Battling breast cancer: One woman’s struggle to defeat a disease
One-half million dollars — and just maybe Tracy DuPont will live to see her 2-year-old ride a bike, her 4-year-old start kindergarten, her 11-year-old attend prom.
Otherwise, no bone marrow transplant, no chance of a cure for the breast cancer that has metastasized to her lungs.
Still, there are no guarantees.
Tracy, 35, knows the odds are not in her favor.
Her cancer is aggressive, fast-growing and ruthless. A bone marrow transplant is an extremely expensive and experimental option.
Chemotherapy will slow the cancer, but it will not kill it. A bone marrow transplant offers the only chance for cure.
Yet if she doesn’t at least try, it’s like giving up. She can’t do that to her kids: Dylan 2, Jacy, 4, and Drew 11. She can’t do that to Johnny, her husband of 13 years, her high school sweetheart, her soulmate and the love of her life. She can’t do that to her mother, her brothers, her sisters and the hordes of friends and co-workers whose words have become little Jacy’s mantra to Mommy: “You’re gonna beat it.”
“I have to hold on to that idea … that there is always hope,” Tracy said, tears leaking from her eyes.
Her friends also hang on to hope. They gather at each other’s homes several nights a week, beading pink and silver bracelets adorned with charms of pink breast cancer ribbons and pink flip-flops sporting the pink ribbon (because Tracy loves flip-flops) to raise $20 at a time for Tracy’s transplant.
She tells them: You don’t need to do this.
Yes we do, they say.
In many ways Tracy’s story is not typical — she’s young, has only one of the risk factors for breast cancer and no family history of the disease.
Then again, in many ways Tracy’s story is one heard way too often — a woman notices something amiss with her breasts, her doctor assures her it’s probably nothing and encourages her to wait and see.
Ultimately, a mammogram reveals a mass.
A biopsy confirms her worst fears: cancer.
And throughout all the wait and see the disease has had months to grow and travel throughout her body. In cases like Tracy’s — in which the woman is premenopausal — medical professionals disagree whether early detection really makes a difference in the outcome.
Yet waiting, doing absolutely nothing while the disease makes its death march, defies that human instinct to survive.
You’ve got to know what you’re up against so you can at least decide whether you’re up for the fight.
You’ve got to follow your gut instinct, say Tracy and Ruth Van Gerpen, a nurse and clinical nurse specialist for oncology at BryanLGH Medical Center.
“The main risk factor for developing breast cancer is being a woman,” Van Gerpen said.
Breast cancer is more common among women over age 50 — post menopausal women.
But about 25 percent of the victims are like Tracy — premenopausal.
Because of the age and hormonal differences in these two groups of women, the cancers are different and so are the treatments. Usually the cancer in young women is aggressive.
It was January 2004 when Tracy first noticed a lump on her left breast while breast feeding Dylan, who was then 9 months old.
“It was pretty large, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh,’” she said.
Her family doctor told her not to worry, that it was probably just a clogged milk duct.
“I thought, ‘I’m just a nurse, he’s the doctor,’” Tracy said, who is a labor and delivery nurse at BryanLGH.
She discontinued breast feeding, but the lump kept growing.
In March her obstetrician performed an ultrasound and biopsy. He told her it would be several days before he had the result.
But the call came the next day.
Tracy remembers looking at the time on the clock — 9:29 p.m. — and her doctor’s name on her caller ID.
“I just stared at the phone. I thought, ‘This is really bad and I don’t want to know. Or it’s really good news. … If it’s bad, what am I going to do?”
The doctor’s words still echo in her head: “I don’t know how to tell you this, but the tumor is malignant.”
She called Johnny, who was at Lux Middle School, getting his lesson plans in order for the next day.
“I have cancer. Come home.”
The next day they learned just how bad it was. Tracy had “an aggressive, nasty” type of cancer — extremely fast-growing.
Her treatment options: chemotherapy, radiation, surgery.
