This podcast contains the personal stories, opinions and experiences of its speakers
rather than those of Breast Cancer Now.
Welcome to the Breast Cancer Now podcast.
I'm Laura Price and I'm the new presenter of this podcast which aims to support
anyone affected by breast cancer, whether it's you or a loved one.
In this new season, we'll bring you a brilliant selection of guests,
some of whom have had breast cancer and others who, like me are living with secondary breast cancer.
We'll also be talking to healthcare professionals and experts about new developments in cancer drugs and treatments,
and important topics such as working and exercising with cancer.
We hope this podcast will help you feel less alone as you deal with breast cancer.
And also explain and simplify what can feel like a very confusing, very jargon heavy place.
We're here as you go through what is undoubtedly one of the biggest challenges of your life.
We'll be publishing a new episode every other week for the next few months.
And if you subscribe to The Breast Cancer Now podcasts on Spotify, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts, you'll be alerted as soon as a new episode is available.
If you're listening from breast cancer nails website, then be sure to check it regularly or follow us on social media.
We've put all the relevant links in the show notes.
Before we
bring you our first guest episode, I wanted to introduce myself Laura Price.
I'm a food writer and author, a podcaster a stepmum, a wife,
a daughter, a sister and a friend, and I live with secondary breast cancer.
If you've been subscribed to this podcast for a while, then you might recognise my name
because I was actually the last person to be interviewed for this podcast in 2022 before it went on a break.
Now if you've listened to that episode, you'll have heard me talking about the hurdles
I faced in the 10 years since I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012.
Certainly, the treatment doesn't stop
after chemotherapy and radiotherapy stops.
I was on Tamoxifen.
Well, I've been on Tamoxifen for nearly 10 years, and I've had hot flushes and aches and pains
and kind of the usual side effects from that.
But I think for me, probably the bigger thing has been psychological.
And obviously,
like I was very naive at the time when I was diagnosed, I didn't know that much about it.
But since then, I've met a lot of people who, you know, have sadly had secondary breast cancer.
And I've learned so much about you know, the really horrible stuff that cancer throws at us.
Unfortunately, the day after I recorded the Breast Cancer Now podcast in 2022,
I found out my cancer had come back and spread to my bones, making it secondary,
or metastatic, or stage four breast cancer.
That day, my life changed.
And in the following months, I took massive comfort in this podcast,
listening to people who had survived for years with secondary breast cancer and hearing advice on everything
from explaining cancer treatment to kids to dealing
with menopausal symptoms and a whole lot more.
A year and a half after my secondary diagnosis, I'm doing really well.
And I've been working with Breast Cancer Now to put together a new season of this podcast
that will allow patients like me, and partners and friends and family of patients like me
to find the answers to some of the questions and concerns they have around breast cancer.
We won't be able to answer all the questions, of course.
But we hope that by talking to a diverse selection of people from the breast cancer community and beyond,
that we'll be able to provide you with a resource
and a hand to hold if you like throughout whatever you're going through.
And also just to help you to know that you're not alone.
So my story,
I was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 29 years old in 2012.
I've been living and working in South America as a journalist,
and I found a lump in my left breast while on a surfing holiday in Brazil that February.
I knew that my maternal grandmother had had breast cancer in her 30s and that this could be serious.
So I went immediately to the hospital in Argentina where I was living to get it checked out.
I had a mammogram and an ultrasound and was told that
because of my age and the characteristics of the lump,
it was likely to be a fibro adenoma, or a non-cancerous lump.
The doctor said he was 99% certain that it wasn't cancer,
but that I could get it checked out again in a few months’ time if it was still there.
A month or so later, I moved from Argentina to Ireland
and was encouraged by my family to get the lump checked out again.
I went to my GP in Dublin who wasn't concerned
about the lump but referred me to the hospital just to be sure.
And I was then referred again for more non urgent scans
and consultations in June 2012.
I heard those words for the first time.
It's breast cancer.
It had been four months since I've found the lump
but amazingly the cancer hadn't spread and I was able to have surgery,
a wide local excision which is similar to a lumpectomy
followed by six months of chemotherapy and two months of radiotherapy.
My cancer was E are positive or oestrogen
receptor positive, which means that the thing that makes my cancer grow is oestrogen.
So to suppress the oestrogen in my body, I was given a drug
that many of you will have heard of, or may even be taking called tamoxifen.
I took that drug for the next 10 years with a couple of breaks.
I was
considered to be cured and cancer free, which was an incredible position to be in.
I think many people when we go through a life changing illness or event, our outlook changes.
And that was definitely the case for me.
I'd been working as a financial journalist, but after my diagnosis, I started writing a blog about my cancer experience.
And I found it really resonated with people.
I loved my job as a financial journalist.
But I've been wanting to work in a different area of journalism for a really long time, and also to write a book.
And I realised I might not have the privilege of all the time in the world to do that.
So for me, cancer acted as a catalyst
to make some changes in my life and to follow my career dreams and life goals there
and then rather than waiting for some distant day that might never come.
So I quit my job, went back to uni and did a master's in magazine journalism.
I then got a dream role as a food writer.
And a few years later, I started writing my first novel, that book called Single Bald
Female, was published in April 2022.
It's about a woman called Jess who is working
as a magazine journalist when she's diagnosed with breast cancer.
At the same time as going through a breakup, she then plunges herself
into the world of online dating with a bald head whilst going through chemo.
Obviously, the book was inspired by my own experiences with cancer,
but it's very much a fiction and tells the story of Jess and the friendships she makes through cancer,
the way her family and friends deal with her cancer diagnosis and the feeling of being left behind
while all her friends kind of move on and settle down in their 20s and 30s.
