Womea Keeps Cancer Diagnosis Secret Until After Best Friend’s Wedding

“I’ll never forget that phone call,” she told the Daily Record. “I was getting ready to stay overnight with my best friend before her wedding day and was the only bridesmaid doing this, so I had to be there. As hard as it was, it was the right thing to do.”

While Samantha didn’t share the news with Kara right away, she did tell her husband John. But Samantha ended up telling Kara the heartbreaking news a few days after the wedding.

“She (Kara) said she couldn’t believe how I’d managed to keep it a secret,” Samantha recalled. “I think she understood it had been so important to me that I didn’t burst her happiness bubble.”

“We talk all the time and she’s been a great support all the way through cancer,” Samantha added.

Samantha was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer in October of last year after discovering a lump in her right breast. Once she found the lump, she made an appointment with her general practitioner, and within two weeks she was at the hospital having a mammogram, ultrasound and biopsy to inspect the lump further.

The night before Kara’s wedding, Oct. 14, 2021, was when Samantha got the call. Samantha started chemotherapy shortly after receiving her diagnosis, which she completed on March 9. She’s not preparing for surgery to have the breast tumor removed. After surgery, she’ll need radiation treatment.

She told the Daily Record that one of the hardest things she’s had to deal with during breast cancer treatment is losing her hair.

“My hair was falling out so much that after the second chemotherapy treatment I asked my husband to shave the rest of it off,” she said. “It felt like a chance to take back control from cancer by deciding when I wanted to lose my hair. When my daughter saw me bald for the first time she just hugged me and told me I looked beautiful.”

Coping With Hair Loss

Vivian Ruszkiewicz, a nurse practitioner with OhioHealth, a not-for-profit system of hospitals and health care providers in Columbus, Ohio, previously told SurvivorNet that hair loss is one of the more “distressing” side effects of chemotherapy, a common breast cancer treatment.

“It’s one of the things that people can see from the outside that people may know that you are ill,” she said, “and that poses a lot of stress for patients.”

Chemotherapy Side Effects — Hair Loss

There are a large number of chemotherapy treatments that cause hair loss, but not all of them, she said. Others cause hair thinning. Ruszkiewicz stressed that if you are concerned about your hair, talk to your doctor or nurse practitioner about what to expect from your chemotherapy treatment.

She added that some people who only experience partial hair loss still choose to wear a wig, like many people who lose their hair completely, before chemotherapy so that they are prepared, “so they can feel more like themselves during chemotherapy.”

Ruszkiewicz said that hair loss begins about three to four weeks after your first chemotherapy treatment; you could start to see some hair regrowth about four to six weeks after your last treatment.

“Then it will kind of continue from there, as long as you aren’t being treated with another medication that might cause hair loss,” she says. “But in general, most people do have a resumption of hair growth, and can slowly over time put away their wigs and scarves, and are able to kind of go back to what they expected in terms of their hair growth.”

In other words, remember that hair loss is temporary!

Understanding Triple-Negative Breast Cancer

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Triple-negative breast cancer is one of the most aggressive forms of the disease and accounts for about 20% of all breast cancers.

What is Triple-Negative Breast Cancer?

It is called triple-negative because it doesn’t have any of the main drivers of breast cancer — the estrogen receptor, the progesterone receptor or the HER2 receptor — and consequently doesn’t respond to treatments that target them. The main treatment for this type of breast cancer is chemotherapy, immunotherapy or participation in clinical trials.

If a patient has metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (it remains unclear what stage Samantha’s cancer was when she was diagnosed), the usual first line of therapy is chemotherapy. There are different chemotherapy options depending on the burden of disease, which refers to how sick someone is with their disease. Triple-negative breast cancer is usually responsive to chemotherapy.

“If the disease burden is not too great, meaning that a woman doesn’t have a lot of symptoms, we can often start with oral chemotherapy,” Dr. Elizabeth Comen, a breast oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, tells SurvivorNet.

In certain instances, a patient will become resistant to their first line of therapy and will have to switch to another chemotherapy. There are many different chemotherapies that are used for triple-negative breast cancer. There are also different clinical trials that may be available to patients.

Contributing: SurvivorNet staff reports

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