Nicholasville, Kentucky, situated in the heart of horse and tobacco country, was a tranquil little town of 5,000 people in the 1960s. As in most small towns in that era, there was little for children to do during the summer. So my sister, Gena, and I entertained ourselves. In the shade of our carport on Melrose Avenue, we played games of make-believe. One of our favorites was "doctor." Gena, a year and a half older than me, played the role of physician and I her patient. She operated on me with a butter knife, an egg beater and other dull utensils borrowed from our mother's kitchen and gave me imaginary medicines. I dutifully took everything she prescribed.

Little did we know in those blissful times that one day too soon Gena would become the dutiful patient, not in an imaginary hospital, but in a real one where the scalpels were sharp and the medicines harsh.

Breast cancer had been no stranger to our family. Two of our mother's half-sisters developed the disease in their 30s but survived only after double mastectomies. And one of our mother's good friends died of breast cancer at age 39. As a teenager, it seemed to me that just about all of the middle-aged women in our neighborhood were getting the disease.

No wonder. Breast cancer is pervasive. Its incidence has increased about 3 percent a year since 1980 so that today one of every nine American women living to 85 will get it at some time in their lives. Each day in the United States almost 500 women – one every three minutes – are diagnosed with breast cancer and another 120 die from it. The disease is the leading cause of death for American women between 35 and 54 years old.

This year, an estimated 184,000 women will be told they have breast cancer, and some 46,000 will lose their lives to it – comparable to the number of American soldiers who died during the entire Vietnam War. If a monument were built to the 330,000 women who died of breast cancer during that span, it would be 5 1/2 times the size of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial. But, unlike the Vietnam War, breast cancer keeps on killing today, adding tens of thousands of names to the cancer memorial each year, with no end in sight.

We knew breast cancer was out there, but we never thought it would strike our family, let alone Gena at the young age of 29. It was her youth that made the diagnosis so shocking. We expect older people to get cancer, because age itself is a major risk factor. But when someone in their teens, 20s or 30s gets cancer in the bloom of life, the unfairness of it hits like a sledgehammer.

Gena's diagnosis seemed particularly unjust. She had an effusive personality that attracted friends easily, and she was pretty, bright, eternally optimistic and hard-working – virtues that promised to give her a successful and happy life.

What I could do for Gena during her battle with breast cancer, I did gladly. I visited her often in the hospital, helped her research her disease, offered words of encouragement, drove her to the hospital for her treatments, and began keeping a journal of her experience and our family's response to it. Committing her ordeal to paper was immensely therapeutic and helped me make sense of the tragedy. The journal soon became the basis for this book, which Gena encouraged me to pursue for the sake of other women in her situation. She was always thinking of others and how to help them.

Close to the Heart recounts Gena's diagnosis of breast cancer; her extraordinary ability to manage the physical and emotional demands of her medical treatment; and our family's supporting role. Ultimately, it is a love story, a testament to the power of love in coping with a family trauma. By sharing our experiences, we hope to inspire, educate, inform and console other young women and their families who brave breast cancer. They are not alone.