Beating breast cancer, a Petaluma woman found support

Petaluma resident Sheriden Vince, a wife and mother, was busy attending law school and working in a law office in 2009 when she was faced with a health crisis she never saw coming.

It had been two years since her last mammogram, but without any history of breast cancer in her maternal or paternal family lines, Vince didn’t think she had anything to worry about. But a week after her mammogram, she received a letter saying the radiologist had detected an abnormality in her right breast.

“They said not to worry about it because 90 percent of these abnormalities are benign,” said Vince, who was 53 at the time and living in Lake County. “They wanted to do a second mammogram, so I went back in. Two weeks after that, I got another note saying that they were concerned about what they saw and wanted me to have a needle biopsy.”

Vince never noticed any lump in her breast at all. In fact, she was told that the area of concern had no identifiable lump at all - the affected area had abnormal jagged edges that the radiologist said he could not do a needle biopsy on. Vince was referred to a breast surgeon to have a surgical biopsy performed in January 2010.

“The breast surgeon looked at my mammogram films and said ‘why have you come to me?’” Vince said. “He told me that he had been looking at breast films for 20-plus years and was certain that mine were fine. I told him that I was told I needed a surgical biopsy. He said ‘okay.’?”

The surgeon’s plan was to perform a partial mastectomy to remove enough of the breast tissue in question so that they would not have to go back in later in the event cancer was found. After Vince’s surgery, it took two weeks to find out if the abnormality in her breast was benign or not.

The waiting game

“I’m sure that if you talk to any woman and anyone waiting for a pathology report that it’s the most difficult and frightening time of the whole cancer diagnosis,” said Vince. “You don’t know what direction your life is going to go.”

The pathology report determined that Vince had invasive ductal carcinoma, a type of cancer in the milk ducts that spread to other parts of the breast tissue. According to the National Breast Cancer Foundation, it’s the most common type of breast cancer, making up nearly 70 to 80 percent of all breast cancer diagnosis.

“Never has anything shocked me more than my diagnosis,” said Vince. “There’s no history of this anywhere in my family. I’m the first woman in my family to have breast cancer. Nothing has shocked me more.”

The breast surgeon also gave Vince the news that her cancer was “at the margin,” meaning that the partial mastectomy did not remove all the cancer and she would need to have another surgery. The doctor reassured her that they would only need to remove a little more tissue and one lymph node because he was certain the cancer wasn’t spreading. She woke up from surgery, however, to a “code blue,” tremendous pain and the doctor’s horrified expression. Instead of removing one lymph node, the surgeon ended up removing six that looked suspicious.

After three weeks of waiting, the pathology report came back with the news - out of the six nodes removed, the first one was not cancerous, the next four were metastasized and the last one was benign.

“On the positive side, if he had looked at the results of just one node removed, I would have gotten a false negative cancer diagnosis, and that does happen,” said Vince. “Had I gotten the diagnosis that it hadn’t spread to the lymph nodes, I would have made the decision to not undergo chemotherapy. So, it’s really a grace that it all took place the way it did. It saved my life.”

Chemotherapy hits hard

Vince underwent four months of chemotherapy treatments at Martin O’Neil Cancer Center in St. Helena. She continued going to law school in Santa Rosa during that time, with her husband driving her there and back. Even though she kept her life going during treatments, Vince said chemotherapy was extremely difficult.

“For my type of breast cancer, they were going for a cure, so that means they hit you really hard with chemo,” she said. “I lost all my hair and was very ill for a number of months.”

It took her six weeks to recover from chemotherapy, and then she was sent in for two months of daily radiation treatments to her breast.

“The fatigue from the radiation is extraordinary,” she said. “The fatigue from the chemo was noticeable, but the fatigue from the radiation on the heels of that was beyond any fatigue I have experienced. I couldn’t get up a set of stairs most days.”

After the radiation therapy was completed, Vince began a hormone inhibitor course, which she will continue to be on for 10 years.

She said her family and strong, spiritual faith is what helped her through her breast cancer diagnosis, but it wasn’t until she moved to Petaluma and joined a support group that her emotional healing began.

A healing support group

“I was traumatized,” said Vince of the experience. “I contacted Cynthia Wilcox, a retired clinical psychologist who is now a wellness coach, and she invited me to attend a women’s breast cancer support group. That was when my healing process began. On top of having a one-on-one session with her alone, I was able to start to process the trauma that had set in - and there was a lot of trauma. I had been facing my mortality and looking at my daughter, my only child, possibly not having a mother. It was extremely healing to be in a group where it was safe to talk about life and what happened to me with other women who went through similar things.”

It’s been five years since her breast cancer journey began, and though her oncology team describes her as being cancer-free, Vince said that there is no guarantee that all the cancer cells were destroyed during chemotherapy and radiation treatments. She continues to get annual mammograms and said that the experience has left her with a strong sense of the fragility and brevity of life.

“I make more conscious decisions now about what I’m going to put my time into,” she said. “And because I’m making more conscious decisions about what I do with my energy, I’m relaxing. In that relaxation, I’m learning to love. That might seem like an obvious thing, but I’m actually learning to express that. Being a very independent, driven character, vulnerability was not something that I was willing to be before. I was afraid in that space. Now, I feel I appreciate much more the interdependent reality of my life.”

(Contact Yovanna Bieberich at yovanna.bieberich@arguscourier.com.)