Laura's Cancer Story
From Diagnosis to Hope: A Cancer Journey at Baptist Health Hardin
I have been married to my husband for thirty four years. We have two sons. We have one grandson. We're an empty nester with six dogs now.
We do a trip of a lifetime every year. Because you never know how long your lifetime's gonna be. It was March twenty twenty two. I had a abnormal mammogram. Ended up having a biopsy maybe the first week of April twenty twenty two. It was a Thursday afternoon. I was out driving and I got a phone call from my nurse practitioner's office and she said, I just want to tell you that your biopsy came back and it was positive for cancer.
And I'm like, What? When your first inclination when you have cancer in your body is, Just take them off. Just get rid of it. Get rid of it. I don't want to have any cancer in my body.
Baptist Health Hardin gave me a lot of options, and I felt comfortable with those options. Went through four sessions of chemo, which were three weeks apart. Then afterwards, about six weeks later, I had surgery, had a lumpectomy.
Everything came back contained except for one millimeter of possible DCIS, which is precancerous. I was really scared about the whole radiation thing.
I approach things in a very systematic way when I explain why we're doing something.
And when people know the why, the how becomes less intimidating.
When they understand the risks of not doing something, they understand that the road to getting to where they need to be isn't such a bad thing. And by the time they meet me, many patients have already gone through something that's pretty scary. In her case, she'd already been through surgery.
Doctor Porter was as calm and as patient as he could be with me.
When I first met Laura, she was optimistic. She had hope, which is really, really important in anyone's cancer journey. When we deliver radiation, we deliver a low enough dose to allow normal tissue to be able to repair, but a high enough dose to where we can kill cancer cells when that dose accumulates over the course of four weeks or so.
So for four weeks, I went for radiation every single day. Everybody was just so kind and I just felt like, you know, we were family.
Radiation plus breast conserving therapy is equivalent to undergoing a mastectomy. And so we were instrumental in being able to help not only her oncologic outcome, which is decreasing the likelihood of cancer coming back, but the ability of her to, keep her breasts. And so that was a goal of treatment.
By then my hair was growing back in. I kind of felt like I was on the other side at that point. When they told me that I would be going to the lymphedema clinic, I said, we're not really removing that many lymphs. I went and she said, I'm going to see you for the next five years.
Well, I feel like Tara's a friend. She was able to educate a lot of people. She educated me, which I thought, I'm not going to have it, and we do. She said, From now on, anytime you travel or you're going to be sedentary for more than a few hours, I want you to wear a sleeve.
I said, What happens if somebody can't afford a sleeve? How much would it cost for you to keep four or five of each sleeve in stock?
And she said, Probably about five thousand dollars and I thought, I bet I could raise five thousand dollars. We ended up raising thirty seven thousand dollars that went the Lymphedema Clinic. They have a really valuable place in our cancer world there.
You know, everybody from, you know, the front desk to the techs to the nurses to the physicians and the physician's assistant, you know, were great. They were great. And they treated me like a person. I wasn't just a number coming in there. I feel like the standard of care here was as good as I was going to get anywhere. And at Baptist Health Hardin, I'm close to home.
The team here at Baptist Health Hardin is absolutely outstanding. I put our team up against any team in the country. And this is a patient centered practice. And that's not just within radiation oncology, it's within our entire oncology program.
I think you just have to talk to people. You have to talk to people because otherwise it's a big scary disease. And I think that Baptist Health Hardin really helped make that journey a lot easier. I think I actually have a better quality of life than I did before because I don't take it for granted.