Young cancer survivor speaks out in new best-seller

MONTREAL (CityNews) – Nalie Agustin is a cancer advocate, public speaker, social media influencer and now a best-selling author.

She’s managed it all while still thriving with stage four metastatic breast cancer after initially being diagnosed with cancer eight years ago.

“I feel really proud to be Filipino Canadian sharing my story because growing up here in Quebec very rarely [do] you see faces of other women of other ethnicities when it comes to breast cancer. I represent a community that would remain more quiet usually,” explained Agustin.

“I found it very therapeutic to release my thoughts through writing. I started writing my blog in 2013 and being really public and open about how I felt. Initially, it was just so that I could update my big Filipino family and not have to repeat myself 10,000 times.

“Little did I know that there was a huge community out there of young women that were diagnosed with breast cancer too and they say it’s pretty rare that in your 20s, you’re going to have breast cancer,” she added.

“Often when we speak about cancer we speak about the elderly and so that’s when my blog picked up. In 2013, I was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer but unfortunately, I had a recurrence in 2017 and it was a stage 4 diagnosis as it had spread to my lungs. I continued to advocate nonetheless as it was always in me but it was in 2020, unfortunately, when the metastasis went from the lungs to the brain and that was a very traumatic time.”

As public as Agustin had been with her health journey, she took the necessary time to step away from social media and focus exclusively on her health. Perspective is everything for Nalie.

“I’ll do a scan and I’ll have no clue what the results will be and I will have control over what I do with that wait. Either I hide under my bed sheets and cry all day or I spend time with my family and I visit my little niece and she makes me happy and we play games and I just end up laughing. At the end of the day we do these scans and we just want to live but then you don’t end up living. That’s how I see it,” explained Agustin.

Agustin shares all this and more in her debut best-selling book, The Diary of Nalie.