Everything I thought I knew about breast cancer was wrong
I grew up in a small town outside of Austin, Texas, called Wimberley, on a small chicken farm with my extended family. We had a family band. My father is a bluegrass musician, and my mother is a writer. They’re hippies, but I always wanted to be an actress, and my life plan was always to move to Los Angeles to be a sitcom star. So I got my degree, moved to Los Angeles in 2014, and shortly after that, I was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic breast cancer. I was only 26, had no family history, and had always been healthy. It was already incurable. It was really, “You have two to five years to live.”
When I found out, I was on my break between working two shifts at a fancy restaurant in Los Angeles, doing my best to pursue my dream of acting. I had an agent, I was going to auditions all the time, and I was doing stand-up and stand-up comedy. I’ve been busy, busy, busy. It was a guy I had been dating for about a year (who I had just moved in with) who noticed a lump in my breast. I wasn’t worried. My older sister had a benign tumor removed, so I thought it was the same thing. I called the office of a gynecologist I’d been seeing for years, but saw a different doctor because my doctor was out of town. They told me not to worry, it was just a lump, and I was too young to have breast cancer. I believed them, because who was I, with my acting degree, to question the doctor?
But not only did the lump not go away, when I turned to the side and looked in the mirror, I could see it clearly; He was growing up. I went to another doctor, and he told me the same thing, but I started to feel weird, like no one was really listening to me. I was prescribed an ultrasound, but my insurance wouldn’t cover it because I was so young and had no family history. The third doctor I went to helped me fight my insurance and get one. By then, it had been nine months since we found the nugget. All that time, I was just trying to be a good patient. The biggest health issue I’ve ever had was getting chlamydia once in college, or having my tonsils removed. Every time I went to the doctor, he made me feel better. I had no reason not to trust what doctors said. But during the nine months it took for her to be diagnosed, the breast cancer had already spread to her liver. It was widespread. I was like, “What? What do you mean it’s too late? What do you mean, I didn’t catch the disease earlier? I’ve been doing this for nine months.”
I was still processing this while driving, that same day, to the oncologist they recommended. Again, I was a good patient; I just went with him. But this oncologist wasn’t great. He kept telling me I was going to die and that I needed to accept it, and he shared terrible statistics. I eventually walked out of that office and said to my mom — who had moved to Los Angeles and stayed in an Airbnb to support me — “I never want to go back there again.” Instead, I went and got a second opinion and a third opinion. Here’s a piece of advice I give to people who are newly diagnosed: Don’t let anyone rush you or tell you that you don’t have time to get more opinions and figure out the best treatment plan for you. The time you spend now can add time to your life later. Treating cancer is an art, and it is a science, yes, but it is also an art.