By Danielle Cass
" I need to surf as much as possible while I still can.” That was my first thought when a routine mammogram six months ago revealed a tumor, and I was told I needed a surgical biopsy to rule out breast cancer. When the pathology report confirmed I had an aggressive form of it, I immediately texted my surf girlfriends and drove to the beach to process the news while surfing with them.
Isn’t that where all surfers go to sort through big questions in their head? I had lots of questions, many of them existential: Am I going to die? Will I be around long enough to see my kids get married? Is my life as a surfer over?
I came to surfing late as a 52-year-old empty nester. That was five years ago. Since then, I’ve surfed with the urgency of someone making up for lost time. I cultivated a community of two dozen women surfers aged 25 to 75; organized surf trips with them to Central America, Mexico, and Southern California, and weekend overnight trips to breaks north and south of San Francisco; and signed a lease last year on a shared rental overlooking our surf break in Northern California so my friends and I had a home base.
Danielle’s community of surf girlfriends supported and encouraged her on her six-month cancer journey. Photo: Matt Berridge
A short film about the first year of my midlife surfing trajectory – Learning to Surf at 52: Danielle’s Journey to Living Fearlessly – screened at the 2022 San Diego Surf Festival. Becoming a surfer transformed me from feeling invisible in menopause to feeling strong and beautiful. When I faced a scary breast cancer diagnosis four years later, I didn’t want to give up the empowerment that surfing gave me.
My first question to my surgeon after hearing I needed surgery to remove my breasts and lymph node wasn’t about pain management or cancer recurrence. It was: “How soon after surgery can I surf?”
My first question to my oncologist after hearing I needed three months of chemotherapy after surgery was: “Can I surf during chemotherapy?” (She said yes!)
I see now that surfing the last six months through a raw Northern California winter surrounded by my community of women surfers kept me strong, healthy, and sane through my cancer journey. My surfing-through-cancer experience isn’t just a personal anecdote of resilience. It points to a growing body of research demonstrating the immense physical and mental benefits of maintaining — or even starting — physical activity during cancer treatment.
Surfing during chemotherapy helped offset Danielle’s side effects. Photos: Matt Berridge
Rell Kapolioka’ehukai Sunn once said something that resonates strongly with me. “When you get in the water and catch a wave, you own your life again,” she said. “Surfing gives you great inner strength.”
When I fell in love with surfing five years ago, it gave me more than inner strength. It gave me a cellphone-free forcefield where demands of work and family could not reach me. Each session wiped my mind clean, freed me of negative thinking, and left me with a daylong, Zen-like body calm.
My surfing addiction back then was amplified because, as my middle-aged ovaries shut down and collagen drained from my face and color from my hair, something new and powerful was blossoming inside me — something that grew stronger each session. For the last decade I had become invisible as a middle-aged woman. But as a surfer, I felt more beautiful, strong, and sexy than I had in ages.
Unfortunately, intense devotion to surfing was not the only new thing rapidly growing inside me. A routine mammogram last summer found a tumor that was an invasive form of breast cancer. I needed surgery to remove both breasts and a lymph node from my armpit, followed by 12 weeks of weekly chemotherapy through an IV port in my chest, nine months of targeted immunotherapy IV infusions through the chest port, and five years of an estrogen-blocker to keep the cancer from sprouting elsewhere in my body.
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I was lucky enough to take short-term medical leave from my job as an AI Safety & Security education leader at Microsoft and started surfing twice a day right up until my five-hour surgery. In between surf sessions, I researched and adopted best practices for staying healthy during surgery recovery and chemotherapy: drinking 100 ounces of water a day, making batches of homemade chicken bone broth and ginger cardamom coriander tea, practicing daily meditation, and getting weekly acupuncture and massage therapy. I found an at-home strength training routine developed by surgeons and physical therapists to regain arm mobility after mastectomy and lymph node removal surgery.
Those first weeks before surgery meant navigating the confusing puzzle of MRIs, ultrasounds and biopsies to determine my prognosis. Surfing was the only time I felt like I could climb on top of my mountain of fears and uncertainty. Each surf session reminded me: “I can do hard things.”
Some days the water was glassy, calm, and iridescent. I would glide effortlessly in a dreamlike state into hypnotic waves. Other days, the water was angry, windy and choppy, and the sky dark gray. Waves smacked my face and pushed my surfboard and me back 20 feet as I tried to punch through to get back out to the takeoff spot. On those days, I would grit my teeth and chant: “This is how I get stronger! This is how I get stronger!”
