Stephanie Smith survived breast cancer | Chemotherapy | Vermont Cancer Support Network

DESCRIPTION

In today’s @CancerInterviews podcast, Stephanie Smith tells host Bruce Morton how she survived breast cancer.  She was pregnant when she discovered a lump on her breast.  This led to a biopsy, which revealed a 4cm tumor.  After a difficult chemotherapy regimen, Stephanie achieved survivorship.  Her energy level is decreased, but otherwise, she says her health is very close to what it was before her diagnosis.

Stephanie Smith of Montpelier, Vermont was the one who discovered what turned out to be a diagnosis of breast cancer.  She was pregnant with a son and only a few weeks from having him.  As a result, she was regularly seeing an OB/GYN, who after checking Stephanie out, ordered an ultrasound, then sent Stephanie to a surgeon to get a biopsy.

Because Stephanie was 36 weeks pregnant, and 29 years old, the surgeon did not want to do the biopsy.  He didn’t want the biopsy to hitting a milk duct, suggesting the procedure wait until Stephanie was done breast feeding.  However, Stephanie insisted on the biopsy, as the tumor was already 4cm.  The biopsy resulted in her breast cancer diagnosis.  The very next day, she went right back to work.

Before surgery to remove the tumor, Stephanie Smith opted to go on chemotherapy.  She went on four rounds every other week, then went on a second set of four rounds with a different cocktail. It was an aggressive regimen, but because she was young, doctors wanted to hit the cancer as hard as possible. 

Stephanie suffered from the same cognitive issues as many do on chemotherapy, all this while pregnant.  After she gave birth, she credits her son and caring for him as being helpful in the remainder of her treatment, which at this point included radiation treatment.

In addition to friends and family, she was helped out by the Vermont Cancer Support Network.  It connected her with survivors also going through cancer.  She especially appreciates VCSN connecting her with cancer survivors who were in her age group.

As for her current health, Stephanie admits there are changes that come with getting older and with having a baby.  As a result, her ability to cardio decreased, but she says for the most part, she can physically do what she did before her diagnosis.

Additional Resources:

Support Group: Vermont Cancer Support Network

https://www.info@vcsn.net

TRANSCRIPT

Bruce Morton: Greetings, this is Bruce Morton and welcome to Cancer Interviews.  Our guest on this episode is Stephanie Smith of Montpelier, the capital of the gorgeous state of Vermont.  She has survived breast cancer, but a key component of her journey is her being diagnosed at age 29, and how her being diagnosed at that age affected her life during, and away from, treatment.  Now it’s time to hear her story, and Stephanie, welcome to Cancer Interviews.

Stephanie Smith: Thanks for having me.

BM: As always, we like to start by learning more about you in terms of your life away from cancer.  So, tell us more about where you are from, what you do for work and what you do for fun when time allows.

SS: I am originally a Green Bay, Wisconsin native.  I live in Montpelier, Vermont now.  We moved here in 2013.  My husband and I finished grad school in Chicago and moved here to take jobs in a place where we have a lot of access to the outdoors.  We like to play outside, we have been doing a lot of skiing this winter, cross country skiing mostly and love living in this absolutely wonderful place.  For work, I work for the state and do projects and planning predominantly about reducing flood risk in the state, doing property buyouts, that sort of thing.  We are trying to reduce the impacts from climate change in Vermont.  Things are getting a lot wetter, our rivers are a lot more volatile than they used to be.  I also have an almost four-year-old.  He keeps telling me he is almost four, who takes up any and all remaining energy and time.

BM: We are confident you will be able to learn some tips and tools from Stephanie that can help you through your personal cancer journey, but first we’d like to invite you to please give us a ‘like’, leave a comment or review below and share this story with your friends.  Kindly click on the Subscribe button below and click on the bell icon, so you will be notified when we release our next interview.  And if you or a loved one are facing a cancer diagnosis, please click on the link in the description and Show Notes below to check out our free guide, “The top ten things I wish I knew when I first got cancer.”

Stephanie, it is also our custom to learn about the juncture in your life when you initially noticed something wasn’t quite right, but in your case, it sounds like something was wrong was unusually difficult.  Is that fair to say?

