Remembering a cancer warrior

27 year-old ends her fight, but leaves legacy to help others

Story by Cindy Aguirre-Herrera with courtesy photos

The following is not your average October Breast Cancer

Awareness story. Instead, it’s about one warrior who is speaking from the trenches as she not only fights for her life but the lives of our wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, and aunts.

Next month will mark one year since 27-year-old S’adi Gonzales first learned that she had Stage 3 Breast Cancer. After a successful treatment and a couple of months of breathing room, Gonzales found herself back in battle and is now diagnosed with Stage 4 Breast Cancer -- a cancer that has also spread to her bones and liver.

Despite the roller coaster of a year, it was Gonzales who reached out to the Seguin Daily News. Gonzales says she felt it was important to share her journey so that hopefully, others would be able to navigate through their own should that day ever come.

In fact, it was her experience at the very beginning of her diagnosis that prompted her to advocate for others.

“I’ve always just checked my breast in the shower when showering so I was checking it and then there was a little lump and I was ‘oh, no!’ and then I said maybe I strained myself because I took my dog a bath so I was like maybe he jumped on me and hit my breast but then, I had noticed about two weeks later that that bump had started getting bigger and it started getting very painful. That’s when I realized I needed to see the doctor. It was hard for the doctor to confirm what I had because they kept pushing that it was an infection and they kept giving me antibiotics for about two months and within that two months, the original doctor was no longer helping me because they wanted to keep pushing antibiotics but at that point, I had refused and I ended up seeking a second opinion and I ended up seeking my second opinion which ended up being with my breast surgeon and she took one look at my breast and she was like ‘no, we have to get you a biopsy now!’ And so then they finally got me the biopsy and confirmed that it was cancer,” said Gonzales.

The young mother says she doesn’t want women especially young women like herself to discredit any pain or symptoms that they may be experiencing.

“I would like to say that it’s very important that everybody self-checks themselves even if they are only 20 through 30 because mammograms don’t start till 40. The earliest that some people can even be seen for mammograms because of family history of breast cancer is about 35. So, when you are 20 and older, you are on your own and you really have to continue to check on yourself because you are the only person who is going to get to say ‘oh, this does not seem right,” said Gonzales.

Gonzales says unfortunately, it can be difficult for health professionals to place an emphasis on young women especially if they are already a mother or have no family history of cancer.

“I trusted my doctors for those two months and within those two months, that lump took over my whole breast. I was 26 and I was already Stage 3 because it was already in the skin, and it was already 9 cm and I often go back and I’m like I wish I would have gone back and pushed for the biopsy from the very beginning. But I can’t always be like I wish I would have done that. I’ve just got to keep moving forward so that’s why

I think it’s very important for me to tell everyone ‘If something doesn’t feel right and they just want to brush it off which most doctors do brush it off because we are young, most of us don’t have family history of breast cancer but it happens. It just doesn’t happen to women over 40,” said Gonzales.

Gonzales says her best advice for breast cancer or any health condition is to be persistent and to rely on their intuition.

“The type of breast cancer that I have, it does often get mistaken as mastitis which is the breast feeding infection as well but even at that, I had always thought it was weird because I did breast feed my daughter when she was younger and I have had mastitis before and I didn’t have a fever but they kept pushing that on me and they didn’t want to give me the biopsy because I was too young,” said Gonzales.

Gonzales says the type of pain she experienced should also be noted although symptoms can be different for everyone.

“It was a shocking strike of pain. I would always describe it to my doctor as a woman who had given birth, it’s kind of like a contraction in your breast. It’s just a striking sharp pain,” said Gonzales.

Gonzales her fight thus far has been anything but easy. Yet, she is grateful to have come this far.

“I had to do five months of chemotherapy and during that five months, it went down all the way to two centimeters and it was working but then, it had stopped working so it started growing which lead to me getting an emergency surgery mastectomy and so then, I had to get a single mastectomy. I ended up getting into a wound vac (vacuum) because with Inflammatory Breast Cancer which is the type of cancer that I have, it takes over your skin and when it takes over your skin, you have to take off all of that skin and so I have a large portion of my breast skin taken out so I need what is called a wound vac to shrink the wound -- that way it was possible for my next surgery and my next surgery was called a DEIP flap where it takes your stomach skin and it moves it to your breast and then, when I had that, that’s when they had seen my results and they said that I was clear of cancer, but then a month later, I started noticing redness on my skin and that was the cancer back and unfortunately, they had found it in my bones and in my liver,” said Gonzales.

She says thanks to current chemo treatments, the pain in her bones has lessened, and it appears as though the evidence on her liver has disappeared. However, the overall job of the chemotherapy is apparently not working as well as they want it to and for that reason, Gonzales says she will soon be at MD Anderson (Cancer Center) in Houston with the next step maybe being clinical trials. It’s vital Gonzales says that younger women, especially, be vigilant in protecting their bodies.

“I know that when I had breast cancer, mostly everyone thought oh okay, you can have a surgery, you’ll be fine and then if you need chemo, you’ll get chemo and you’ll be fine. But that’s not the case. Typically, with younger women people that get diagnosed with cancer and they are under 40, they get diagnosed with aggressive cancers. That’s something that people also don’t realize that sometimes people believe that ‘oh, you are younger. You’ll be able to beat it. It’s so much easier. You are healthy’ but we also get diagnosed with more aggressive type cancers. They have aggressive grades that are given. That’s why it’s also so important for people to always check themselves. Also, for the older women who are over 40 and able to get mammograms, I think it’s also important because something that I didn’t realize until I joined my breast cancer Facebook group is that there are so many women that are over 40 that because of these mammograms, they found their cancer and it is at an early stage,” said Gonzales.

Also, breast cancers don’t all come with a lump. And some don’t offer any symptoms at all. Those are a couple of other points that Gonzales shares as she encourages women to listen to their bodies and to schedule those mammograms as soon as possible.

On top of the chemotherapy and radiation, Gonzales believes her number one source for strength and healing comes from positivity and her ability to advocate for others just as she has done by sharing this story.

“I’ve always been a very positive person, so I think that that helps. Before when I was Stage 3 and I thought of that scary thought of ever becoming Stage 4 would happen to me, I thought I’d be crying every day. I thought I’d be going insane, but I haven’t. I’ve been good for the most part. I’ve just been going by it day by day because that’s all you can really do so like even though, it’s scary – I still stay pretty positive because that’s really all you can do whenever you are faced with something so scary so I’m doing good. I have a great support system that keeps me going. I have my sad days sometimes, but I have my daughter, my mom and my boyfriend and they keep me pretty strong and help me through it,” said Gonzales.

According to statistics, one in eight women will develop breast cancer over the course of their lives. It is also not an illness that only women can get. About one percent of those affected are men. •