So the book is a novel, but the paperback version actually has
a new chapter with an essay about my own secondary diagnosis.
In the 10
years after my primary cancer diagnosis, I really did live life to the full.
With my job as a food writer, I travelled all over the world and I visited so many of the places
that I'd wanted to go to when I was lying in bed feeling completely rotten with chemo,
I ended relationships where I didn't feel happy,
because I knew life was too short to not be happy.
I packed a huge amount of experiences into those years, but I was always conscious
that my cancer could come back and that I needed to take care of myself.
Then, in July 2022, almost 10 years to the day since my primary diagnosis,
I was told the cancer had spread to my bones and was now secondary,
otherwise known as stage four, or metastatic or incurable.
I was 39 years old.
Lots of people have
asked me what the symptoms were for my secondary breast cancer diagnosis.
And I'm aware once you've had cancer, once you're constantly afraid that it's going to come back,
which in many cases it won't, but unfortunately, sometimes it does.
I had been experiencing symptoms for about nine months before I got my diagnosis.
I'd had my annual MRI scan of the breasts, and there been nothing of concern there.
But I started to feel a tender spot on my chest
above the breastbone, which felt a bit like a bruise.
At the same time, I had some breast pain, which turned out to be unrelated.
But when I went to the hospital, I was given a breast ultrasound and was told everything was fine.
Over the next few
months, that spot on my breastbone got more and more painful,
and it would hurt to give someone a hug or to wear a necklace.
I swim front crawl,
and after a while it felt like my bones were kind of crunching together.
Then I couldn't push myself up out of the pool
and it would really hurt when I turned over in bed as well.
I was fairly sure at certain points that I had secondary breast cancer.
But the symptoms were confused with a condition called costochondritis
which is an inflammation of the cartilage that joins the ribs to the sternum.
So I went between worrying it was secondary breast cancer
and then believing it was nothing and would go away.
But I kept falling out with my hospital and eventually I was given a chest MRI
and then a PET CT scan which revealed a large tumour inside my sternum bone.
When breast cancer spreads beyond the breast, it's called
secondary or stage four breast cancer.
It is treatable with drugs but it's incurable.
So in my case, I will always have cancer and I'll eventually become resistant to the drugs although there are lots of options.
secondary breast cancer in the bone is different
from say bone cancer because it's actually the breast cancer that has moved to your bone.
So it's treated with breast cancer drugs rather than bone cancer drugs if that makes sense.
When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012,
I was tested for the bracket gene mutation, which many people will be familiar with, partly because of the actress
Angelina Jolie who had a preventative double mastectomy to reduce her breast cancer risk.
Back in 2012, I tested negative for bracket,
but I was told there were other gene mutations that couldn't be tested for yet.
Then when I got my secondary diagnosis, 10 years later, I asked for my DNA to be retested.
And I found out I have a gene mutation called PALB2, which is similar to the bracket gene.
To briefly
explain, I'm not a doctor or a scientist,
we are all born with certain genes, including genes that protect us against breast cancer.
But in my body, one of those genes is broken.
It means I was born with something like a 50%
chance of getting breast cancer in my lifetime.
It hasn't made a difference to what treatment I'm on.
But it's made a huge difference to me mentally, in
that it's helped me to understand why I got cancer,
that it was never my fault that there's very little I could have done to prevent it.
Now in terms of my treatment, because my cancer is oestrogen receptor positive,
my main treatment has involved cutting down the oestrogen in my body.
I have a monthly injection called Zoladex and a daily tablet called letrozole.
On top of the hormone treatment, I also have a targeted therapy drug called Ribociclib.
Fortunately, I've responded incredibly well to these drugs.
And in 2023, I was able to have surgery
to remove my entire sternum bone, along with the cancer.
As far as we know, there's no active cancer in my body at the moment,
but I have scans every three months to check on its progress.
My secondary diagnosis was slow.
And as someone particularly at risk of secondary breast cancer,
I didn't feel I was given the right tools to look out for the signs and symptoms.
So I'm actively involved with breast cancer.
Now it's brilliant campaign to educate patients and healthcare professionals about those signs and symptoms
and to make sure that secondary breast cancer patients are properly recorded and cared for.
When I was diagnosed with secondary breast cancer,
I felt the most profound sense of grief.
I was in a new relationship
and had just had my first novel published and I was at the start of an exciting writing career.
But my diagnosis made me feel I was at the end of my life instead of the beginning.
That in the last 18 months, I've been fortunate enough to be able to access
incredible treatment and life changing surgery and I've got my life back on track.
I've started a new job at a food magazine, I'm presenting this podcast
for Breast Cancer Now, which is a charity I hugely admire and respect.
And I'm also writing more books.
I've started a new chapter in my career despite
having incurable breast cancer.
I am painfully aware that many people aren't as lucky as me and don't get this chance.
But I am here and I can do this.
And so I really want to use this space on the Breast Cancer Now podcast, to share my story
and to hopefully give hope where others gave hope to me.
I want to help you and your loved ones understand more about breast cancer
and how you can cope with your diagnosis both physically and mentally.
How you can still exercise and work and have sex and relationships
and really do as much as your health allows you to do so over the next few months.
I'll be interviewing a range of different guests and opening up a number of topics from within the breast cancer community.
If that sounds like something you'd like to listen to
then please do subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also follow
me personally on Instagram @LauraPriceWrites
and you can find my novel Single Bald Female
in bookshops, online or at the link in the show notes.
Thank you for listening to the Breast Cancer Now podcast and see you next time.