Happy Mother’s Day with Koning Team!

This week is all about Mothers – grandmothers, expecting moms, mother figures – we honor them all. Our Vice President of Marketing, Naomi Cosman, recently had the pleasure of discussing breast cancer and family history with Allyn Rose at our Norcross headquarters. Allyn is a breast cancer awareness advocate, public speaker, former Miss USA, and our newest spokeswoman at Koning. 

“I always say that my story started with my mother”, Allyn says. “She was a marathon runner, very attuned to her body and found a lump in her late twenties. She went to the doctor’s and insisted on getting screening even though they said she was too young to have breast cancer. Turns out she had a stage three invasive ductal carcinoma that turned into a radical mastectomy.”

“Later on, she ended up having children and life got in the way. She wasn’t getting consistent mammograms as they were painful and uncomfortable, which unfortunately led to another cancer diagnosis. She passed away just after my 16th birthday.”

“This was a very defining moment in my life as a young woman growing into my own womanhood. Suddenly having to go on the rest of my life without my mom was an aggressive wake-up call to take this more seriously. It was not just my mother – it was my grandmother, my great aunt; I had this long lineage of women who had lost their lives to breast cancer at a really young age and it encouraged me to decide to have a double mastectomy in my twenties.”

“My mother was a very career-focused woman and did not have a lot of time. If screening had been easier and more comfortable, she might have done it more often. Having access to Vera by Koning at a diagnostic center and getting a screening done in 7 seconds per side would have made sense for somebody like her. Had it been available, perhaps she would still be here today.”

Allyn’s story is a generational emblem of breast imaging. As we celebrate Mother’s Day, our motivation to change the traditional timeline of prevention and breast cancer detection only grows stronger. Our technology is designed to save millions of lives and eradicate breast cancer completely. In the near future, we want to ensure our daughters never have to go take the same path in prevention again.

Watch the interview here