“I thought, ‘I have three little kids. I need to be very aggressive,’” Tracy recalled.
She opted for a double mastectomy and chemotherapy.
The mastectomy was scheduled for April 21, 2004.
“On April 20 my left breast was really large and really red. It felt like it was engorged with blood and an infection,” she said.
Surgery was postponed until May 5, the day after Jacy turned 3; 17 days after Dylan turned 1.
She suffered severe infections and six more surgeries, resulting in a more than three-month delay in chemotherapy.
Initially, she was told she did not need radiation. But her own research and advice from specialists recommended otherwise — 33 radiation treatments over seven weeks. And again she found herself playing catch up in her attack on the disease.
Christmas 2004 was one of her lowest points.
“I was really angry. I had no eyelashes. No eyebrows. No hair. And I also had no breasts, just indentations from where they used to be,” she said.
She was sick of being sick. And devastated that she was too weak and too ill to be the kind of mother she wanted to be for her children, the kind of wife she wanted to be for Johnny.
“Then I thought, ‘Grow up and get over it. You’ll kick yourself if you give up.’
“At least I can say I did everything in my power,” Tracy said.
A woman of strong Christian faith, she put her life in God’s hands. She read Rick Warren’s “The Purpose-Driven Life.” She decided God wanted her to be more than a wife, mother and nurse — he wanted her to help other young women battling breast cancer, to maintain hope and drive amid their shattered dreams,
She finished radiation in February. She felt good. Her hair was growing back. She took a celebratory trip to Hawaii with her best friends in June.
In July she told her doctor about a lump in her chest where the porta catheter had been for chemo injections.
The consensus was it was probably scar tissue. She had a CT scan, just to be sure.
On Aug. 3, the doctor called, repeating those same dreadful words she’d heard only 14 months earlier: “Tracy I don’t know how to tell you this …”
The lump was scar tissue. But the CT scan also revealed nodules all over her lungs — nodules that five weeks earlier had not been there.
At best, it was a fungal infection. Surgery and a biopsy would tell them for sure.
She remembers waking up from surgery and seeing her husband, her mother and her doctor at her bedside.
“I knew,” she said.
The cancer had spread.
Days later, she was at Houston’s renowned MD Anderson Cancer Center.
“I was afraid they would say go home,” Tracy recalled. “But they said, ‘We can help you.’”
And the hope returned.
They told her a bone marrow transplant was her only hope for a cure. Cost of the transplant: $263,000 (if they could use her bone marrow) to $500,000 (if it came from a donor).
Her medical insurance said it would not pay because the transplant is considered “experimental” in treating breast cancer.
She sought a second opinion from an Omaha oncologist, hoping to sway the insurance company. But the doctor did not concur.
Tracy is frustrated and angry.
“If a bone marrow transplant is my only chance for a cure…,” she said, stopping mid-sentence.
“I want to be here for my kids …
“I am afraid to die.”
The DuPonts have appealed the insurance company’s ruling.
In the meantime, her friends and co-workers are raising money.
“I am scared to death for my life again. … I try not to think about it. My mind plays games on me. I try to be strong,” she said.
But the tears come.
“I don’t remember my first day of kindergarten,” she said as Jacy bounced in after a day at preschool.
“Will she remember me? Dylan won’t remember me.
“I try to imagine why God allows things to happen. Why does he allow hurricanes? Why do babies get sick and die? Why?
“I need my kids as much as they need me. I need my husband and he needs me.”
She wonders if she misunderstood God’s purpose for her.
“It can’t be my purpose (to help other young women) if I’m going to die. …”
Johnny tells her he knows that God will take care of her and that they will be together.
Tracy is not always so sure. She thinks about death.
“I have to know I am going to a better place,” she said. “If I didn’t know I was going to a better place I would be even more afraid to die.”
She is not ready to give up. But she wants balance … just in case.
“I want to play with my kids. I want to spend quality time with them if I only have a year or two left,” she said.
