Invasive lobular breast cancer: Those four words set Anderson on the path to the place where she stands today. Spoken by her community doctor, they told her she harbored an uncommon form of breast cancer that begins in the milk-producing glands, or lobules, and spreads to surrounding tissue. The recommendation: immediate mastectomy, possibly both breasts.
The Breast Care Center’s philosophy is to live fully, not to define yourself by the diagnosis. Tomorrow’s UCSF hospitals will make that possible for others, as UCSF did for me.
But Anderson hesitated. “I wanted to capture all my options,” she says. So she bought time with a lumpectomy and chemotherapy while talking to other breast cancer survivors, who pointed her toward UCSF. Even though she belonged to an HMO, she came in for an MRI and a second opinion. “What would you do in my place?” she asked her UCSF doctor. The answer, outlining the full risks of a cancer destined to spread, gave Anderson the confidence to return to her HMO hospital to have one breast removed and the healthy one screened and treated as necessary.
Today, Anderson sees the value of peer-to-peer support and expert consultation from the other side of the breast cancer equation: She’s now a patient care liaison at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. As someone who’s walked miles in a cancer survivor’s shoes, she understands the complex emotions her patients experience: anger, frustration, depression. She offers compassion without judgment. “I don’t question their feelings or stop them from having their own experience,” Anderson says. And she knows the value of objective, science-based information, delivered by people whose knowledge gives you confidence, when you’re making life-or-death decisions about your body.
Practicing the advice she dispenses, Anderson has transferred her own follow-up to the UCSF Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center. There, a support team diagnosed and treated the fatigue and shortness of breath that have plagued Anderson since chemo, and gave her the courage to seek breast reconstruction surgery five years after cancer. Now, she’s back to tackling the tough trails that wind through her Marin County neighborhood. And she is there to counsel women on their own journeys out of breast cancer. Anderson has hiked the path to the forest’s edge and savored the view from the hill’s crest. And in the struggle, she has found strength to share.
