Five Things All Breast Cancer Patients Need to Know

For those of you who don't know me and don't know me well and don't know my story, I just briefly want to share it. I am Dr. Jen Simmons. I am an integrative oncologist. My specialty is breast cancer. And I come by my breast cancer place in this world very naturally and very organically. There was actually never a time in my life where I did know about breast cancer. As a child. I had a first cousin, and her name was Linda Creed. Linda was a singer songwriter in the 1970s and 1980s. She wrote all the music for the Spinners and the Stylistics. She was the queen of Motown sound. And anyone who is over 50 years old knows all of her music. I promise, promise, promise you. She wrote 54 hits in all with her writing partner, Tom Bell. But the one song that she wrote independent of him, her most famous song, was called the Greatest Love of All. She wrote that song in 1977 as the title track to the movie the Greatest, starring Muhammad Ali. But it really received its acclaim in March of 1986 when Whitney Houston released that song to the world. And at that time, it would spend 14 weeks at the top of the charts. And there wasn't a person on the earth who didn't know that song. And I was so proud because this was my first cousin. She was a rock star, and she literally wrote the song that every single person was singing. She was brilliant, magical, larger than life, just lit up a room. And I loved her so much, and she was such an important part of my childhood. And when she released that song in March of 1986 and it would spend 14 weeks at the top of the charts, she would actually never know because she died of metastatic breast cancer just one month after Whitney released that song. I still can't tell the story without bringing tears to my eyes. I was 16 years old when my hero died. Her life, and ultimately her death, gave birth to my life's purpose. I did the only thing that I knew how to do so as to prevent another woman, another family, another community from having to suffer the way that my family suffered. I became a doctor. I became a surgeon. I became the first fellowship trained breast surgeon in Philadelphia. And I did that for a really long time. And I did it really well. And I ushered thousands of women through the most difficult part of their lives. And I practiced long enough to see my mother diagnosed and my aunt diagnosed. And all the while, I really thought that I was living my purpose and doing exactly what I was meant to do on this earth. And I was about 15 years into practice and at the top of my game, doing cutting edge things that no one else was doing. Really, really finding a silver lining for women with breast cancer diagnosis. And in addition to running my practice, I was running the cancer program for my hospital. And I'm a wife and a mother and a stepmother and an athlete and a philanthropist, and I have a lot of balls in the air and I think I'm an expert juggler until the day that they all came crashing to the ground. And I went from being probably one of the most high functioning people you'll ever meet in your life to, to completely incapacitated in a matter of three days. And I underwent an intensive workup. And at the end of that three day workup, I'm sitting in the office of my friend and colleague and physician and he tells me that I need surgery and chemo, radiation, and I'm going to be on lifelong medication. And despite the fact that these are things that I said all day, every day without hesitation or reservation, and despite the fact that I knew that this was the standard of care, and despite the fact that I knew that he would say to me that if I didn't do these things, I would die, these same words that I had spoken myself thousands and thousands of times, I walked out of the office that day. I knew that refusing treatment would mean isolation from my friends and colleagues. I knew that I was on my own. But something just told me, God, universe, call it whatever you want to call it. Something told me that there was something else, there was another way, there was more to the picture, things that I didn't understand, things that I couldn't understand if I just followed these recommendations and I went on a journey. This journey was not about helping my breast cancer patients. This journey wasn't about helping my mother or my aunt or anyone. This journey was about helping me. It was about bringing me back to life because I was very, very, very close to death. And I decided pretty early on in my journey that despite the fact that I was a physician, and at this point I had been a physician for over 20 years, I decided that I needed more information about how to nourish your body. And we really don't get much of that in our traditional medical training. And if any of you are doctors, or if any of you know doctors, you'll know that there is very little around nourishment in the conventional medical world. And in fact, in the conventional medical world, we're really not taught to heal. We're only taught to mask the signs of disease. And so I decided that I would start by learning more about nourishment. And I enrolled in a certificate program called the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. And it's actually a training program for. For health coaches. And I entered very begrudgingly because I think, you know, I was still my snooty booty self. I was still a doctor for 20 years, and I struggled with how much I could possibly learn. But that little nagging voice inside of my head said, you need to learn. You need more information, Go find it. And so I'm sitting in one of the very first lectures, and a man named Mark Hyman walks on the stage, and he introduces himself