Battling Breast Cancer

This story by features writer Heather Salerno ran in Life & Style on Oct. 21.  Photo by Tania Savayan.

Carrie Pataky enters an exam room at a plastic surgeon’s office in Scarsdale and introduces herself to Constance Rogers , who wears a thin, blue paper gown that covers her chest.

As Pataky unpacks equipment from a small rolling suitcase — squeeze bottles of ink, a hand-held, electric machine, sterile needles, powder-free latex gloves — she offers to share her iced coffee with Rogers, and the two begin an easy conversation about the procedure that’s about to take place.

It won’t take very long, about 15 minutes or so. And Rogers shouldn’t feel any pain, just some vibration from the machine.

“I hope I just feel better,” says Rogers, 52, a divorced mother of two and Poughkeepsie resident, who was diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago. “That it gives me back confidence.”

That is Pataky’s job as a tattoo artist, one with a unique talent for making survivors like Rogers feel beautiful again. Women have come from as far away as England to see the 44-year-old Yonkers native, who has built a solid niche tattooing nipples and areolas on women after breast cancer surgery.

For these women, Pataky is the last step in a long, harrowing journey through treatment and recovery. She’s giving them an exceptional gift: their self-esteem, and with that, the ability to move forward with their lives.

Even with full nipple reconstruction, a post-mastectomy patient’s breasts lack the skin pigmentation that makes them look completely natural. Some survivors say it’s like looking at a blank canvas; others have described their breasts as a face with no features.

Over the last six years, Pataky has worked on more than 500 women. Her specialty is rare among tattoo artists; most often specially trained nurses in a surgeon’s office — or even the doctors themselves — are the ones doing the areola tattoos.

Pataky says other tattoo artists have told her that they entered the field because they wanted to create art‚ not areolas.

“I believe if we have a skill and a talent in putting ink on the skin, we should use it the best we can, for whatever we can,” says Pataky. “Whether it’s putting a flower on you…or giving you areolas.”

Here’s a story by Karen Croke that ran in the Life & Style section on Oct. 11. Photos by Tania Savayan.

Call them good luck charms, or talismans, or simply smile inducers on the darkest of days, but for those facing treatment for breast cancer, sometimes the simplest things make all the difference.

For Bonnie Draeger, Hope and Grace come in handy. While recovering from bilateral breast cancer, Draeger, the author of “When Cancer Strikes A Friend,” (Skyhorse), carried a set of two pink teddy bears given to her by a friend named Karen.

“The first was named ‘Hope’ and she arrived shortly after my initial diagnosis,” says Draeger, a long-time White Plains resident, who had the bears along at a recent visit to the Dickstein Cancer Center. “When a second cancer was discovered a month later, Karen gave me a second bear that I named ‘Grace’ as I would need a great deal of grace to handle two different breast cancers at once,” she says.

Her surgeon asked if Draeger wanted to take the bears into surgery with her. She declined, although at a crucial moment, she says, “they did remind me to face cancer with hope and grace each and every day throughout my recovery.”

Join us at 1 p.m. Tuesday, when we’ll chat with Una Hopkins, a nurse practitioner with training in cancer genetics at White Plains Hospital’s Dickstein Cancer Treatment Center.

You can sign up for a reminder below.

This information also ran in Sunday’s Life & Style section about testing for the breast cancer genes.

Here’s a story that ran in Sunday’s Life & Style section by reporter Heather Salerno. All photos are by Tania Savayan.

A mother’s choice: Allison Gilbert tests positive for breast cancer gene, makes life-altering decision

Irvington’s Allison Gilbert knows exactly what the human face of cancer looks like.

It’s the face of her grandmother, Henny, who died of breast cancer when Gilbert was a little girl. It’s the face of her mother, Lynn, who died of ovarian cancer in 1996. It’s also the face of her father, Sidney, who died of lung cancer five years later, leaving Gilbert an adult orphan at 31.

A few years after losing her dad, Gilbert discovered that this disease’s attack on her family wasn’t random: It’s a tragic birthright. Testing showed that she inherited a mutation in a gene called BRCA1, which drastically increases her chance of getting breast cancer, ovarian cancer or both. In fact, she was told that — without intervention — the odds of developing breast cancer in her lifetime were as much as 85 percent.