And in the toughest moments, Tracy hears Jacy’s voice: “Mommy, you’re gonna beat it.”
“Yeah,” Tracy said through her tears. “I’m gonna beat it. Lots of people beat breast cancer.”
Reach Erin Andersen at 473-7217 or eandersen@journalstar.com.
Fundraisers for Tracy
Several fundraising efforts are underway to help Tracy DuPont and her family defray her medical costs in fighting breast cancer.
* Luncheon — Noon Oct. 23, Sheridan Lutheran Church, 70th and Old Cheney Road, hosts a luncheon for Tracy.
* Movie night — Oct. 30, at the Starship Theater, 1311 Q St. Ten dollars buys popcorn, pop and admission to any one of nine movies being shown at the theater. Doors open at 6:15 p.m, movies start at 7 p.m. All the money goes to the Tracy DuPont Cancer Fund.
* Soup supper and silent auction — noon to 5 p.m. Nov. 6 at Lux Middle School, 7800 High St. $7 for adults, $3 for children age 12 and under. Free will donations will be collected. Donations to the auction are still being accepted. To donate call Tracie Klassen at 474-0152.
* Tracy’s Angels — Tracy’s supporters are selling T-shirts, sweatshirts, beaded bracelets and $20 POGO cards. Items are available at all fundraisers as well as at Hair Pros, 201 Capitol Beach Blvd., behind the Runza on West O Street.
Making Strides walk
The fifth-annual Making Strides Against Breast Cancer walk hosted by the American Cancer Society will be held at 1 p.m. Oct. 30 at Holmes Lake Park. Walkers can choose between a 1- or a 5-mile walk.
Funds raised in the walk will stay in Nebraska to fight breast cancer. In August, the American Cancer society presented a $125,000 check to Every Woman Matters, a program to provide breast and cervical cancer screening for low-income women who do not have health insurance or have inadequate insurance. The money was raised in previous walks.
Teams for the walk are now forming. For information call the American Cancer Society at 423-4888 or go online to www/acsevents.org/lincolnstrides.
Otherwise, no bone marrow transplant, no chance of a cure for the breast cancer that has metastasized to her lungs.
Still, there are no guarantees.
Tracy, 35, knows the odds are not in her favor.
Her cancer is aggressive, fast-growing and ruthless. A bone marrow transplant is an extremely expensive and experimental option.
Chemotherapy will slow the cancer, but it will not kill it. A bone marrow transplant offers the only chance for cure.
Yet if she doesn’t at least try, it’s like giving up. She can’t do that to her kids: Dylan 2, Jacy, 4, and Drew 11. She can’t do that to Johnny, her husband of 13 years, her high school sweetheart, her soulmate and the love of her life. She can’t do that to her mother, her brothers, her sisters and the hordes of friends and co-workers whose words have become little Jacy’s mantra to Mommy: “You’re gonna beat it.”
“I have to hold on to that idea … that there is always hope,” Tracy said, tears leaking from her eyes.
Her friends also hang on to hope. They gather at each other’s homes several nights a week, beading pink and silver bracelets adorned with charms of pink breast cancer ribbons and pink flip-flops sporting the pink ribbon (because Tracy loves flip-flops) to raise $20 at a time for Tracy’s transplant.
She tells them: You don’t need to do this.
Yes we do, they say.
In many ways Tracy’s story is not typical — she’s young, has only one of the risk factors for breast cancer and no family history of the disease.
Then again, in many ways Tracy’s story is one heard way too often — a woman notices something amiss with her breasts, her doctor assures her it’s probably nothing and encourages her to wait and see.
Ultimately, a mammogram reveals a mass.
A biopsy confirms her worst fears: cancer.
And throughout all the wait and see the disease has had months to grow and travel throughout her body. In cases like Tracy’s — in which the woman is premenopausal — medical professionals disagree whether early detection really makes a difference in the outcome.
