storm has disappeared entirely. Gynna’s latest PET scan brought welcome news: She says the cancer is currently under control. But for Gynna, that does not mean the journey is over. She continues treatment while managing ongoing side effects. At the same time, she is learning, day by day, to open herself to being loved through it.

Not long ago, Gynna found something she had written in 2021, early in treatment. In the note, she wrote that she knew she did not need anyone to be happy, but she wanted to share life’s beautiful moments with someone — a conversation in a beautiful place, a sunset, a fresh coffee, Coldplay playing in the background.

Gynna traces part of this understanding of love to her grandfather, who died in July 2026 at age 92 after living for years with COPD chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a lung condition that makes it hard to breathe. The greatest lesson he left her, she says, was that love is a powerful force — one that helps us keep going and fighting for life, even when life is difficult.

Now, she thinks about that lesson, the note she once wrote, and where life has brought her. “That year, I thought I was going to die,” she says. “And now, I’m here with Diego.”