Seeking guidance on whether and how to surf through chemotherapy following a double mastectomy, I posted a message on the “Women Who Surf” Facebook group of about 40,000 women surfers. “I just got diagnosed with breast cancer and am looking for other women surfers who surfed through chemo, and surfed after a double mastectomy,” I wrote.
Within 24 hours, more than 100 women surfers from around the world weighed in with advice from personal experience, and more than 690 women reacted positively to my message. The majority of those who had gone through breast cancer chose not to surf during the surgery recovery or chemotherapy due to infection risk from weakened immune systems, limited mobility, fatigue, and weakness.
But my oncologist encouraged me to surf during chemotherapy; she said it was fine once my plastic surgeon determined my chest incisions were healed. Finally, after seven weeks of being grounded on land for three surgeries and my first chemotherapy session, I got the green light to resume surfing. I drove immediately to the beach 60 minutes away. I didn’t bother alerting my surf crew in case I chickened out when I reached the water.
How many times during the seven weeks while recovering from surgery and anticipating chemotherapy had I fantasized and envisioned what my first post-surgery surf would be like? More than a 100 times for sure. In my mind, I was always surrounded by a pack of my surf girlfriends egging me on with encouraging cheers. Turns out I was all alone at 4 p.m. on a sunny, warm Friday in mid-December standing at the water’s edge with my beloved 9’2” log, Violett, waiting for a break between sets to try this stunt.
My first attempt to get past the winter shorebreak was stymied by walls of water that swamped me in seaweed that wrapped around my legs and leash.
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“C’mon Cass, you can do this!” I muttered grimly as I tried again, pushed past the steep breaking wave, flopped onto my chest, and started paddling past the rocks to deeper water. My chest incisions felt sore through my 4/3 wetsuit against my hard surfboard, so I arched my back upward into a cobra yoga pose for the first time in seven weeks. “What the fuck!?” my creaking spine complained.
But the waves were glassy, the swell small, and it was a short distance to reach the green breaking waves due to high tide. While I waited for the right wave to come to me, I sat upright on my board facing the horizon and placed my bare palms on the surface of the 55-degree water to calm my heart rate and connect with Mother Ocean. When the next set rolled in, I was ready. I angled my board, dug into the surface of the water fiercely with my arms and suddenly, I had liftoff.
The next two and a half months of chemo were a race against the clock, surfing as much as I could before the cumulative side effects of fatigue, weakness, and poor immunity set in. I discovered a pattern to balance my limited stamina with my need for saltwater therapy: surf one day, rest for two days, surf one day, rest for two days. Nothing swept toxic chemo sludge from my veins and snapped me out of gloomy self-pity like catching party waves with my friends.
Science on the healing proximity of the ocean explains why surfing during chemotherapy felt so therapeutic: the cold water regulates the nervous system, and the water’s negative ions nourish the body’s cells. As Dr. Wallace J. Nicols explained with his “Blue Mind” theory based on neuroscience and research, contact with the ocean reduces anxiety, increases overall well-being, and improves performance. Recent studies confirm that physical activity after cancer surgery, and during chemotherapy and radiation, speed recovery and reduce side effects of fatigue, depression, anxiety, and insomnia.
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In 2022, the American Society of Clinical Oncology released its first-ever exercise guidelines based on 100-plus clinical trials examining the link between exercise and cancer treatment. The findings showed staying physically active following surgery and during chemotherapy and radiation accelerated surgery recovery, reduced fatigue, anxiety, and depression, while improving quality of life and physical function. And in 2025, the New England Journal of Medicine published the first randomized controlled trial that found exercise increased disease-free and overall survival for colon cancer patients who went through chemotherapy.
My oncologist described me as a unicorn patient because I was so upbeat, positive, and physically active. But any cancer patient can do this by collaborating with their surgeon and oncologist on an exercise plan. It can transform the disempowering experience of cancer into an opportunity to take charge of one’s physical and mental well-being — and lead to better surgical recovery, reduced side effects from chemo, and improved long-term health outcomes and resilience.
My story ends the way it started. With chemotherapy complete, I have the stamina again to surf twice a day. To mark this milestone of health, I’ve stepped through a new portal by adding another board to my quiver: a cherry red, C.J. Nelson Outlier mid-length. This featherweight eight-foot board — shaped like a shortboard — rides like a hot knife cutting through butter, allowing me to carve with an agility I never knew possible. As I paddle into the next dimension of surfing, I carry a deep gratitude for the healing power of the ocean and the community that carried me back to it.
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