A revelation

I have some big news to share with you.  This is probably not news to most of my readers, but since I can never be positive about who is reading my blog, I'm not sure that everyone knows. 

I was diagnosed with breast cancer last year.  I am a breast cancer survivor.  When I was diagnosed and at the very beginning of everything, I had a lot of concerns about my privacy.  I also had no idea just how much and for how long this would impact my life.  I was not forthcoming in my blog because, honestly, it was just easier to not talk about it. I promise that I have had a tremendous level of support since the very beginning.  I have also had a "secret" group in Facebook where I have updated everyone and shared everything that was happening.  I've considered taking all of those posts and turning them into a public blog so that I can somehow be helpful to others.

The best way that I can think to incorporate this information is to cut and paste the post I shared on my general Facebook page in July (not in the secret group, which I started in December).  This information is a little outdated because I wrote it two months ago.  I've been done with radiation for over a month now. Now that this is public on the blog, I can start including alllllllll of the pictures that I haven't been using and can be completely open about everything to bring you up to date. 

This is the post.  The pictures are below it. 

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I am sure you are reading this as quickly as you can because you just saw the (admittedly shocking) pictures of me below. Please let me explain and, although this will be long, please read to the end. It has taken me a while to get to the point that I feel comfortable discussing this with more than my closest friends and family, so I hope you will forgive me for keeping an incredibly difficult part of my life private for so long. I promise you that I have had an amazing support system since the beginning.

For those of you who know me well, you are likely to agree that I am a bit of an overachiever. I’m also protective of my family and our privacy. Because of this you can probably imagine how difficult it is to tell you that I was diagnosed with Stage 2B breast cancer on November 28, 2018, two months after I turned 39.

I found a lump in my left breast in mid November and through a series of appointments (imaging and a biopsy) it was determined to be invasive ductal carcinoma. I had a double modified radical mastectomy on January 14th. During that operation, cancer was found to have metastasized to my left axillary lymph nodes. As part of the mastectomy, my surgeon did a complete lymph node dissection and removed 24 nodes. Two of them were cancerous and cancer had also spread to areas outside of the nodes. I had immediate reconstruction of my breasts using implants as soon as the mastectomy part of the operation was complete. My healing on the left breast (the cancer side) did not go well right from the start. I had another surgery three weeks after the mastectomy to place a chemotherapy port in my chest and I started 16 weeks of chemo a week after that, on February 15th.

At the end of February I had emergency surgery on my left breast to remove necrotic tissue and to try to fix the mastectomy flap that had opened. It lasted two weeks before the flap busted open again and I had another emergency surgery where my surgeon removed the entire implant. I thought the mastectomy was difficult to recover from, until I experienced dose dense chemotherapy while still healing from a double mastectomy. My first four chemo treatments were a combination of Adriamycin (the most powerful chemo drug ever developed) and Cytoxan. There were truly days I thought I was not going to survive and that I was going to leave my husband widowed and my children motherless before I turned 40. My last four treatments were with the chemo drug Taxol, which caused less nausea but came with serious nerve pain and peripheral neuropathy. I finished chemo on May 31st, had another surgery to remove my chemo port on July 1st, and started six weeks of daily radiation treatments on July 8th.

One of the reasons why I have decided to go public with my diagnosis is because I feel an incredible calling to be a champion and a voice for the community of young women facing breast cancer. Please don’t skip the statistics I am about to throw at you. Please read them.

• Breast cancer in young women is rare. Only about 4% of breast cancer diagnoses are in women younger than 40.

• In young women, breast cancer tends to be diagnosed in its later stages and is more aggressive.

• Young women have a higher mortality rate and higher risk of metastatic recurrence (return of breast cancer in areas beyond the breast).

• There is no effective breast cancer screening tool for women under 40, most of whom have dense breast tissue that prevents routine mammograms from being a useful screening tool.

• Each year, approximately 70,000 men and women age 15 to 39 are diagnosed with cancer in the US. Breast cancer is the most common cancer for women in this age group.

• Nearly 80% of young women diagnosed with breast cancer find their breast abnormality themselves.

• Compared to older women, young women generally face more aggressive cancers and lower survival rates. More and more evidence tells us that breast cancer before age 40 differs biologically from the cancer faced by older women.

• Because breast cancer occurs at a much lower rate among young women than in our older counterparts, young women remain highly underrepresented in many research studies.

Breast cancer has taken over my entire life for eight months. It will continue to be a part of my life every single day for the rest of my life. This is my reality. This is my family’s reality. My cancer was estrogen and progesterone positive, HER2 negative, and Grade III, which is the most aggressive grade a cancer can be. Due to all of this, I have had, and will continue to have, the most aggressive treatment possible. I have three weeks of daily radiation treatments left. When that is done I am having surgery to remove my ovaries. Since my tumor was estrogen and progesterone positive, removing my ovaries, combined with daily hormone therapy for the next decade, will reduce the risk of cancer recurrence and metastatic cancer growth. After I am healed from my ovary surgery and am healed from radiation, I will be undergoing multiple reconstruction surgeries (three to four operations) in order to fix my chest. I have decided to have the remaining implant removed and my highly specialized surgeon will be using my own tissue and fat to create new breasts. I have already been attending physical therapy for months and have months of sessions ahead of me. This is due in part to the double mastectomy, but also because I am at a very high risk of lymphedema (swelling in my arm caused by a blockage in the lymphatic system most commonly caused by lymph node removal or damage due to cancer treatment) because all of my lymph nodes were removed on the left.

I was not ready, physically or emotionally, to have everyone know about me when I was diagnosed, or after my mastectomy, or during the grueling weeks of chemo. I didn’t want people to know about my pain, my hair loss, my nausea, my fatigue. It was an incredibly private and trying time in our lives. In addition to being a cancer patient, I had to be, and wanted to be, a wife and a mother, a daughter and a sister, and a friend. I missed six weeks of work after my mastectomy and hired people to cover for me, but I continued to work during chemo because I own my own speech therapy company and had a contract to fulfill. I had to reduce my work hours and even then, some days were almost impossible.

I am still not ready for everyone to know about my diagnosis because it feels awkward and uncomfortable. I will tell you why I’m doing this though. I recently learned about a woman here in the Phoenix area that died in May of metastasized breast cancer. She had the exact same cancer that I have. She was three months younger than me. I have to do this for her. I have to do this for me. I have to do this for every woman who is diagnosed with breast cancer before they are even expected to have a mammogram. I will be 40 in September. The age at which women are advised to get their first mammogram will be nine months after my breasts were cut off and burned in an incinerator. I don’t know if my story or my advice or my guidance will help a single person in this world, but I have to try. I will try. I will do my best to honor every single woman cruelly taken from this world before she was ready.

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The hair loss after chemo started was rapid. It is growing back now, but I had been bald since early March. There are lots of pictures of me in bed because, well, I've spent A LOT of time in bed. 

A picture from each one of my eight chemotherapy treatments. I was straight up angry (and SCARED) at the first one 

 Breast cancer will never not be a part of who I am, so we decided to fully show that with family pictures on June 1st

My favorite is when people who don't know me compliment my "hair". I love to say, "thanks, it's totally a wig!"