East End Faces: Karen Comneck

Karen Comneck
Karen Comneck | Gianna Volpe photo

We found Karen Comneck celebrating with a glass of McCall Sauvignon Blanc at Mattituck’s a Mano on March 1, after finding out she is cancer-free.

“They say I’m the woman who saved her own life. Cancer was found in my left breast. I was first diagnosed as a pre-cancer patient — but, when they did the lumpectomy they found out that the cancer was in the lymph nodes of the breast without the cancer, but not in the lymph nodes of the breast that had cancer in it, so they said, ‘Either this is a mistake or it’s Stage IV.'”

“When cancer doesn’t play by the rules, you’ve gotta be very, very aggressive, so I said to do whatever the pathologist says to do. If I had used implants during reconstructive surgery, they would have been removed because they didn’t think I had any cancer in the lymph nodes, so they used my stomach…and because I used my own tissue, when it was radiated my breast held up because it had a whole new blood supply.”

Our roving reporter Gianna Volpe is traipsing all over the North and South forks looking for stories to share on East End Faces. 

Gianna Volpe

Gianna Volpe is a multimedia reporter hailing from a little town along the Palisades of New Jersey. She loves goblin sharks, bioluminescence and throwing beached conchs back into the bay. She once high-fived a shark off of Montauk, and she eats her bay scallops raw.

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