That revelation increased Gilbert’s fear that she might die young like her relatives, leaving her husband, Mark Weintraub, and their two children – Jake, now 12, and Lexi, 10 — behind. In 2007, with her family complete, she underwent surgery to remove her healthy ovaries — a decision The Journal News chronicled — and she continued to see doctors every three months for a breast exam, mammogram, sonogram or MRI, in order to catch breast cancer in an early stage. With each appointment, though, there was the potential for a dreadful diagnosis.

Gilbert had another option besides careful surveillance: another prophylactic, or preventive, surgery. Removing both still-healthy breasts would reduce her odds of getting breast cancer to about 1 percent, far lower than the average woman, whose lifetime risk is about 12 percent.

The Journal News caught up with the 42-year-old this year, after she made the decision to go forward with that operation, and followed her throughout the surgical process, in real time and on Facebook. The move, she hopes, will keep her around for Jake and Lexi for a very long time.

“I’m trying to make this a parenting decision,” she says. “It’s really about my kids. Even though it’s my body, I feel it’s really more about them than it’s about me.”

Given her family history, it’s a choice that Gilbert knew she’d have to make eventually. But for her, the turning point came in 2008, when her beloved aunt, Ronnie, her mother’s sister, told the family that she, too, had an aggressive form of breast cancer. She passed away barely three months later.

“It was a hard death,” says Gilbert. “Sometime shortly thereafter I went on the warpath.”

Read blog posts, see Tweets and follow links in this recap of our Twitter chat with Rica Mendes, a Livestrong Leader, LoHud.com blogger and a breast cancer survivor, about the challenges of coping with cancer after the treatment is over.

In case you missed it, here’s the story that ran Monday in Life & Style:

Treatment over, blogger Rica Mendes looks ahead to the next chapter of life

Last October, Rica Mendes shared her fight against breast cancer in a monthlong series of blog posts on LoHud.com.

A year later, she is relieved to be cancer-free.

But the difficulties continue for Mendes, a 38-year-old single mother of two who lost her job and is battling with insurance companies as she wades through piles of unpaid bills.

Recently she learned that the hospital where she was treated has a “financial aid department,” but that you need to apply for Medicaid and be turned down before they’ll even consider your case.

The “financial ramifications” of being a cancer patient are clearly among her greatest challenges, says Mendes.

“COBRA alone is so outrageous right now, it’s higher than my mortgage,” she says. “And God help me if I tried to get private insurance.”

As if all that weren’t enough, Mendes’ mother was also diagnosed recently with breast cancer. She had a lumpectomy two weeks ago and will need six weeks of radiation. Mendes is BRCA positive, which means she has a genetic predisposition to the disease, but her mother is not. “Her cancer can’t be any more different than mine,” says Mendes. “That’s how wacky this disease is.” Her mother’s prognosis, she adds, is excellent.

Mendes’ own life changed abruptly last year, just a month after her 37th birthday.

In July, she learned from a mammogram that she had invasive early-stage breast cancer, then found out she had the gene. In August 2011, she had a double mastectomy. In September, she started four months of chemotherapy. In February, her chest expanders were replaced with breast implants.

Her last surgical procedure was in May, when she had her nipples reconstructed. This past July, doctors finally said she could resume exercising.

For Mendes, who’d been an avid cyclist — and who remains a leader in Livestrong, the cancer-support organization founded by Lance Armstrong — getting active again has done wonders for her spirit.

She started by canoeing around nearby Lake Kitchawan every morning, and this summer, she took part in an adventure camp for cancer survivors, overcoming her fear of heights as she went rock climbing in the Colorado Rockies.

Her body is slowly springing back, too. Mendes lost her hair during chemotherapy — in one of her video posts last October, she cried as she held a clump of hair that came out on camera — but now she’s got a head full of curls.

“I look like a really sad Little Orphan Annie,” she says with a laugh. “If it was 1978, I’d be fine.”

It’s her ability to laugh at herself that’s helped pull her though, says Mendes. Welcoming her “twins” — the new breast implants — with a “booby shower” at her home this spring is a case in point, she says.

“I am very grateful for my sense of humor, as macabre and twisted as it is.”

She’s also gained perspective, she says, and has, quite literally, taken time to smell the roses she planted in the garden outside her South Salem home. Recently she put up a hammock, where she relaxes with a cocktail and does absolutely nothing.

While her previous job as Web operations manager for a Connecticut start-up had provided a steady income, it also meant she had to deal with crises late into the night, says Mendes.

