I found out I had breast cancer because of a wild dream that woke me up in the middle of the night. In it, I was urged to schedule a screening so I could find out what was wrong. At first, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. But when I woke my husband to tell him, I felt a horrible itch on my left breast. As I scratched, I noticed a lump.
I’d just had my annual breast screening a few months earlier, and everything looked normal, but in that moment, I knew something wasn’t right. I was 36 and had been getting annual screenings since my mid-20s because my mom and my aunt carry the BRCA2 gene, which I knew could increase my risk of breast cancer. I found out a year earlier, when I was 35, that I had the BRCA2 gene as well.
The day after the dream, I went to see our family physician. She said I didn’t need another MRI because I’d just had one and was young and healthy. But I pushed for it, saying I felt something and really wanted it checked. This time, it was abnormal, so they ordered a mammogram, and I was then told that it looked like breast cancer. They biopsied two areas—the lump itself and a lymph node that looked suspicious on the mammogram. The results confirmed that I had Stage 2B hormone-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer. [Editor’s note: Being HER2-negative means the cancer cells have a normal amount of a protein called HER2. While that rules out certain types of targeted treatments, it also means the cancer may be generally less aggressive.]
I was in absolute shock at how quickly I went from a normal screening to Stage 2 cancer. The day I was diagnosed, my husband was on his way to Iraq to celebrate the Assyrian New Year. I reached him as soon as he landed, and he got on the next flight back to our Chicago suburb. I have two teenage stepsons who live in California, so I called them to share the news, and then told my six-year-old son, who I always say is a 60-year-old man trapped in a 6-year-old’s body. He understood, and what a little man he was in taking care of me through all of this.
Most of the hospitals that I got opinions from told me that I needed to do chemotherapy first to shrink the lump, then do a double mastectomy, and come back later on to do breast reconstruction. As someone who’s afraid of needles, this was an absolute nightmare for me, so I kept searching for other opinions. My dad ended up calling the breast surgeon my mom had gone to after she was diagnosed with breast cancer—Dr. David Winchester at City of Hope, a cancer research and treatment center in Chicago. We went in to see him, and he told me he could do the double mastectomy with reconstruction all on the same day. It’s been a year since that procedure, and since then, I’ve also completed radiation. I go in monthly to get a shot called Lupron that shuts off my ovaries and temporarily puts me into a medically induced menopause-like state. I also take a daily pill called letrozole. It lowers levels of estrogen, which fuels my type of cancer; I’ll stay on it for five years.
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