Yes, you have cancer.

I already mentioned in my PSA post that they found my breast cancer when I went in for a routine mammogram. I probably am going to overshare here, but who cares?! I have dense breast tissue so I am not a stranger to the call back for a follow up after my regular mammogram. Honestly, I dreaded everytime I went to get my scan done, but I did it because while breast cancer did not run in my family, other cancers (melanoma and prostate) did.

Well, the joy of dense breast tissue is that you regularly will be asked to come back for a follow up ultrasound to check out something they could not get a good look at with a regular mammogram. You get to sit — shivering — in your little gown in the “second” waiting room (why are they always so freaking cold?!) with all the other women sitting there silently, averting eye contact, while you and they worry about what that ultrasound is going to show.

For many years, I have left the imaging center with a skip in my step when the radiologist comes back to say everything looks OK. This time that didn’t happen. Instead, I knew there was a problem the moment the radiologist walked into the room. She probably should not play poker as I took one look at her face and my heart skipped a beat. She told me I needed a biopsy in two places on my right breast and could I do it today? Uh. yeah. I am not about to go home and stew in my dread any longer than necessary.

I came back the same day. Little did I know but there is a “third” waiting room for those of us unlucky enough to warrant the dreaded biopsy. If you think the fear is palpable in that second waiting room, wait until you get a load of this room (I write this hoping NONE of you actually have to go to this room). Fear is a thick fog in the third waiting room. As the radiologist was prepping the site for my biopsies, I asked her if there was any chance these growths might be benign — hey, I was trying to be optimistic. She looked me dead in the eye and told me that she would be very surprised if it was benign.

THAT WAS THE MOMENT. For those of you who have experienced this already, you know what I am talking about. That was the moment when everything kind of froze and I could feel fear — cold fear (yes, it really is cold) — wash right through my body. In a single moment, I realized that my life and my family’s life was not going to be the same. I was not going to skip out of the imaging center, feeling lucky, and go on as usual.

Let’s just say that those four days waiting for the biopsy to come back felt like four years. I am not proud. I wallowed. I came home from the biopsy and went to bed IN THE DAYTIME. Ben, our 16 year old, came home from school (this is pre-pandemic) and knew something was wrong. Let me just say that it is not a normal Thursday when Dad is home from work and Mom is in bed. We are not low key people. You could say that Chris and I are work-a-holics. I’m stealing this line from someone when I say that “Stress is my Caffeine.” My family gives me endless crap because I do not stop. If I am not working, I am cleaning, cooking, volunteering, gardening, exercising, out with friends and/or family, or nagging my family to do stuff. Chris is similar (not the nagging part — he is the nice parent).

So, Ben comes home and asks — quite reasonably — what is going on? At this point, we have a choice. We could lie and say everything is OK. Mom is just not feeling well. But, I am a terrible liar. Seriously, I am the worst. Try as I might, all of my emotions play out over my face. (This is not a good thing, by the way, when you are sitting in meetings and someone is saying something that you think is dumb/wrong/asinine/etc.) So, we go with the truth: Mom may have breast cancer. She just had a biopsy. Ben took this all in stride. He was amazing. I was crying — ugly crying — and he just said that if turns out to be breast cancer, he knew I would beat it. He said: “Mom, you are a fighter. You are one of the strongest people I know and you have this.” This just made me cry harder because I was so struck by the fact that Chris and I have produced such a loving, caring and strong human being.

That weekend Samantha, our daughter, came home for Spring Break from Northeastern University. We decided to keep quiet for a day so she could enjoy at least one full day home before we dropped the Cancer Bomb on her head. She was just as amazing as her brother. She cried a little, but she said the same exact thing. Wow.

Four days after the biopsy, my regular doctor called and asked, “are you sitting down?” At this point, I had already processed — to a certain extent — what was about to come next.