SS: Yes, absolutely.  One of the things that made it more difficult was my age.  I found the cancer myself.  I was in the shower, and I noticed something a little weird and thought I should talk to someone about it.  I was pregnant with my son and a couple weeks away from having him and I was seeing an OB every week, so I went in and showed it to her.  She thought something was there, so she sent me to get an ultrasound.  It was solid, so they wanted to do a further assessment, a biopsy to see what was going on.  When I got to the surgeon, and I was 36-37 weeks pregnant at the time, he almost didn’t do the biopsy.  Because I was so young, he was 99 percent sure it was nothing and he was worried about hitting a milk duct while the biopsy because I was so close to giving birth.  I told him I wanted the biopsy done because I didn’t want to be thinking about it; but I heard later from the OB who delivered my son that he wasn’t going to do it.  So, if I hadn’t pushed for him to do it, they never would have found it.

BM: Which brings up a topic that we hear about in these interviews from time to time, and it is very important.  We cannot bring it up too often.  In that situation, Stephanie, you rose to the occasion and advocated for yourself.  How important is that?

SS: It’s huge.  It’s unbelievably important.  In that moment I didn’t feel like I was advocating for myself.  I didn’t feel like he was going to perform the biopsy.  He was just giving it to me as an option, but subsequently told my OB that he wasn’t going to do it.  I really hope that reframes how he thinks about these things that he doesn’t have that hesitation going forward.  He suggested waiting to treat me until after I am done breast feeding and you can come back.  I was thinking I am going to breast feeding my baby for a year or more and my tumor was already four centimeters.  That would have been very bad news for me to wait another year.

BM: It is never a good time for one to learn they have cancer, but with you getting this terrible news in addition to carrying a child, how did you deal with the two?

SS: It’s one of those in which you know looking back, it’s like so much was happening so fast that I really didn’t start processing it until I finished treatment which was nine months later.  All of these things are going on in my head at this point, but in some way when I look back at it and the surgeon calling me and telling I had cancer, it’s almost like watching it happen to somebody else because I didn’t really know what that meant.  I didn’t know what treatment was going to look like, I didn’t know how any of the things that would come next at that point and the other weird thing, the way that I think about it is, when someone calls you and says you have cancer, your entire world comes to a screeching halt, but it is so strange to think about how nobody else’s world stopped.  Everything else is moving around you, the world is still moving.  So, I got up the next morning and it was a Wednesday, and I went to work because I had a meeting and I had e-mails and I had things to do, and I remember thinking what a strange idea: I just got told I had cancer and I just got up the next morning and went to work because I had things to do.  People don’t know how they will react in the moment because they have never experienced it felt like this sort of out-of-body experience to continue living my life when I just had this huge boulder dropped on top of me.

BM: Stephanie, each type of cancer is a bit different.  Some afford one various treatment options, some don’t.  In your case, did you have treatment options and if so, what sort of treatment did you choose?

SS: I had a couple of options.  For the most part, it was a pretty prescribed standard treatment approach.  So, because my cancer was big and because I was young, I talked with my doctor about doing chemotherapy first so we could see what that did to the cancer before the surgical procedure.  That was one of the choices.  My chemo was one set of chemo for four rounds every other week, then a different type of chemo for every other week after that.  Sometimes they do that in three-week intervals, but they said I was young, and they wanted to hit it as hard as they can.  So, I went in for the chemo, I had surgery, then through radiation after that. 

BM: Chemo is never easy, but again, it can be different, given the treatment, the person and any number of other variables.  How tough was chemo for you?

SS:  The first treatments were harder than the second four treatments.  So, my last four treatments, compared to my first four, were a lot better.  I think the hardest part about it is the mental part, going back to chemo, going back every Thursday, knowing how I am going to feel Thursday night, how I am going to feel Friday, how I am going to feel Saturday and just slowly over the two weeks getting my energy back, and then knowing I have to do it again.  That was really hard for me, but I knew when my bad days would be.  I knew on Saturday I would feel really terrible for the entire day, then Sunday I would feel a little bit better and start getting to feel like myself again, before doing it all over again.

BM: Many people who go through chemo experience certain cognitive setbacks.  Was that a problem for you?  A term we often hear is ‘chemo brain.’

SS: I think it was a problem.  I think what I have a really hard time separating now is the having a baby and going through cancer treatment, doing them at the exact same time.  Hormonally, it was crazy from both of those experiences.  People talk about having a baby and having your mental faculties challenged.  For me, it was hard to tell what was cancer and what was ‘brand new mom,’ but it was a lot harder to retain things, and maybe it still is a little bit compared to before. 

