Health decisions sometimes boil down to insurance coverage and job stability. Just as important are individual lifestyle choices and a factor that you can’t control – family history.
Just as you inherit your physical traits and characteristics from relatives – the same is true of risks for some medical conditions, including breast cancer.
Jacqueline Jennings was 36 when she a lump in her right breast. She wasn’t a drinker or a smoker and had no known history of cancer in her family. In 2003, the company she was working for (Nordyne) was moving to Tennessee. Jennings went to get a health checkup before her insurance ran out.
“I found this soft lump in my breast – in my right breast. So I got it checked out and this was my doctor many years…and she said, ‘No it wasn’t what you think it is, Jackie,’” Jennings recalls. “And she felt it, but she said if it hurt or felt bigger to come back.”
Jackie waited – just long enough to get cancer in both breasts.
“Five months down the line, it starts to get big, so I’ve noticed things in my breast. So I went to the free clinic in May (2004) – People’s in the City,” she said. “It was at the beginning of the week, like on Monday. By that Thursday, I was at Siteman’s Cancer Center.
“They took the biopsy and everything … and it came back and I kind of knew it,” Jennings said. “I was just scared and I didn’t want to face it. Not only the right breast – the left breast had started to look funny too.”
In a matter of months, Jennings’ health had changed dramatically.
“The left breast…that breast was hard, and it started to look – the texture of it was like an orange. And it was getting red,” She describes. “So I sort of knew it, but I just didn’t want to face it.
“When they found out and I knew it was cancer, I was in my third stage—that quick,” she said. “And I was diagnosed with an inflammatory breast cancer.”
Inflammatory breast cancer, or IBC, causes the skin of the breast to become reddish purple, or to look bruised, swollen and feel warm to the touch. Redness and warmth occurs because cancer cells block the lymph vessels (a fluid drainage system) in the skin. The ridged, pitted orange-like appearance comes from fluid build-up and breast swelling. Oftentimes, breast lumps are not found in IBC. Although Jennings’ breast wasn’t painful, other symptoms include heaviness, burning, aching, increased breast size, tenderness, or a nipple that is facing inward.
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) says these symptoms usually develop quickly –over a period of weeks or months. Swollen lymph nodes may also be present under the arm, above the collarbone, or in both places. NCI says IBC accounts for 1 to 5 percent of all breast cancer cases in the U.S. and it tends to be diagnosed in younger women compared and occurs more frequently and at a younger age in African Americans.
With cancer in both breasts, three kids, a mortgage and unemployment running out, what did she do? Jackie went job-hunting.
“I went out and got a job at Express Scripts … I told my doctors I found a job [and asked] could I start this treatment a couple of months later,” she said.
That’s when doctors had to sit her down for a reality check.
“I just went ahead and called Express Scripts and told them I couldn’t work and I did tell them that I had cancer. They were sympathetic with me and said, ‘When you get well, come back to us.’”
Jennings’ cancer treatments included a double mastectomy, chemo, radiation.
Some studies have shown an association between family history and inflammatory breast cancer. Being from a family of five sisters, Jennings had plenty of support, but her breast cancer diagnosis also meant her sisters could be at risk too.
“After my deal with the cancer, all my sisters…they had tumors without knowing, but their tumors came out to be not cancerous,” Jennings said. They found it just in time and I got the genetic testing.”
Jennings said she and her sisters all have a hereditary gene mutation that makes them at greater risk for breast cancer. With two daughters her own and now an identified family risk factor, they will keep a close watch.
“They told me to – because I’ve had it and that we are carriers… start early with them,” she said.
The National Cancer Institute says approximately 60 percent of women with an inherited mutation in BRCA1 or BRCA2 will develop breast cancer sometime during their lives, compared with about 12 percent of women in the general population. Women with inherited BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutations also have an increased risk of ovarian cancer. Researchers site several other gene mutations, including TP53, PTEN/MMAC1, STK11/LKB1, CDH1, CHEK2, ATM, MLH1, and MSH2 as being associated with hereditary breast and/or ovarian tumors.
Jennings was treated at Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center, where Susan G. Komen for the Cure supports treatment and prevention at Siteman’s Breast Health Center with screenings and three breast health navigators who accompany patients, from a suspicious finding throughout treatment.
Just this year, Komen awarded $2.8 million in grants to 29 programs at local health care facilities and non-profits in the St. Louis area for breast cancer care.
“Our focus remains on making certain that no woman goes without screening, treatment or care for breast cancer,” said Helen Chesnut, executive director of Komen St. Louis. “Every day, here in St. Louis, we are working to save lives and empower women to know their risk, get screened, know what is normal and make healthy lifestyle choices. We are dedicated to the promise of ending breast cancer forever.”
It works toward fulfilling that promise is through supporting medical research at institutions globally. More than $900,000 of locally-raised Komen funds went to cancer research programs at Washington University School of Medicine.
If you have a lump or anything suspicious, keep pushing to get answers. Why wait on cancer? Cancer is not going to wait for you.
“It’s been bad, but it’s good,” Jennings can now say. “I am doing well. I have healed.”
Although she did not go back to Express Scripts, she is working again and completing reconstruction.
For further information, contact Komen St. Louis at 314-569-3900 or www.komenstlouis.org ; the National Cancer Institute at www.cancer.gov or the American Cancer Society at www.cancer.org.