as a functional medicine physician. And my snooty booty self said, there's no such thing as a functional medicine physician. What is this quack talking about? And then I remember that I'm sick, and I check my ego at the door and I tune in and I listen. And thank God I did. Because after hearing him speak for three minutes, I knew exactly why I got sick. I knew that I was meant to be in that room on that day listening to him speak, because everything that he was saying was everything that I needed to hear. I am a woman of deep faith. I strongly believe in God. And I know that God put me there to hear this because I was not on the right path, despite the fact that I was doing things that were really great, they weren't great enough, and I was meant for more, and this was my calling. And I think that happens to all of us. I think that we get whispers and we don't hear them, and the voices get a little louder and we don't hear them. And it takes a really loud noise to wake us up from our slumber. And for so many people, it's their diagnosis. So is this resonating with anyone? Does anyone feel that their. That their breast cancer diagnosis was their wake up call, their sign from God, their sign from the universe that there is something more, that. That there is something else that we should be doing, that we need to pay attention to our bodies, to ourselves, to our lives in a way that we weren't doing before? Because this was my wake up call. This was my ability to really examine my life. You know, B. Brown is very famous for saying, you people think that I want to live a life without regret. And Benet Brown points out that the people that are living life without regret are not living an unregrettable life. They're living an unexamined life and for me, my, my diagnosis was my opportunity to examine myself, to examine my life, how I was living it, what I was doing, so that I could stop walking through the motions of life and actually heal. And so often when we're stuck in the system, we just get a symptom, get something to suppress it, get a symptom, get something else to suppress it. Sometimes the things that suppress the symptom bring up new symptoms and you have to take something else to suppress that. And we get in these cycles where we're playing these never ending games of whack a mole and we can't get off the hamster wheel. And it takes something so drastic like a breast cancer diagnosis to get us off that hamster wheel. So I know all of you are here because you're concerned about breast cancer. You've had a diagnosis, you're living with a diagnosis, you're worried about a diagnosis. You have a friend or a family member with a diagnosis. And so often we see that diagnosis in the context of punishment or something we did wrong. And I'm asking you tonight for a reframe. I'm asking you to instead see your diagnosis not as a punishment, not as a hardship, but as an opportunity. An opportunity to live an examined life. An opportunity to choose. An opportunity to live the life that God meant for you to live. And you don't have to be religious, you don't even have to be spiritual. But just know that we were all put here for a purpose. We all have a unique purpose. And whatever that purpose is for you, that needs to be fulfilled. And for most people, a breast cancer diagnosis is an opportunity to understand that what you're doing isn't right for you. It's not about right or wrong. It's about what's right for you. And this is your opportunity to examine that. So I want to offer you the five things that I think everyone with a breast cancer diagnosis needs to consider. The first thing is, when you are given a breast cancer diagnosis, take a breath, take a pause, take time to reflect. Know that you have time. Most breast cancer diagnoses come after that process has been in motion for years, not four, for years. Most people we're talking about 10 years before it becomes clinically relevant. So there is no reason to rush to judgment. There is no reason to rush to treatment because you have time, take a breath. There are some exceptions to that rule. They are very rare. And I'll tell you that in my 25 years of treating women with breast cancer, I have only seen emergencies, a Handful of times. I'm going to tell you what they are right now so that you can know that they don't apply to you. If you have something called inflammatory breast cancer, that is something that needs to be rapidly treated, and you'll know that because that is something that is rapidly progressing. You go from essentially having no disease to having a breast filled with disease in a month's time. So in that situation, days matter, weeks matter. And if you are in that situation, I will tell you that I often look for reasons to not have chemotherapy in that situation. This is equivalent to your proverbial sink overflowing. Your body has exceeded its ability to clear toxins. And we get toxins from so many places. We get toxins from chemicals, we get toxins from food that doesn't agree with us, or get toxins from relationships that don't agree with us. We get toxins from the stress that we put on ourselves. We get toxins from the stress that the world puts on us. Okay, so we have. We have toxins that surround us. Some people are really good at clearing the toxins. Some people, not so much. So someone who has inflammatory breast cancer, their sink is overflowing, the floor is flooded. Chemotherapy, radiation, these are things that we use to mop up the floor, and they are necessary in that instance. However, the far more important thing is to figure out why your sink is overflowing. And this is true of everyone. So sometimes you need those band aids, sometimes you need those crutches. Sometimes, if