Cancer survivor rides on after radical surgery
When Andrea Francis learned she had breast cancer in 2005, her doctors in Buffalo and at the Cleveland Clinic recommended a lumpectomy for the non-invasive ductal carcinoma, stage 0, medium grade.
“Statistically, the odds were 99 percent in my favor to be cured,” said Francis, who left today on a weeklong Harley-Davidson ride along the Pacific Coast Highway to raise funds and awareness of breast cancer in young women.
Instead, she opted for a double mastectomy and immediate reconstruction, a procedure openly being talked about as her choice by actress Christina Applegate.
“I wanted to minimize this interruption in my life,” said Francis, “and I didn’t want to get into chemo or radiation if I didn’t have to.”
A radical decision? Yes.
But Francis, 53, had just gone through the death of her mother, artist Frances Crohn, from breast cancer. And she’d been corresponding with a California radiologist, with the same diagnosis, who opted for a bilateral mastectomy.
“She is someone who has 1,000 patients in her clinic and this is what she decided, so it made me re-evaluate,” said Francis, who wanted to avoid chemotherapy or radiation.
And one more thing ...
“I’d just had half-a-dozen pallets of creek stone delivered and I had work to do,” said Francis, referring to the construction of a stone house that she and her husband, Tim, have nearly completed on their South Wales property.
Francis is convinced that her decision was the right one, for her, though she had to search for a surgeon and appeal to her insurance company to cover the prophylactic removal of the non-diseased breast.
By her account, she sailed through recovery. “Within a month, I could swim across the pond and it wasn’t long before I was lifting boulders,” she said.
Her life continued — with attention to her two grown children and a stepson, an extensive garden, biking and working as a private care nurse’s aide.
The cancer, too, continued its life.
On New Year’s Day 2007 she discovered a cherry-sized lump, extremely rare, aggressive and thought to be incurable, at the original site. “I just about fell on the floor,” she said, especially when she learned that a gene test, which she never got, could have detected the likelihood of spread.
Now, the odds were dramatically against her, as the cancer had metastasized to her liver and elsewhere.
“One thing I learned from the doctor in California was how to strategize,” she said. “As you wait for results, you take charge by deciding what you’ll do. Then you are prepared and it doesn’t suck the life out of you every day.”
Her best hope, she was told, was to undergo a 14-month regimen of chemotherapy, which would mean losing her hair and having her implants removed. Besides that, the drug was heart toxic for some, she said. When she arrived at the clinic to start treatment, she found that they didn’t have the means to administer that test.
She walked out, again defying medical advice.
“I was shaking like a leaf when I left,” she said. “When I got home, I called Roswell and said I needed a miracle.”
It came in the form of a clinical trial. “I could get on it because I was a virgin — no chemo, no radiation.”
It was the miracle she needed, she said. “I never got sick. I never missed a day of work. I never lost a strand of hair.”
Most importantly, it worked. The tumor on her liver shrank, leaving only two tiny spots.
Next, Francis located another clinical trial, this time in Rochester, where a doctor was treating such liver spots with a type of laser therapy. “He told me that everyone says you can’t get rid of spots in a metastasized liver,” she said, “but he had 45 women who’ve done it.”
During treatment, Francis didn’t join a support group. “I didn’t feel I deserved the pink-ribbon treatment,” she said. “I didn’t think I was sick enough, not after seeing what some women went through.”
But she rode in the Ride for Roswell, raising more than $5,000 and igniting a desire to do more. When she found the Amazon Heart Thunder group, cancer survivors who are adventurers, it was exactly what she wanted. In particular, Francis wants to raise awareness of the disease in young women such as 33-year-old Michelle Bynum, mother of a 4-year-old, who is now acutely ill.
“She went for two years with a lump to her doctor, who said it was from milk or changes because she was breast feeding,” said Francis. “He told her the techs would laugh if he sent her for a mammogram because she was so young.”
For veteran rider Francis — who will wear a white-fringed jacket, black leather pants and boots — it’s the ride of a lifetime, to be with other feisty women, some of whom took up riding so they could participate in the ride from San Diego to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
“It’s a group celebrating a lust for life,” she said, “female bonding on the open road and the eternal promise of the journey ahead.”
Further information and the opportunity to contribute is available at: www.amazonheartthunder.org .
