A personal battle
On Oct. 14, 2010, freshman nursing major Megan Perry got a phone call that would change her life forever. In June of that year, Perry had found a lump in her breast and had an ultrasound performed. Doctors reassured her that it was nothing. However, three months later, it had grown larger and had become sore. Perry decided to see a surgeon. She had always performed regular breast self-exams because her aunt and great-aunt had both been diagnosed with breast cancer. After meeting with the surgeon, he suggested she get a mammogram and then a biopsy.
“After my very first ultrasound in June, I was told it was just fibrous tissue [and]not to worry…I was too young to have breast cancer,” Perry said.
A week after her biopsy, Perry got the call while in class.
“When he [the surgeon] told me it was cancer, at first I was like, ‘Ok,’ I was pretty sure that was going to be the result because I just had a gut feeling,” Perry said. “It actually hit me when I called my mom to tell her. And at that time I was feeling scared, sad, angry and confused all at once.”
The first week after getting the results, Perry was busy having tests run, having a port placed for chemotherapy and having meetings with her oncologist; a doctor specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.
“I knew I had the right doctor when after he went through everything with me, I pulled out my list of questions and he had already answered all of them,” Perry said.
According to Perry, she went through chemotherapy. The first eight weeks she did Cytoxan, an anti-cancer drug, and Adriaycin, a chemotherapy drug. The next eight weeks she underwent Herceptin, a drug used for breast cancer patients, and Taxol, another anti-cancer drug. After chemotherapy, she underwent a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on her breast to determine whether the cancer was still present.
“The first eight weeks were pretty rough, but the last eight weeks were so much easier,” Perry said. “I still have a long journey until I’m recovered.”
The MRI proved that the chemotherapy had done nothing about the cancer, and the surgeons waited four weeks before doing a mastectomy, the removal of one or both breasts. On March 18, Perry underwent a modified radical mastectomy, in which her entire left breast was removed, and radiation is to begin in a month from that date. In another year, she will undergo a mastectomy of her right breast and then a reconstructive surgery.
Perry was diagnosed with Stage 2B Invasive Ductal Carcinoma. She took the BRCA1 gene test, a test done for those with strong family histories of breast and ovarian cancers, and determined that her cancer was not genetic. Perry said she urges women young and old to take breast cancer seriously, even if it doesn’t run in the family. She said that breast-self exams are extremely important and should be done monthly to try to catch cancer at an early stage.
“Cancer doesn’t care about your age or ethnicity,” Perry said. It can happen to anyone.”
Perry’s busy college life completely changed to sitting at home and visiting doctors on a regular basis. She was in her first semester of clinicals in nursing school at the University of Indianapolis when she had to take a medical stop out. She hopes to return to school in the fall, as long as no complications arise.
The biggest struggles during treatments were having gasoline and food money. Perry stressed that volunteering to take someone to their treatments is a great help.
“I think if someone could start some kind of program with making healthy lunches to provide during treatment [that] would be an awesome thing,” Perry said. “I also feel that survivors should try to be there to help encourage those that are going through this that there is a happy ending to it all.”
She plans to return to St. Vincent Breast Center as much as possible to help encourage other patients.
“Being around others going through the exact same thing helped a lot also,” Perry said. “It showed me that I wasn’t alone.”
