From Previvor to Founder: Jennifer Renne on Cancer Risk, Recovery and Starting Again

Can you tell us how your health journey unfolded, from your mTBI and melanoma diagnosis to learning about your breast cancer risk and ultimately choosing preventive surgery?

My cancer story is really part of a larger health story, and I think the pieces make more sense when they are understood together.

I am deeply honored to have spent nearly two decades serving my country as a CIA Operations Officer. Much of that time was spent overseas in war zones, developing countries, and other demanding environments. For more than half of my career, I lived and worked in places where the mission came first and where environmental and occupational exposures were simply part of the landscape. You learned to endure a great deal without necessarily thinking about what some of it might mean for your body ten or twenty years later.

In 2022, I sustained a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) that left me with chronic side effects. In particular, sensory overload issues and an overall reduction in capacity.

In August 2023, I was diagnosed with Stage 1A melanoma. I was incredibly fortunate that it was caught early by a really incredible dermatologist, and I underwent a wide excision. Several months later, in December, I had another wide excision for a separate area considered precancerous.

Melanoma changed the way I understood cancer because there was not a single dramatic action I could take afterwards to make the risk disappear. The work became surveillance and diligence. I continue rigorous skin checks every six months, and there is a particular kind of anxiety that accompanies knowing those appointments will remain part of my life. There is also a great deal of prayer in learning to be vigilant without allowing vigilance to become fear.

In 2024, I was diagnosed with Atypical Ductal Hyperplasia, or ADH, which significantly changed my breast cancer risk profile.

My years of overseas service and environmental exposure are part of the medical history my physicians consider relevant. I would never claim that one of my deployments caused a particular cancer, but I do think there is an important and still-evolving conversation about men and women of the Post-9/11 generation who served for years in chemically and environmentally compromised environments and what those exposures may mean for our long-term health. It is a conversation that the cancer community does not talk about a lot, and I would love to see that change.

How did you decide to undergo preventive surgery, and what was that experience like for you?

The ADH diagnosis was different from melanoma because suddenly there was something very significant I could choose to do. Risk certainly mattered in my decision to undergo prophylactic bilateral mastectomies. But what made the decision surprisingly easy was my family. I have an amazing husband and three beautiful daughters. In the middle of the night after my oncology appointment where I received my official diagnosis, I had the thought, “What if I can take this hit myself and spare the people I love from having to watch me walk through breast cancer?”

With the right question, the answer was immediate. I would do that in a heartbeat.

That framing gave me an enormous amount of peace about the decision. I was being given an incredible opportunity to face a potential cancer diagnosis on my own terms before it had the opportunity to dictate the terms for us.

I chose prophylactic bilateral mastectomies in 2024. I have never regretted choosing surgery.

I knew it would be physically difficult. What is harder to anticipate is the terrain afterwards: pain, altered sensation, nerve symptoms, fatigue, physical limitation, changes in how your body feels to you, and the emotional work of integrating all of it.

I was also not entering that recovery with an otherwise untouched nervous system. I was already living with the effects of amTBI, including reduced stamina, sensory overload, fatigue, and a body that could become overwhelmed much more quickly than it once had.
So recovery was layered. There wasn’t one thing healing at a time.

There was also something profoundly humbling about it. I had spent most of my adult life in environments that rewarded endurance and competence. Suddenly, strength sometimes meant allowing someone else to carry the load or, even harder for me to do — admitting that I had reached my limit for the day.

Many people assume that choosing preventive surgery brings peace of mind, but the reality is often more complex. What was the emotional side of recovery like for you?

There is an assumption that preventive surgery immediately produces peace of mind. There was certainly relief in knowing I had taken a meaningful step to protect my future, but recovery was much more emotionally complicated than that.

I had already learned through melanoma that cancer changes your relationship with certainty. I was incredibly fortunate to have my melanoma caught at Stage 1A, but there is no surgery I can have now that makes future skin-cancer risk disappear. My responsibility is continued surveillance, diligence and showing up every six months.

That creates a different kind of anxiety. There is always an awareness that the next skin check matters. For me, faith has become very intertwined with that process. There is a lot of prayer in learning to be diligent without allowing vigilance to become fear.

The mastectomies were different because there was a tangible action I could take. I could make a very difficult decision and meaningfully reduce one category of risk. But even then, surgery did not create some clean emotional finish line.

Recovery was physically demanding and emotionally layered, and my mTBI made it more complicated. Fatigue, sensory overload, pain and the need to carefully manage how much stimulation my nervous system could tolerate meant that recovery often moved at a pace very different from the pace I wanted.