Yet waiting, doing absolutely nothing while the disease makes its death march, defies that human instinct to survive.
You’ve got to know what you’re up against so you can at least decide whether you’re up for the fight.
You’ve got to follow your gut instinct, say Tracy and Ruth Van Gerpen, a nurse and clinical nurse specialist for oncology at BryanLGH Medical Center.
“The main risk factor for developing breast cancer is being a woman,” Van Gerpen said.
Breast cancer is more common among women over age 50 — post menopausal women.
But about 25 percent of the victims are like Tracy — premenopausal.
Because of the age and hormonal differences in these two groups of women, the cancers are different and so are the treatments. Usually the cancer in young women is aggressive.
It was January 2004 when Tracy first noticed a lump on her left breast while breast feeding Dylan, who was then 9 months old.
“It was pretty large, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh,’” she said.
Her family doctor told her not to worry, that it was probably just a clogged milk duct.
“I thought, ‘I’m just a nurse, he’s the doctor,’” Tracy said, who is a labor and delivery nurse at BryanLGH.
She discontinued breast feeding, but the lump kept growing.
In March her obstetrician performed an ultrasound and biopsy. He told her it would be several days before he had the result.
But the call came the next day.
Tracy remembers looking at the time on the clock — 9:29 p.m. — and her doctor’s name on her caller ID.
“I just stared at the phone. I thought, ‘This is really bad and I don’t want to know. Or it’s really good news. … If it’s bad, what am I going to do?”
The doctor’s words still echo in her head: “I don’t know how to tell you this, but the tumor is malignant.”
She called Johnny, who was at Lux Middle School, getting his lesson plans in order for the next day.
“I have cancer. Come home.”
The next day they learned just how bad it was. Tracy had “an aggressive, nasty” type of cancer — extremely fast-growing.
Her treatment options: chemotherapy, radiation, surgery.
“I thought, ‘I have three little kids. I need to be very aggressive,’” Tracy recalled.
She opted for a double mastectomy and chemotherapy.
The mastectomy was scheduled for April 21, 2004.
“On April 20 my left breast was really large and really red. It felt like it was engorged with blood and an infection,” she said.
Surgery was postponed until May 5, the day after Jacy turned 3; 17 days after Dylan turned 1.
She suffered severe infections and six more surgeries, resulting in a more than three-month delay in chemotherapy.
Initially, she was told she did not need radiation. But her own research and advice from specialists recommended otherwise — 33 radiation treatments over seven weeks. And again she found herself playing catch up in her attack on the disease.
Christmas 2004 was one of her lowest points.
“I was really angry. I had no eyelashes. No eyebrows. No hair. And I also had no breasts, just indentations from where they used to be,” she said.
She was sick of being sick. And devastated that she was too weak and too ill to be the kind of mother she wanted to be for her children, the kind of wife she wanted to be for Johnny.
“Then I thought, ‘Grow up and get over it. You’ll kick yourself if you give up.’
“At least I can say I did everything in my power,” Tracy said.
A woman of strong Christian faith, she put her life in God’s hands. She read Rick Warren’s “The Purpose-Driven Life.” She decided God wanted her to be more than a wife, mother and nurse — he wanted her to help other young women battling breast cancer, to maintain hope and drive amid their shattered dreams,
She finished radiation in February. She felt good. Her hair was growing back. She took a celebratory trip to Hawaii with her best friends in June.
In July she told her doctor about a lump in her chest where the porta catheter had been for chemo injections.
The consensus was it was probably scar tissue. She had a CT scan, just to be sure.
On Aug. 3, the doctor called, repeating those same dreadful words she’d heard only 14 months earlier: “Tracy I don’t know how to tell you this …”
The lump was scar tissue. But the CT scan also revealed nodules all over her lungs — nodules that five weeks earlier had not been there.
At best, it was a fungal infection. Surgery and a biopsy would tell them for sure.
