A Different Kind of Strength

Erica Langley loved the sense of achievement bodybuilding gave her. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she had to draw upon resources she didn't know she had. Now she's ready to flex again.

- By Leslie Goldman

Standing onstage at a bodybuilding competition in May 2021, Erica Langley fit right in alongside the other contestants: She had awe-inducing muscles, a confident stance and a gleaming smile. Nobody would have guessed that just a few years earlier, the Chicago microbiology lab manager had been so frail that she needed her parents to feed her and her fiancé and sister to help her use the washroom. This competition, in which she wore a pink-and-gold bikini bedazzled with a crystal breast cancer ribbon, was her first ever. She won three medals. It was Erica's way of celebrating having endured a breast cancer diagnosis, months of chemotherapy, a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.

A week after she found the peach pit-size lump in August 2018, doctors at University of Chicago Medicine did a biopsy and told her she had invasive breast cancer. "I was in complete shock," she says. "I only knew of one person in our family with breast cancer-my maternal grandfather's sister died of it, [which] didn't feel like a close family linkage."

The other reason Erica didn't expect it: "Growing up in the Black community, cancer wasn't 'our' disease. We thought about high blood pressure, diabetes-things normally associated with a not-so-healthy diet." Erica ate lots of grilled chicken and vegetables, never smoked and rarely drank, so she didn't perceive a risk.

Black women are in fact somewhat less likely to get breast cancer, but are 41% more likely to die from it if they do. There are several reasons for this, including systemic inequalities in our health care system that lead to Black women's being diagnosed later and the fact that Black women are disproportionately affected by more aggressive subtypes, according to the American Cancer Society.