I have learned that healing and relief are not the same thing. You can be deeply grateful for a decision and still acknowledge that what followed was hard. And you can live responsibly with ongoing risk without letting that risk become the center of your life.

In some ways, these experiences taught me that there are two forms of courage. Sometimes courage is acting decisively when there is something meaningful you can do to change the risk, and sometimes courage is accepting that you cannot control everything — staying vigilant, remaining faithful and continuing to live anyway.

Can you tell us a little about your journey from your career in the CIA to becoming a cancer survivor, previvor and founder of 4R Farm?

At first glance, my former career and 4R Farm probably look like two completely different lives.

I spent nearly two decades serving in demanding environments, including war zones and developing countries, where the mission came first and where you learned to endure a great deal without thinking too much about the long-term cost to your body.

In 2022, I sustained a mild traumatic brain injury. In 2023 came melanoma. In 2024 came Atypical Ductal Hyperplasia and the decision to undergo bilateral prophylactic mastectomies.

It was a very compressed period of learning that the body eventually asks you to account for what it has carried.

The TBI changed how everything that followed was experienced. It left me more easily overwhelmed, more quickly fatigued and more sensitive to sensory input. Then cancer, surgery, and recovery layered additional demands onto a nervous system that was already working very hard to heal.

Leaving a CIA career was a difficult transition in its own right. When you have spent so many years living around mission and service, you feel the absence of that purpose very keenly. The head injury complicated that transition because it changed not just what I could physically do, but it also changed my confidence in what I was capable of doing.

Then came months when surgery made even ordinary usefulness difficult. 4R Farm became part of how I slowly found my footing again.

There is something wonderfully grounding about working with your hands and being accountable to the rhythms of the land, animals and the seasons. The work asks you to be present and intentional. It gave me a way to rebuild purpose at a pace my recovering body could sustain.

Our botanical products came from the same philosophy. I was not interested in creating another beauty brand. I wanted to make hard-working products from recognizable materials- slow-infused herbs, traditional fats and Montana beeswax - that could support people in ordinary life and in the harder seasons of it.

In some ways, the work looks completely different from my former career. In other ways, the values underneath it are remarkably similar: intention, service, being present, and caring about others.

The mission changed. The instinct to serve did not.

What inspired you to start 4R Farm, and how did your personal journey influence the products you create today?

4R Farm didn’t begin as a business plan. It began much more quietly than that.

After decades of service, our family settled in Madison County, Montana, at the base of the Tobacco Root Mountains. There was land to care for, animals to tend, children to raise, and a different rhythm of life to learn.

Long before there was a company, there was simply the desire to live closer to what was real: to know where things came from, to make things well, and to build our lives around stewardship rather than excess and craftsmanship rather than convenience.

The first botanical formulations were not really created with selling them in mind. They came during a long healing season.

After my mastectomies, I was dealing with sensitive healing skin, nerve pain and the limitations of a nervous system already affected by the mTBI. At the same time, a history of exposures and resultant health concerns had made me much more thoughtful about everything I was putting onto my skin.

After years spent in environments where I had very little control over what I was exposed to, I wanted the opposite at home. I wanted to know what was in the products I was using. I wanted ingredients I recognized. I wanted restraint. And I kept encountering a gap.

There were clinical products that served an important purpose but felt completely removed from the experience of comfort and ritual. On the other end of the spectrum were products marketed as “natural” that contained long ingredient lists or made promises with which I was not comfortable. I could not quite find what I was looking for, so I began making it.

I spent time infusing whole botanicals into oils, working with traditional fats and beeswax, and cultivating herbs. I paid attention to how different ingredients behaved, what my own recovering skin could tolerate, and what actually made a difference.

The first formulations were deeply personal. That work eventually became the foundation of our GENTLE Care Collection, which remains the most personal part of what we make. Today, 4R has grown well beyond those original formulations, but the underlying standard remains the same: thoughtful ingredients, intentional design, and products born from real need and made well enough to be trusted.

What I did not expect was how much the process of making would give back to me.

After the TBI had shaken my confidence and surgery had temporarily made me feel anything but useful, working with botanicals and building something tangible allowed confidence to return quietly, in small increments. There was purpose that fit the pace of recovery.

That may be one of the things I love most about 4R now. It grew out of a need for care, but it became a way to serve again.

When developing your products, what unmet needs were you hoping to address for people navigating recovery or wellness?

I kept seeing a false choice between products that felt highly clinical and products that felt purely cosmetic.

