Love Island's Sharon Gaffka had a cancer scare aged 19

'Love Island' star Sharon Gaffka had a breast cancer scare when she was 19.

The 26-year-old civil servant - who took part in the seventh series of the ITV2 dating show last year - is raising awareness for the disease and the signs to check for and has admitted she could have been in a "lot of trouble" if the lump she had found turned out to be "more sinister".

She told The Sun Online: "My mum [Linda] had cancer, and you know, I had my own breast cancer scare when I was 19.

"So, for me, it was really important to raise awareness because if I didn't know what to look for, and I didn't know what was abnormal or normal for me, then had it been something more sinister than it ended up being, I could have been in a lot of trouble because I couldn't spot the signs early."

"I think people have said that with breast cancer, your partner tends to find it before you do, just because they're paying more attention.

"I find that young women or anybody, there's a stigma about checking your chest or some who find it weird. So I want to take that stigma away."

Sharon felt discomfort between her breast and underarm and it turned out she had a "solid lump of scar tissue" from an injury.

She continued: "I remember feeling discomfort in my right breast between my breast and my underarm. I didn't know that that was a potential spot.

"People automatically assume that breast cancer is literally in breast tissue, as opposed to like maybe in your collarbones, or in your underarms.

"I basically had a solid lump of tissue, and it was really painful, even just to move around in general life."

The brunette beauty found her lump just as her mum finished her own cancer treatment and has previously lost grandparents to the disease.

She added: "Yeah you know, I think I found it pretty much the same time that my mum was finishing her treatment.

"So knowing how quickly my mum caught on that she wasn't well, kind of pushed me to go check myself, so I went to a GP pretty quickly.

"I was very lucky to find that it was just it was basically like scar tissue, I've injured myself and my body was trying to fix it.

"If I didn't know that, that was a part of my body that could potentially have breast cancer."