Invasive ductal carcinoma is one of the most common breast cancers, comprising 80 percent of all such diagnoses.
Blair Holloway was diagnosed seven years ago.
“My youngest son, Cash, was born in 2009, and in July 2010, around the time I finished nursing him, I noticed a lump,” Holloway said.
The lump was “more in the chest area of my left breast,” she noted.
Symptoms, she said, included a lump in the breast; thickening of the breast skin; a rash or redness of the breast; swelling in one breast; new pain in one breast; nipple pain or the nipple turning inward; nipple discharge; and lumps in the underarm area.
“You can also have changes in the appearance of the nipple or breast that are different from the normal monthly changes a woman experiences,” Holloway said.
Shortly after her diagnoses, Holloway had the breast cancer gene test performed.
“Basically, if I had had this gene, everything dealing with female hormones would have to go,” she said.
Holloway was negative for the gene, however.
The months that followed were filled with chemotherapy, specifically six rounds in 14 months.
She underwent a 10-hour double mastectomy on March 9, 2011, followed by a reconstructive surgery.
She was under the care of Dr. Richard Kline of East Cooper Plastic Surgery.
“He basically remade me,” Holloway said. “It is all-natural from my own tissue. (There are) no implants.”
At the time, Kline was one of only four doctors in the United States performing such surgeries and reconstructions with patients’ own tissues.
“Chemotherapy was OK,” Holloway said. “I never really got sick. I did get dehydrated, and I would be down about 2.5 days every three or four weeks. I would have my ‘Big Chemo Days,’ as I referred to them.”