There is a large space in between.

People going through recovery still want something beautiful. They still want ritual, comfort and dignity. But they also need products that respect sensitive skin, altered sensation, surgical recovery, fatigue and bodies that may be easily overwhelmed.

I wanted to create products that felt substantial and purposeful without making exaggerated promises.

The goal is not to “fix” someone. It is to give them something thoughtfully made that can support the ordinary work of caring for themselves - protecting dry or stressed skin, caring for healing scars, supporting massage or bodywork, easing into the evening, or simply making a difficult day feel a little gentler.

My TBI added another layer to that philosophy. Recovery is not always just about the surgical site or the diagnosis. Sometimes the nervous system itself has a reduced margin. Light, noise, crowds, fatigue or simply too much activity in one day can change what the body is capable of handling.

That taught me to think about care more broadly: skin, body, fatigue, sensory environment, emotional resilience and the importance of products that ask less of the person using them.

That philosophy ultimately became especially important in developing our GENTLE Care Collection — formulations designed for seasons when skin and body need a more restrained approach to care. The broader 4R formulation philosophy remains rooted in whole plants, slow processes, traditional fats and ingredients chosen by function rather than trend.

How can friends, family and community better support someone navigating difficult decisions around cancer risk, treatment or recovery?

Listen without trying to make the decision for them.

People facing cancer risk are often surrounded by very well-intentioned opinions: what they should do, what someone else would do, whether surgery is too aggressive, whether surveillance is enough.

Ultimately, the person facing that decision has to live in their own body and live with the consequences of whatever path they choose.

I have also learned that none of us gets through these seasons by ourselves.

My husband, Karl, has been extraordinarily steady through all of it. He has had what I can only describe as an almost unblinking willingness to walk into whatever came next with me — the TBI, melanoma, surgeries, recovery, uncertainty, and the ordinary hard days in between. There is enormous grace in knowing that the person beside you is not frightened away by the difficulty of what you are carrying.

I have also been truly fortunate to have incredible support from my three girls, our extended family, friends and a community who love us well.

That matters more than I think people sometimes realize.

Practical support matters tremendously - meals, laundry, driving, animals, children, sitting through appointments, simply showing up. Recovery does not occur in some protected medical bubble. The hundred ordinary responsibilities of life continue even when your body is asking you to stop.

But emotional support can be even simpler.

Sometimes it is understanding that something another person considers routine may not feel routine to you. A six-month skin check may be just another appointment on the calendar to someone else, but there is always a little bit of history walking into that room with me.

Sometimes it is allowing someone to lean on you without making them feel that they have become a burden. And sometimes it is simply remaining present.

The most helpful people are the ones who do not demand that you perform wellness for them. They let you be grateful, frightened, strong, tired, hopeful and uncertain — sometimes all in the same week.

I have been blessed to have people in my life who have given me that kind of room. Being able to lean on them has been critical.

What advice would you give someone who has just learned they are at elevated risk for cancer, whether because of genetics, a precancerous diagnosis or another risk factor?

I would tell anyone entering that world that they do not need to understand everything immediately. That learning to live in the moment is the best grace you can offer yourself.

There is an enormous amount of information coming at you when cancer or elevated risk suddenly enters your life. Give yourself permission to learn slowly enough to actually understand it.

Ask questions. Ask them twice if you need to. Get another opinion. Find physicians who are willing to talk with you not only about statistical risk, but about what each option will mean for your actual life. Having a care team that you trust and genuinely like is critical.

And remember that there is rarely one universally correct emotional response. You can be frightened and grateful. You can feel empowered by a preventive decision and grieve what it costs you. Those things can exist together.

Make room for faith, grief, fear, relief and gratitude to coexist.

I have also learned not to measure courage only by the dramatic decisions.

Melanoma taught me that sometimes courage is very ordinary. It is making the next dermatology appointment. Showing up for the skin check. Waiting for pathology. Praying. Then going home and getting back to living your life.

My breast-cancer-risk journey taught me another form of courage — that sometimes you are given an opportunity to act before disease forces your hand, and taking that step can require surrendering something significant in order to protect something you value even more.

Those are two forms of courage I have come to understand: acting decisively when there is something you can change and learning to live faithfully when there is not.

Neither necessarily feels courageous when you are inside it.

You simply keep going — gathering good information, surrounding yourself with people you trust, making the best decision you can with what you know, and allowing yourself to believe that there is still a full and meaningful life on the other side of whatever comes next.

This article is a collaboration with 4R Farm and is not sponsored.