Doctor: “Yes, you have breast cancer. In fact, you have two cancers: DCIS (basically, an early type of cancer that has not busted out of a duct yet so it is not invasive) and an invasive breast cancer (the kind that has busted out of the duct and could be elsewhere in the body).”

Me: “Two cancers? Seriously.” At this point, I have two lines of thought going on in my head. First: Of course, I have two cancers. I am an overachiever. (This is me trying to make me laugh). Second: Are you sh#tting me? Two? I don’t have time for this. I have a family, a new business, and a mom living with me while I figure out what to do with her house, cars, twenty five years of stuff.

Later that afternoon, the full report came back. Not only did I have two types of cancer, my invasive breast cancer is Triple Positive. Now, normally, you hear “triple positive” and you think that maybe you have hit the jackpot. You know, it is like the slot machine you play in the Las Vegas airport when you put in your dollar and pull the lever and three clovers or stars or whatever show up and you hear the ding-ding-dinging of “WINNER.” Yeah. That is NOT what happens here. Instead, you google “triple positive breast cancer” and start reading about how the third part of the positive ain’t so positive.

So, let me explain about what type of cancer I have. First, some breast cancers are sensitive to hormones — estrogen and progesterone — and some are not (hormone receptor negative). My invasive cancer is sensitive to both: Estrogen receptor positive and Progesterone receptor positive. If I had stopped there, that would not be bad as these cancers are very responsive to chemotherapy. But . . . Nooooooo . . . my body has to go the extra mile and be HER2 positive, which makes me triple positive. HER2 positive means that my cancer cells have too many copies of the HER2 gene, which means that it produces too much of a growth promoting protein called HER2. Yes, my cancer is supercharged. However, I am very lucky because there has been a lot of progress made in fighting this type of complication with drugs that are targeted at turning off the HER2 protein, thus slowing down the growth so we can kill those cancer cells.

So, turning back to my googling session, I want to make a note here that I think my husband, Chris, will both appreciate and find ironic given my overuse of WebMD in general. USE GOOGLE WITH CAUTION. Seriously, before I got into see my new cancer doctors, I was a hot mess. I overdid it in the googling. It was like taking a drug that I knew was not good for me, but I could not stop. I was up late a night reading medical journal articles that I really had no business reading right off the bat. I consider myself an intelligent human being, but a law school degree does not give you the necessary knowledge to understand fully the nuances of cancer BEFORE you actually talk to a doctor.

Once I got my cancer diagnosis, I kicked it into high gear. I was able to get myself into the UCD Comprehensive Cancer Center where I have been lucky enough to have a team of top-notch doctors join me in my fight to kill EVERY SINGLE CANCER CELL IN MY BODY DEAD. They quickly scheduled me into A LOT of scans to make sure the cancer was confined to my right breast (more on that later) and mapped out a strategy of treating me with 18 weeks of chemotherapy followed by a double mastectomy. They call this: neoadjuvant chemotherapy. They are going to hit my cancer hard with drugs — a mix of Taxotere + Carboplatin + Herceptin + Perjeta — called TCHP. The T and the C are the cancer killers and the H and P are targeted at turning off that pesky HER2 protein. What comes after the chemotherapy and mastectomy will depend on what my doctors find when they do the surgery.

It is funny the things that you focus on once you have been told you have cancer. Lying in bed before I go to sleep, I now count the things for which I am grateful. Waking up in the morning, if I have had a good night sleep, I lay there for a moment enjoying feeling good because I know that I might not feel that way once I start treatment. I am savoring foods that I enjoy because I might not taste things the same when I am in treatment. When taking walks with my friends (now 6 feet apart) and family, I try to focus on the moment — enjoying the sunshine, literally smelling the flowers, and watching the birds. I have come to realize that I am a very lucky person. I have an amazing family, friends who are right there by my side giving me and my family so much support, and work that inspires me to get up every day and work hard. I know that the next 6-12 months could be the hardest time of my life, but I am confident that I will triumph over this nasty invader in my body.