“I have been diligent about going in and having my annual screening mammogram especially since my sister makes me go,” says the busy wife and mother of three teenage boys. “I was sitting in the waiting room after the screening when the certified breast health navigator told me that Dr. Nicholson had found something suspicious and wanted a biopsy.”
That was October 16, 2015. Two years earlier, one of Tinsley’s two sisters, at 44 years of age, was diagnosed with breast cancer and had 18 weeks of chemotherapy and then 12 weeks of radiation. Some 40 years before that, her paternal grandmother also had breast cancer and a double mastectomy.
“You hear the ‘cancer’ word and you have to stop and think how is this going to affect my life, my kids, my husband, my family, my work?” Tinsley says. “All those things are swirling around in your head especially after having seen it up close and personal with my sister.”
One week later, Tinsley had the biopsy. On Halloween morning, not even 24 hours later, the certified breast health navigator called her to tell her that they did find something and she would need to meet with the next necessary physicians.
“Regardless of how we do a biopsy at the Women’s Diagnostic Centers, we get well over the majority of results the next day,” says Mary Nicholson, MD, medical director of breast imaging services for Community Healthcare System who performs breast MRI, ultrasound and stereotactic core biopsies. “The sooner we get the results, the sooner our patients get to treatment.”
Oncologist Mohamad Kassar, MD, explained to Tinsley that the mammography and biopsy revealed a lesion called atypical ductal hyperplasia (ADH). Women diagnosed with ADH do not have breast cancer, but have a higher risk of developing it in the future.
Before treatment, Tinsley’s care was reviewed at one of the Community Healthcare System’s Tumor Board conferences. Recommendations for the next appropriate preventive steps are then presented to the patient. Tinsley’s recommendations from the breast conference and medical oncologist Kassar included a surgical biopsy similar to lumpectomy and regularly scheduled screenings for vigilant surveillance. The Tumor Board and Kassar’s findings also revealed that both Tinsley’s ADH and her sister’s breast cancer were not due to a hereditary breast cancer gene. Kassar says that the chances of two sisters both having breast cancers that were not hereditary were about one in one million.
“I thought about how far treatment has come since the time that they diagnosed my grandmother,” Tinsley says. “Back then, there was no early detection and only limited treatment. I had a lot of decisions to make and my oncologist gave me a lot of information. In the end, Dr. Kassar was great about letting me make the choices that were best for me.”
For more about oncology care and services offered at the hospitals of Community Healthcare System: Community Hospital, Munster, St. Catherine Hospital, East Chicago and St. Mary Medical Center, Hobart, visit COMHS.org/cancer.
