By Brandi Watters, Herald Bulletin Staff Writer
ANDERSON — When Carla Castor noticed a tenderness in her left breast and felt a dime-sized lump, she was shocked and frightened.
When he doctor confirmed that she had breast cancer, she found herself worrying about the financial burden of treatment for the cancer.
But with stage III cancer, she went through with both chemotherapy and radiation, deciding to worry about the cost later.
The survival rate for Castor’s stage IIIA cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute, is only 67 percent.
Her treatment began with surgery to remove the lump in her breast and seven of the lymph nodes in her arm pit.
Six of the lymph nodes were cancerous.
Immediately after surgery, Castor started chemotherapy treatments, and soon felt the effect of cancer treatment.
She had a bottle-cap sized port implanted in her chest due to deep veins, which would make the chemotherapy difficult.
She’d go in once a month on a Tuesday for six months, spending up to four hours hooked to a machine that pumped various cancer drugs into the port.
As she sat, waiting for the treatment to be over, Castor’s body was pumped with anywhere from four to six different drugs.
Within two weeks of her first chemotherapy treatment, Castor’s hair began to fall out.
“Mine came out when I was coming home from my daughter’s volleyball game,” Castor said, a single mother to her then 12-year-old daughter.
When she arrived home from the game, Castor decided to shave her head. “My sister shaved it for me.”
“It was devastating. That was probably the hardest part,” Castor said.
All the while, Castor was experiencing extreme tiredness and nausea, effects of the chemo drugs.
“I had no appetite. You kind of get tired, almost like you had the flu. It made your bones hurt, like you’d been run over by a Mack truck.”
Castor said she missed a lot of work during that period as she struggled to feel strong.
The next phase of her treatment, radiation therapy, was less painful, she said.
Although radiation was less painful, it was more time consuming.
Castor went to radiation every week-day for 33 weeks.
She’d continue working, and only visit the doctor at 8 a.m. for a treatment just before work.
It felt, she said, “almost like when you lay out in the sun and get tired.”
The treatment, which zapped her with radiation using a machine, burned her skin during the last week of treatment.
Dr. Chandrika Patel, a radiation oncologist with Saint John’s Hospital, said side effects of radiation typically include redness and swelling of the skin along with lethargy.
Radiation is sometimes used to shrink a tumor, she said, but in the case of patient’s who’ve had a lumpectomy, like Castor, the treatment eliminates microscopic disease.
Now, as she rounds the corner on her fourth year of remission, Castor’s is done with her treatments, except for one cancer-prevention pill she will continue to take until her fifth year in remission.
Patel said many breast cancer patients are making it to the fifth year because the medicine has improved over the past two decades.
“I think we’re definitely getting better in terms of targeting diseases and being able to — it’s almost like tailoring treatment to the patient. Before, a patient would come in with a breast tumor and everyone would be treated the same.”
The future for breast cancer treatment is encouraging. “More recently, we’ve been testing the tumors for molecular receptors, even something like estrogen and progesterone receptors.”
This will allow doctors to provide medication suited to each patient’s hormonal make-up.
Even with advances in breast cancer treatment, the old adage still applies, she said. “The earlier we find it, the more likely we are to be able to cure them of the cancer.”
Contact Brandi Watters 640-4847, brandi.watters@heraldbulletin.com.
