SAN ANTONIO – Aubrey Espinoza said it’s hard not to cry when she thinks back on the last two years of her life.
“Everything went really fast,” Espinoza said.
Espinoza, a wife and mom of two, is also a survivor of breast cancer. Diagnosed at only 30 years old, Espinoza is just one of the hundreds of thousands of women diagnosed with breast cancer each year, as predicted by the American Cancer Society.
“It was May of 2022 when I was diagnosed,” Espinoza said. “So much going through my mind.”
Espinoza first noticed a hard lump when she was breastfeeding her son. It wasn’t until she finished breastfeeding and realized it was still there that she went to the doctor.
“I noticed that this lump was just extremely hard; it wasn’t like a soft kind of tissue feeling like it was when I first noticed it,” Espinoza said.
But this breast cancer journey was one she didn’t go through alone. When she was diagnosed in May of 2022, she was already a couple of weeks pregnant with her daughter, Kynlee.
“At that point, it was like tunnel vision. We just got to get through this,” Espinoza said. “My daughter went through the first four rounds of chemo with me, so that was really hard.”
Espinoza got treatment through the Baptist Health System. Through surgery and chemotherapy, she was eventually declared cancer-free, but only after a complicated journey.
“Cancer is not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing,” Espinoza said. “Everyone’s treatment is different and mine was a lot different because I was pregnant.”
Her surgeon, Dr. Morton Kahlenberg, the medical director for the Baptist Network for Cancer Care, said specialized care is the best approach when it comes to breast cancer. And now, with new technology and treatment techniques, more people are surviving.
“Every breast cancer patient deserves that multi-disciplinary, very personal approach,” Kahlenberg said. “We have come an incredibly long way with things like targeted therapy and therapies that actually target specific characteristics of the tumor cell.”
Dr. Marc Erian, a doctor at Baptist specializing in breast radiology, said getting screened is the best way to stay on top of one’s health.
“If you skip that mammogram, we’re kind of missing a piece of the puzzle,” Erian said. “If it is something that is bad, you want to catch it when it’s treatable.”
Typically, doctors recommend that women over 40 get a screening every year for breast cancer. But, new research from the American College of Radiology called for all women to get a risk assessment at the age of 25 to determine if they need screening earlier. Erian said the hope is to help detect more patients earlier, like Espinoza.
“If you feel something, just keep pushing until you have answers,” Espinoza said.
For a deeper look at the signs and symptoms of breast cancer, click here.