you don't have the luxury of time, and inflammatory breast cancer is one of those instances, if you don't have the luxury of time, you are going to need some assistance. Chemotherapy is one of those ways to assist. Now, please remember that breast cancer is not a chemotherapy deficiency. It's not a radiation deficiency. So chemotherapy and radiation will never cure breast cancer. You are not healthier after you get chemotherapy and radiation. In fact, you're usually far worse. However, if you can decrease the tumor burden and allow your immune system to come back online by doing healing measures afterwards, then you do have the opportunity to heal. So inflammatory breast cancer is one of the exceptions. The other exceptions are if you have brain metastasis and you have symptoms of brain metastasis, that is something that needs urgent care. Because our head is a fixed space, so we can't have a lot of swelling inside of our head because it cuts off the blood supply. So if you have inflammatory brain cancer, a breast cancer, if you have mets to the brain that are causing increased intracranial pressure, that needs rapid treatment, or if you have like a fracture from a bone metastasis or you're in intractable pain. These things require rapid decrease, a rapid decrease in the amount of tumor load, in the amount of tumor volume. And those are the situations that need to act quickly and need to act with these chemotherapies or whatever those more aggressive methods are. Other than that, you have time, take it, take that time to do the second thing on our list. Do your research. Do your research, learn about your disease. I wrote a whole book that tells you how to interpret your pathology report. What all the things mean. What's invasive ductal carcinoma? What's DCIS? What's lobular carcinoma? What does ER mean? What does PR mean? What does HER2 new mean? I gave the whole interpretation. I also wrote about what chemotherapy does, what what radiation does, what tamoxifen does, what the aromatase inhibitors do. I gave you a guide to ask your medical oncologist, ask your radiation oncologist, ask your breast surgeon, ask your plastic surgeon. It's all there for you. And I couldn't possibly go through all of it now, but know that I wrote a book. It's called the Smart Person's Guide to Breast Cancer. And if you don't have that book, you need to get that book because it has the answers that everyone is looking for and needs to know. You need to do your research, you need to learn about your disease. You also need to know that there's only one you. And what you have is going to be different than what someone else has. And this is why. Whatever you have, whatever it looks like under the microscope, your why is going to be different than someone else's. Why? Because your body is going to be different than someone else's. Your environment is going to be different than someone else's. And breast cancer is a normal response to an abnormal environment. And so the question that we all need to be asking ourselves is, what is changing my environment? What is making my cells feel unsafe? Because that's what's happening. Breast cancer is a transformation. It's a transformation from a normal cell to a cell that is in survival mode. What happens when an animal gets backed up against a wall, gets cornered, turns vicious, right? It's unrecognizable. All it has are its animal instincts. I mean, even my. I have a five pound poodle named Teddy. And if you corner him, he will show you his teeth and be five pounds of viciousness. That's the animal instinct. That is survival mode, right? And we only go into survival mode when we're threatened. So when we are living a stress filled life, we actually change our chemistry. We shift our chemistry from the chemistry of joy in which we can rest, we can digest, we can repair to the chemistry of stress in that state. We are only in fight or flight. That's all we know. Our bodies are modern beings living on a very old gene code. We only know two states. We only know fight or flight or rest and repair. We don't know the difference between a saber toothed tiger chasing us around and a deadline. We only know unsafe or safe. We only have one response to unsafe and that is survival. So something has changed in the breast. Something has shifted the chemistry in the breast to the chemistry of joy to the chemistry of stress. And those breast cells are doing exactly what they're supposed to do. They go into survival mode. And what we need to do is send up the safe flag. We need to tell our body that is that it's safe. We need to take away whatever that threat is. So you need to be thinking about your why. What is making you feel unsafe? Are you a marathon runner? If you're a marathon runner, your body thinks you're running away from a saber toothed tiger all the time, right? And if you're running away from a saber toothed tiger, there's only two outcomes. You're either going to get away or you're going to get eaten. So if you're going to get eaten, your body doesn't need to worry about your immune system. What do you need to fight off a cold for if you're going to get eaten by a saber toothed tiger imminently? Right? But that same immune system that's not fighting off a cold is also not protecting you against cancer. I mean, that's really what happens is that these cells undergo this transformation and an intact immune system will recognize those cells and destroy them. Only your immune system thinks that it's running away from a saber toothed tiger. So it's off, it's turned off. And so there it goes. And those little tiny cells that transformed are growing and growing and growing because they're in survival mode and there's no immune system to keep them