When Nicole Campbell first felt a lump in her left breast, she thought it was just another gym injury.

“I go to the gym pretty regularly,” Nicole says. “I thought that I had just hit it on the bars trying to do pull-ups or power cleans.”

But just a few weeks after her annual women’s exam, where everything checked out fine, Nicole noticed that the lump was still there. Her doctor told her it was probably just hormonal and to let two cycles pass. She did, but nothing changed. 

After a mammogram and a follow-up biopsy, Nicole, 39, healthy and active, heard the words she never imagined she’d hear: “You have cancer.”

“The world just stops to hear those words,” Nicole says. “You really don’t know what direction you’re gonna go. I was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer. It had showed up as a lump that basically just kind of showed up overnight.”

Nicole says her first instinct was to take the most aggressive route. 

“I told my oncologist that I wanted to have a surgery right away,” she says. “Right from the get-go I just wanted to have a double mastectomy. It was a pretty radical surgery to have, but I thought, let’s get rid of the tissue. Even if I was to beat this, I didn’t want it coming back.”

Her oncologist initially agreed. 

“We literally high-fived,” Nicole says. “I walked out the door like, OK, I feel really good.”

But before she could schedule surgery, Nicole consulted another doctor who pushed for chemotherapy first.

“He just sat there for a good half hour, on me and on me and on me, about why I should do chemo first,” Nicole says. “It put fear in my heart. He said it just takes that one little cell.”

Nicole says the fear consumed her.

“It really sent my whole journey in this tailspin,” she says. “I was scared. I couldn’t sleep at night. I lost so much weight from just the fear alone. It really didn’t have to be that way.”

Nicole eventually agreed to chemotherapy, but she describes it as one of the hardest parts of her ordeal. Thankfully, a friend of pushed her to follow her gut and do the surgery first, which Nicole believes saved her life.

“Eight treatments. I would count them down,” she says. “It was one of the most horrible things to walk through. You are so sick for so long. By treatment two, hair starts to come out.”

Nicole documented much of her experience on Instagram, posting updates, photos and candid reflections about what she was going through.

“Things I’ve shared along the way shows chemo is a whole different walk,” she says. “You get burned down to the ground and rise back up like a phoenix. Spiritually I grew. Your mind and spirit are your most powerful tools. I wanted to be real about what was happening. People need to see that it’s not just statistics and treatments—it’s a person walking through this.”

One of the most memorable moments came when her husband shaved his head in a show of support.

“He sat there right beside me, and we did it together,” Nicole says. “That moment was emotional but also freeing. It felt like we were taking some control back.”

Nicole admits she felt pressured into chemotherapy and wishes she had known then what she knows now.

“I just felt like I had to do it,” she says. “For three weeks I finally gave up. It shows where I was at mentally. If I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently. It’s doctors telling you what you need to do, and not one of them could ever answer my questions.”

After a double mastectomy and six weeks of chemo hell, Nicole was finally declared cancer free. But her body would pay the price for the coming years.

“It took me over four years to get back what four months took from me, mentally and physically,” she says.

However, through her journey, Nicole was most troubled by what wasn’t being discussed in the medical world.

“They can’t tell you where the cancer is coming from,” she says. “Never once is it a conversation on cell biology. Never once is it a question on what’s your nutrition. Never once is it a question on, ‘What are you doing that you could have a toxic overload? Let’s look into the liver, let’s pull a hormone panel.’ There’s never, ‘Let’s get to the bottom of this. No, it’s let’s get you through chemo as soon as we can.’”

Traveling a Different Path

Nicole now believes cancer is a symptom of deeper issues.

“What I’ve learned is that it’s a symptom of metabolic dysfunction in the body,” she says. “If something’s not going right in the body, things are going wrong with the cell. This is all happening on a cellular level, and if we aren’t feeding our bodies as we are designed, things aren’t just going to not go right.”

She believes the human body is designed to heal itself if given the right tools — a belief that led her on a mission to debunk traditional cancer treatments.

“I think just looking back with this whole new outlook on what I have been through, it’s how can I help change things for people to actually heal from any disease?” she says.

Her current care involves functional medicine and a more holistic approach that focuses on strengthening the body instead of just attacking the disease.

“There are a lot of things out there that modern medicine doesn’t give a lot of,” she says. “There are thousands, millions of people going through some sort of cancer or chemo treatment, and not one of them is coached on nutritional or gut health and how that could change the environment in the body.”

Having gone through the fire herself, Nicole has now embarked on a mission to educate others.

“I’ve been kind of looking back, sorting through the ashes,” she says. “Of course I put myself back together since then, but it’s been a road. It’s been a journey.”

Her message to others facing a diagnosis is simple but powerful: don’t be afraid. “That is truth,” she says. “It’s probably so early on that you can make corrections in the body, which can actually corrupt the cancer.”

Nicole hopes more people will explore nutritional and metabolic health as part of their cancer journey.

“The body can heal as we are designed to do,” she says. “It’s a whole lot to take in, but I’m happy to share the things I know now and what direction that it’s taking me into.”

Photos: Cindy Peterson & Provided