Survival of the Realest 

A little over two years ago, Erika Stokes was having a run-of-the-mill Friday night. The 32-year-old sales executive at Electrolux was ready for bed, so she completed her nightly hair routine, brushing and wrapping up her straightened tresses in a silk scarf.

Although she adored natural hair, she worried that the look might be too unrestrained for the business environment she worked in.

"Is it corporate enough? Crisp and clean? I felt like it wasn't quite seen as being acceptable," Stokes says. So she played the middle, cutting out the perms but still going to the salon to have her hair professionally straightened in blow-outs a couple of times a month.

As she laid down in the dark of her Steele Creek apartment, she decided on a whim to give herself a breast exam, a habit born of the admonitions of her mom, a registered nurse.

"It felt like there was a hard rock in my breast," Stokes recounts calmly. Her voice holds not a trace of trauma or fear as she recalls details of the roughest journey she ever had to live through.

Fighting panic, she called her mom that night in 2012, and so began a whirlwind medical odyssey. Monday morning, she went straight to her gynecologist, who set her up for a biopsy that afternoon with another doctor. The news came back and it wasn't good: Stage 2 breast cancer.

Stokes threw herself into tackling the disease. Studies say one in every 8 women will get a breast cancer diagnosis in their lifetimes, but exercise decreases the risk by 25 percent. So she upped the ante on her exercise regimen and prepared herself for chemotherapy and six weeks of radiation treatment. This was complicated by the fact that she preferred to use the medical providers in her hometown. So each time she saw a specialist, she had to drive all the way to Augusta, Georgia, to do it. In the meantime, she maintained a dogged work schedule.

"After the first round of chemo, you feel tired, but you can tell yourself you're just under the weather or whatever. But after the second round, your body is not your body anymore. I knew I didn't want to stop [working]. I didn't want to lay down and start to worry. I believe it's not the cancer or the chemo that kills you, it's the stress and worriation," she says.

Somehow, she was never absent from work. But there was the issue of her hair.

"I went to the salon to get my blow-out done one day, and I felt a tingling in my scalp. By the time I got to the shampoo bowl, I knew something was wrong." When Stokes leaned back in the wash chair for the stylist to rinse her head, entire swaths of hair shed into the bowl.

"I was bald-headed," she says bluntly.

Her doctor had suggested from the beginning that she might want to go buy a wig, so she took their advice. She got a straight one to match her normal style, but she didn't like it, and only wore the wig to work. It was hot and felt unnatural. But she felt pressure to wear it for the comfort of her co-workers.

"I'm a private person," she says. "I worried about putting pressure on everybody else or burdening them with my problems."

Eventually, she could no longer hide her condition. Facing the choice of getting a lumpectomy, mastectomy or a double mastectomy, she decided to opt for the last — the most drastic but also most guaranteed option to keep recurring cancers at bay. Though initially apprehensive, she opened up about her illness to her boss and her workmates. They responded with a ton of support.

She became a fountain of information, encouraging the people around her to be proactive about their own health. One Electrolux co-worker told her they got through their own bout of illness because of her positive example. She won the company's 2013 Inspiration Award, and was recently honored by Paine College in Augusta as a breast cancer survivor.

Stokes found another support network at Beauty by Nature, an all-natural beauty supply in the University area that carries dozens of local and national hair and body products. Stokes immediately felt at home there, and with a little coaxing from Kenny-Etheridge and Robin, Beauty by Nature's stylist, was convinced to ditch the wig. Now, at 34, Stokes looks radiant: her skin glows, and her curly natural hair is as effervescent as her laugh.

Arleese Kenny-Etheridge opened the shop three years ago because she had trouble sourcing the organic products she used to get with ease in New York. She made do with Whole Foods and Trader Joe's until she and her husband decided to have a baby. Then her mind went into overdrive.

"I started reading all of the ingredients in everything," she says laughingly. "My daughter is a completely organic baby." She expected clientele like herself, protective moms and naturalistas, but was surprised to see a number of customers were cancer survivors like Stokes, who could no longer use mass-produced products containing synthetic chemicals on their hair and skin.

"I just want to inspire others through my fight," Stokes says. "You don't have to face it alone. This is not a death sentence. By all means, this is not the end."