She remembers waking up from surgery and seeing her husband, her mother and her doctor at her bedside.
“I knew,” she said.
The cancer had spread.
Days later, she was at Houston’s renowned MD Anderson Cancer Center.
“I was afraid they would say go home,” Tracy recalled. “But they said, ‘We can help you.’”
And the hope returned.
They told her a bone marrow transplant was her only hope for a cure. Cost of the transplant: $263,000 (if they could use her bone marrow) to $500,000 (if it came from a donor).
Her medical insurance said it would not pay because the transplant is considered “experimental” in treating breast cancer.
She sought a second opinion from an Omaha oncologist, hoping to sway the insurance company. But the doctor did not concur.
Tracy is frustrated and angry.
“If a bone marrow transplant is my only chance for a cure…,” she said, stopping mid-sentence.
“I want to be here for my kids …
“I am afraid to die.”
The DuPonts have appealed the insurance company’s ruling.
In the meantime, her friends and co-workers are raising money.
“I am scared to death for my life again. … I try not to think about it. My mind plays games on me. I try to be strong,” she said.
But the tears come.
“I don’t remember my first day of kindergarten,” she said as Jacy bounced in after a day at preschool.
“Will she remember me? Dylan won’t remember me.
“I try to imagine why God allows things to happen. Why does he allow hurricanes? Why do babies get sick and die? Why?
“I need my kids as much as they need me. I need my husband and he needs me.”
She wonders if she misunderstood God’s purpose for her.
“It can’t be my purpose (to help other young women) if I’m going to die. …”
Johnny tells her he knows that God will take care of her and that they will be together.
Tracy is not always so sure. She thinks about death.
“I have to know I am going to a better place,” she said. “If I didn’t know I was going to a better place I would be even more afraid to die.”
She is not ready to give up. But she wants balance … just in case.
“I want to play with my kids. I want to spend quality time with them if I only have a year or two left,” she said.
And in the toughest moments, Tracy hears Jacy’s voice: “Mommy, you’re gonna beat it.”
“Yeah,” Tracy said through her tears. “I’m gonna beat it. Lots of people beat breast cancer.”
Reach Erin Andersen at 473-7217 or eandersen@journalstar.com.
Fundraisers for Tracy
Several fundraising efforts are underway to help Tracy DuPont and her family defray her medical costs in fighting breast cancer.
* Luncheon — Noon Oct. 23, Sheridan Lutheran Church, 70th and Old Cheney Road, hosts a luncheon for Tracy.
* Movie night — Oct. 30, at the Starship Theater, 1311 Q St. Ten dollars buys popcorn, pop and admission to any one of nine movies being shown at the theater. Doors open at 6:15 p.m, movies start at 7 p.m. All the money goes to the Tracy DuPont Cancer Fund.
* Soup supper and silent auction — noon to 5 p.m. Nov. 6 at Lux Middle School, 7800 High St. $7 for adults, $3 for children age 12 and under. Free will donations will be collected. Donations to the auction are still being accepted. To donate call Tracie Klassen at 474-0152.
* Tracy’s Angels — Tracy’s supporters are selling T-shirts, sweatshirts, beaded bracelets and $20 POGO cards. Items are available at all fundraisers as well as at Hair Pros, 201 Capitol Beach Blvd., behind the Runza on West O Street.
Making Strides walk
The fifth-annual Making Strides Against Breast Cancer walk hosted by the American Cancer Society will be held at 1 p.m. Oct. 30 at Holmes Lake Park. Walkers can choose between a 1- or a 5-mile walk.
Funds raised in the walk will stay in Nebraska to fight breast cancer. In August, the American Cancer society presented a $125,000 check to Every Woman Matters, a program to provide breast and cervical cancer screening for low-income women who do not have health insurance or have inadequate insurance. The money was raised in previous walks.
Teams for the walk are now forming. For information call the American Cancer Society at 423-4888 or go online to www/acsevents.org/lincolnstrides.
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