BM: During that time when you had two mammoth tasks to juggle, who provided support for you?

SS: There are three humans that provided the majority of the support during this experience.  My husband was a huge source of strength and stability for me, and I don’t give him enough credit for that, so, I definitely want to bring him up for his going through all this with me, but watching it happen and not being able to do anything about it, but being there through every single step.  Oddly enough, when they hear about my having a newborn and going through chemo at the time, sounds, and is, terrible, but my son was this bright, shining light in all of this that made it easier to focus on something that wasn’t my cancer.  I credit him is a lot of ways for how my chemo worked.  I couldn’t just wallow in a corner somewhere.  I had this thing that was 100 percent dependant on me who I had to keep alive and happy and focus on him, so he was a huge source of light and joy through that entire experience.  Even just bringing him into the cancer center with me for my last two rounds of chemo, seeing him made everyone else’s face light up and it felt good that we could bring energy into this space.  It was really wonderful to see.  Then there was my mom.  She still lives in Green Bay, which is halfway across the country from here.  I was absolutely terrified to tell her because I didn’t know what she was going to say or how it was going to hit when I was diagnosed.  The first thing she said was, I am going to be to be going through treatment, asked if needed help and she moved in with us for four months.  She left her entire life, she left the job that she was doing at the time and she helped take care of the baby and get through everything.  So, those were definitely the three biggest sources of support through all of this.

BM: I cannot imagine how mentally daunting it would be to bring a child into the world and deal with cancer.  Did you find that you had resources that you didn’t know you had?

SS: I did, and there were other people that stepped up, too.  I had co-workers bringing me food, I had a co-worker who had just had a baby dropped off breast milk.  She had a pumping session and brought me breast milk.  I don’t think I have thanked her.  That is such a huge thing to do for somebody else, which I was so incredibly grateful for.  When you go through something like this, there are a lot of people who come out of the woodwork in that way.  Some people don’t know what to say or they don’t know what to do, but a lot of people will step up and support you in a way you didn’t know, which is wonderful.

BM: We’ve talked about the support piece in this, and we’ve talked about your age and how those two things came together.  Did you find that seeking external support outside of your husband and your son and your mother, did that become more difficult because you were 29 instead of say, 59?

SS: I think for me, the part that came after treatment.  I am a planner, I am always thinking of what’s the structure, what’s the plan?  All through treatment, I was living very much in the moment, thinking here is the next thing I have to do, but there was a plan.  It did feel a little bit like I was dropped off a ledge at the end of treatment and I think that part of the trick is, if you are lucky enough to have an end date on your treatment, my experience in talking to some young people as well, is that that’s Day One when you finish treatment, that’s when you really process everything that you have been through and it is also when a lot of that support goes away.  That’s when I needed support the most.  I was wondering what does this look like for me?  I still had to do these scans, I still had to visit my doctors every few months.  There was a lot still happening.  I still think about this all the time, but for everyone else, they are so incredibly grateful that they just want to move on, and they don’t want to talk about it anymore.

BM: There is a cancer support group, from whom you have gotten some support, and you are affiliated with to some extent, and that is the Vermont Cancer Support Network.  Could you address what VCSN has done for you and what it can do for others?

SS: It is a really great organization, and part of my interest in joining the VCSN board was driven by my trying to figure out what happens next in life, and how do I take this experience and support other people who are going through something similar.  We have a program that connects survivors with people who are currently going through cancer, which was something else that was huge for me.  I met someone during my treatment who was young, also had breast cancer, was going through chemo the same time as me, and it was huge to have that connection, so VCSN is helping with some of those connections.

BM: And is there a group within VCSN where people who are diagnosed with cancer at a younger age where they can go and feel some alignment with people who were diagnosed at a young age?

SS: We can do that direct connection approach with people who are younger.  Part of me wanting to join the board is to increase that, so to say cancer isn’t just for people in their seventies, there are people who are 29 and have cancer.  So, my purpose for being there is to help ground the organization in a new population.

BM: Our guest is Stephanie Smith of Montpelier, Vermont.  She survived breast cancer at age 29, while she was pregnant.  Stephanie, along with Vermont Cancer Support Network connecting with young people, if you would, give an example of how VCSN can connect with someone diagnosed with cancer in their twenties.