Life was becoming increasingly hectic.

“Cancer is one of those things where, not only does it grab you by the shoulders and slap you across the face and say, ‘Hi, I’m here,’ but when you’ve survived it and go back into real life — unless your job was your passion and you were enjoying everything about your life prior to that — you just sit back and say, ‘Why did I put myself through this for so many years?’” she says. “Or ‘Why do I put with this BS?’”

These days, she is working as a temp and hoping to be offered a job that is permanent. Her friends at Livestrong have remained a strong support system, she says. And it’s very likely another adventure is in the works.

“In a sense I feel like nothing is stopping me now except for what’s in my own head,” she says.

What about women who find themselves newly diagnosed with breast cancer?

Don’t hide, urges Mendes.

“Reach out to an organization like Livestrong, because if you keep it pent up, if you don’t get it off your chest — even if you’ve been the biggest introvert your entire life — it’s going to eat at you,” she says.

“You’ve already got cancer eating you alive. Why let stress and emotion do it too?”

To read more, go to LoHud.com/breastcancer, where you will find links to Mendes’ other blogs.

Rica Mendes, who blogged about her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment here on this blog on LoHud.com last year, says she feels more like a “recoverer” than a “survivor.”

Tania Savayan / The Journal News

A quote from her Rica’s Livestrong Advetures  blog:

Once the scalpels invaded my skin, once parts of me were carved up and discarded, replaced by synthetic prosthesis, I became something… someone… else. I think the question still looms, who or what have I become?

Here’s the blog post in its entirety:

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

My, how time flies…

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and tomorrow, The Journal News begins its annual special coverage of this important topic with a story  about South Salem’s Rica Mendes, who blogged about her personal struggle with the disease for us last year.

Reporter Linda Lombroso writes a moving update on Rica’s condition: It’s one you won’t want to miss. And we’ll continue to post new information here all month.

But in the meantime, we thought we’d share links to stories we’ve published in the past, which have plenty of useful information – whether you’re a survivor yourself or know someone with the illness.

• Beyond breast cancer: Rica Mendes continues to battle, and share, her courageous story.

• Helping Hands: The best advice for what to do – and what not to do – comes from those battling breast cancer themselves.

• Young women with breast cancer face unique challenges.

• Breast cancer myth busters: There are a lot of misconceptions about breast cancer. Arm yourself with facts.

• Fighting breast cancer in a down economy: A safety net exists in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam.

Reporter Linda Lombroso wrote this story on our blogger, Rica Mendes, for the Sunday Life section on Nov. 20, 2011:

Every Sunday, we write about residents we call “rock stars,” but few of them are actually musicians — they are just local people who are in the spotlight, or who are deserving of some positive attention.

Rica Mendes just might be our first overnight sensation.

We met her, in late September, getting fitted for a wig at the American Cancer Society’s headquarters in White Plains. At 37, the divorced mother of two from South Salem had recently undergone a double mastectomy and was preparing for the eventual day when chemotherapy would claim her long hair.

Journal News photographer Xavier Mascareñas — who was at the cancer society on an assignment to shoot low-cost resources for breast-cancer patients — struck up a conversation with Mendes, who was there to select a free wig. Mascareñas asked if he could take her photograph. She agreed, and gave him her telephone number, too. We called her to follow up, and discovered she was a blogger and leader for LiveStrong, the cancer-advocacy foundation created by athlete Lance Armstrong.

We were looking for someone to blog for us during October, as part of our coverage of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and asked Mendes, who jumped at the opportunity.

The blog, which launched just days later, quickly became a hit with readers. In her chatty, no-holds-barred style, Mendes reported on her personal struggle, chronicling everything from her grueling chemotherapy treatments to the shock of losing clumps of her hair — which she captured, on camera, during one of her many video-diary posts.

“I’ve always been a heart-on-the-sleeve kind of person,” she says.

As tough as it must have been for Mendes, her frankness made us admire her even more — and her courage was inspiring to our readers, many of whom wrote to tell us so. After Mendes was bald, in mid-October, she continued to post video blogs staring straight into the camera.

In this information age, she says, people deserve to see and hear the truth.

“I’m bald, there’s no hiding that. And I’ve got cancer, it’s hard to hide that,” she says. “It takes a lot more strength and restraint not to talk about it.”