Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 13:07:13 EDT

Meet the Love of my Life,'' When His Wife Got Breast Cancer, He Took Pictures. Glamour Shares A Young Couple's Cancer Battle--p. 240

NEW YORK--(ENTERTAINMENT WIRE)--Oct. 15, 2001--"When Tracy was diagnosed with breast cancer, I couldn't admit my biggest fears: What will this do to her spirit? Her body? Will we be different as a couple? She asked me to chronicle her story in pictures, and looking at them I know that if you love someone, nothing can change that," says Andrew Southam.

At age 38, Tracy Sondern was statistically too young for breast cancer, but felt a strange object in her breast graze her upper arm. Concerned, she had her lump examined by a gynecologist who reported there was nothing wrong. "If you like, you can get a sonogram, for your own peace of mind" the doctor told her, while Tracy shook her head feeling stupid. About a month after her appointment, Tracy read a magazine article that revived her panic.

"It was about Yasmine Bleeth from Baywatch," Tracy remembers, "about how her mother's cancer had been misdiagnosed. Something about that article made me think I should get checked out just to make sure." Tracy went for a sonogram. Within the week, she was rushed into surgery.

The hunk of diseased tissue which surgeons sliced from Tracy's breast in October 2000 was remarkably large, considering her age. At 1.9 cm across, the tumor was the size of a plump grape. Yet it had been invisible in her mammogram five months earlier, in part because a young woman's breast tissue is denser than that of an older woman, and partly since Tracy's fast-growing cancer had still been quite small then. The tumor had likely been growing for ten years, maybe since Tracy was as young as 28. "So really I've had cancer for ten years and didn't know it," she says, eyebrows raised.

One decision was immediately clear: Tracy wanted her husband, Andrew to photograph her treatment. "I just felt it was important to document it," she says. Andrew, however, refused; the idea of preserving images of his wife's illness struck him as macabre. "It seemed in appropriate to step back into the detachment of being a photographer. I wasn't even sure I could do it," he adds. "It's hard to go to work when your heart is breaking."

But the day after her surgery, as Tracy stepped out of the shower, her right breast laced with a jagged smile of black stitches, Andrew told her to hold it. He photographed her right then and there, nude but for a towel turbaned around her wet hair, her gaze wary, and vulnerable and brave.

Taking pictures also made Andrew feel useful. He never photographed Tracy in times of crisis, but rather documented her quiet, contemplative moments. It became his loving contribution to his wife's treatment, and served as much-needed distraction for both of them. Actually viewing the pictures, however, took some getting used to. "I couldn't look at them at first," Tracy recalls soberly. "It was too disturbing to see myself like that." But as time passed, she became swept up in the project, and when Andrew would bring home the developed photos, the couple would eagerly sift through them together, watching Tracy's story unfold from a comfortable distance.

After treatment, Tracy's cancer is now in remission, and says she can hardly bare to look at the photos anymore. Once a distraction from her illness, the pictures are now a grim reminder of what she endured. "They're such powerful images for me," she says. "I just look at them and think my God, I had cancer." Although Tracy never originally intended to make these photos public, she now feels that displaying them helps to close the circle of her treatment. After all, it originally began with a magazine health story that caught Tracy's eye. "That article might have saved my life," she says

matter-of-factly.

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