SS: I will tell you, if you are young, and shoot the VCSN am email, and tell them you want to talk to me, I would be more than happy to chat with you and support you in any way that I could.  That’s one of the biggest pieces is making that connection.  I think there is more that we can do, and I am trying to figure out what that is.  I am hoping in the future that we can reach that kind of audience in a broader way.

BM: Let’s get back to your journey and I want to get to perhaps the most pleasant part.  At what point did you sense things were getting better?

SS: By the way, the e-mail address for the Vermont Cancer Support Network is info@vcsn.net.  I think how I processed this, when I knew things were getting better is that they hit you in waves.  So, after I finished my chemo, I had surgery, and I was told I had a complete response to the chemotherapy.  They didn’t find any invasive cancer at that point, which was very good news.  That was one of the best moments of this entire journey.  Finishing treatment was supposed to be this really big deal, but it was a little anticlimactic for me.  As you get further away from it, there is more time between being stressed about it.  I am four years old from my diagnosis date, and now I can go in for a scan and see that they didn’t see anything with that scan, that’s a really powerful moment.

BM: If you think about all the outdoorsy stuff and think of pre-diagnosis as being 100 percent, these days, in terms of doing that stuff, how close are you at 100 percent?

SS: I think I am close.  I think I am in the nineties, but it is hard to tell.  I was 29 then, and I am 33 now.  There are changes that come with getting older and I had a baby at the same time.  As a result, my ability to do cardio was decreased.  It’s just a lot of things that hit you at once, so it is hard to separate those out, but I think for the most part I think that I am back.  It feels like I could have done the things that I did before.

BM: Wonderful.  Stephanie, we are going to wrap things up now, and we always like to finish from the same place.  If you encountered someone who had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, you might have a lot of things to say to her, but if there is one overarching point you really want to make, what would it be?

SS: I think one of the things that would have been really helpful would be for me to hear when I was diagnosed, I was putting a lot of pressure on myself, and it would have been really helpful for someone to say that it’s okay to not be okay.  It’s okay to have moments when things are hard, and you get to move past those and experience other things in life, but I think that would be what I would tell them.

BM: Wonderful, and before we go, I want to get out that e-mail one more time for the Vermont Cancer Support Network.  It is info@vcsn.net.  Stephanie, that is going to wrap things up.  We appreciate your sharing your story with us, and I suspect there are a number of women who hear this and either it will be source of inspiration, education or both.  Thanks very much for an eloquent account of your cancer journey, and thanks for being with us on Cancer Interviews.

SS: Thank you, Bruce, have a great day.

BM: You as well, and remember if you or a loved one are on a cancer journey, you are not alone.  There are people like Stephanie out there who can be of us.  Just remember that when they speak, you should listen.  So, until next time, we’ll see you down the road.

Support Group:

Vermont Cancer Support Network 

info@vcsn.net

SHOW NOTES

TITLE:  Stephanie Smith, Breast Cancer Survivor – Montpelier, Vermont, USA

During a breast self-examination, 29-year-old Stephanie Smith tells the @CancerInterviews podcast she discovered what turned out to be a 4cm tumor.  This while she was carrying a child.  The surgeon who saw her was reluctant to perform a biopsy on the tumor because of her pregnancy, but Stephanie insisted.  While she was expecting, Stephanie dealt with chemotherapy and radiation, but she survived and in 2019 gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

Stephanie is on the board of the Vermont Cancer Support Network and always looking for more ways and better ways to connect with those diagnosed with cancer at a young age.

Additional Resources:

Cancer Interviews: https://www.cancerinterviews.com

Vermont Cancer Support Network: info@vcsn.net

Time Stamps:

03:04 How Stephanie learned something wasn’t right.

03:58 Surgeon was reluctant to perform a biopsy while Stephanie was pregnant.

04:37 The importance of insisting on a biopsy.

05:59 How she dealt with pregnancy and cancer treatment.

07:37 Stephanie describes her treatment option.

08:43 Describes her chemo regimen.

13:51 Stephanie says life after treatment was a challenge.

19:06 When she knew she was getting better.

20:33 Physically, post-diagnosis, she is almost 100 percent.

KEYWORDS (tags):

breast cancer

cancer

cancer interviews

cancerinterviews.com

bruce morton

stephanie smith

chemo

vermont cancer support network

chemotherapy