It takes 12 months out of your life, and the aftermath is a long hard road. It's one that Emily Searle is still walking along, hand-in-hand with her sister Amy Bidois.

Emily was diagnosed with breast cancer on July 14, 2016 – some four days before her son's third birthday.

'There were five locations that it had spread to in my boob, even though I had only felt one lump and it had spread to my lymph nodes,” says Emily.

She underwent 16 rounds of chemo, a bilateral mastectomy with node clearance, breast reconstruction and five weeks' worth of radiation.

After all her treatment, she struggled to come to terms with the changes to her body.

'Everyone says you should be grateful that the cancer has gone,” she says, 'but you're left with this misshapen body that you don't recognise.

'It doesn't just end. Everyone doesn't just high five you on the last day of radiation, and that period after the treatment ends is actually often one of the hardest times for people to readjust to the risk of the cancer coming back and the side effects of all the mediation.”

To deal with these changes, Emily's psychologist recommended writing a letter to herself, and this was where the idea of a self-power book called Dear Boobs was born.

'I wrote the Dear Boobs letter a week before my surgery,” she says 'I wrote it by hand in a note book then put it away.

'It wasn't until after my surgery that I realised it probably helped more than I thought it had at the time.”

While talking to a friend of hers, who also wrote a Dear Boobs letter, she realised how beneficial these letters could be for women. From there she launched a Facebook page encouraging people to write letters of their own.

'I thought nothing of it - just that maybe I'd get a couple of letters - but within 30 days I had 30 letters and they were from all over the world.”

She says at the time she was still recovering from the treatment, so she didn't check them regularly. When she did, she found the letters were flying in.

'I was a bit overwhelmed, but every person that wrote a letter told me how helpful it had been for them, so I couldn't not honour all those letters in the book.”

While her book was forming, Emily also found out she was a carrier of a BRCA2 genetic mutation, which means she had a significantly greater chance of developing breast and ovarian cancer at a younger age.

'It's a big decision getting the test, because you've got to know what you're going to do with that information and if it's useful to you,” she says.

'I decided to find out because it would help me decide whether I'd get just the one breast done or both.”

She also recently chose to have an oophorectomy, which is the removal of her ovaries.

'For me, knowledge is power and it gave me choices,” says Emily. 'I believe from there I was able to make all my own choices during treatment.

'However, it did have a knock-on impact, as my family needed to decide if they wanted to know.”

Her sister Amy chose to take the test and found she was also a carrier of the gene. At the same time as Emily was going through Chemo, Amy decided to have a mastectomy.

'We weren't really surprised, because my sister and I have always had similarities,” says Emily. 'And even though it wasn't my fault, I felt guilty sometimes.”

Amy says she decided to have the procedure because she had seen what her sister had been through and didn't want to put her family through the same trauma.

'I struggled with it in the beginning, because if I had a child again I wouldn't be able to breast feed them, so it took a while to work through those feelings,” says Amy.

She says her sister helped her in many ways, from being there when she woke up to going bra shopping with her after surgery.

Emily also chose to write about her own experience pre-surgery, which is the 100th letter in the book.

'I knew it was something I wanted to do, and it has helped me understand my own thoughts better,” she says.

'I'm just really proud of my sister for what she's been through and she's been able to come out with something so positive for other women,” says Amy. 'I'm not at all surprised by the impact she's made.