in check. So why are you in survival mode? What is driving this state for you? Where are your stressors coming from? What is your why? We need to think about all of this. This is part of our research. So first one, you have time. Second one, you have to do your research. Part of that research is our number three. It's Build your team. When people get diagnosed with breast cancer, they typically get presented with options. Here's your breast surgeon. Here's your medical oncologist. Here's your radiation oncologist. If those people resonate with you, great. If you feel like your voice is heard with them, great. If you feel like what they're recommending to you fits, great. If they don't hear you, if they don't see you, if they don't respect your opinion, if they're not treating you like an individual and instead they're treating you like your diagnosis, that's not great. Because you're so much more than your breast cancer. You're not a breast cancer patient. You're a person. You're a person who is going through whatever it is you're going through. And this is a blip on your screen. And how you should deal with your breast cancer is how you should deal with your breast cancer. And it has nothing to do with, with clinical trials or what's been done before or what the standard of care is, because the standard of care hasn't improved outcomes in 50 years. 50 years, we have not improved outcomes. So the standard of care is pretty bad. No matter what we do, we still lose the same number of women to breast cancer every day, single year. No matter what we do, 43,000 women will die every year from breast cancer. In my humble opinion, this is the unexamined life. This is the missed opportunity. And all of you are here now. You have this opportunity. Take it. Take it. Build your team with people who can help you examine your life, what is causing this imbalance, Help you to get to your why. Your team is very important. So your team may very well have a medical oncologist on, may have a radiation oncologist on, may have a breast surgeon on it. It may have a reconstructive surgeon on it. I hope it has an integrative doctor on it, a functional medicine doctor on it, a naturopath on it. If you need therapy through this process, I hope your team has a therapist on it. There are so many people that can be so important in this journey. I hope you have friends on your team. I hope you have family on your team. I hope you are surrounded by people who love you, who respect you, who trust you, and who believe in what you believe in, because that's so important. So building your team and making sure that your team is made up of people who are going to push you forward and not hold you back. So here's the fourth thing you need to Detox yourself and you need to detox your world. You have to get those toxic thoughts out of your brain. They have no place there. They don't deserve your time, they don't deserve your home, they don't deserve your hospitality. Now, the vast majority of our thoughts are negative thoughts. We grew up during a time where, you know, many of our, if we didn't, many of our parents lived through a war. Many of our parents were immigrants. Many of our parents had to come from nothing, had to leave their homes and start over again in a new country with a new language. And as a result, they were pretty critical of us. And lots of us, myself included, have very negative voices in our head. But those are toxic. And they're every bit as toxic as the chemicals that you breathe in, as the pesticides that are on your food, as the physical abuse. They're equally as toxic. We have lots of saber toothed tigers and some of them are invisible. We have to detoxify our brains and we have to detoxify our worlds. We are living in an unprecedented time. There have never been so many chemicals in, on and around us. We are not living on our grandmother's earth. We are not even living on our mother's earth. In the last 10 years, there have been thousands of chemicals allowed into our food supply, treating our clothing, in the things that clean our houses, in our personal care products. We are inundated, inundated with toxins. Now you're never, ever, ever going to be able to get rid of them all. But you can get rid of a lot. You can choose to get rid of a lot because if we decrease the amount of toxins that come in, our bodies have a better chance of clearing those. So we get to decide the voices that we listen to. We get to decide what we drink out of. We get to decide the kind of water that we drink. We get to decide the kind of food that we eat. We get to decide what we put on our body. We get to decide what we clean our homes with. We get to choose, and I hope you choose wisely because it matters. We have to detoxify our brains and we have to detoxify our environments. You must detoxify yourself and your world. Has anyone done an inventory? Are you taking a little mental inventory right now of some of the toxins that you can, can get away from? You know, I think one of the hardest things for me was I had a very, very, very toxic colleague, a very toxic colleague. And that person was kind of ever present was a fellow surgeon, someone that I had to see all the time. And I knew that if I was going to get better, if I was going to heal, I had to completely get that person out of my life, not see them, not be around them, not have anything to do with them. It wasn't enough for me to kind of smile and nod and brush them off. I had to completely get them out of my life. I don't know if you have relationships that aren't working for you. I don't know where your toxins are coming from. But that is a question that you have to ask yourself and you have to deal with them. And that brings us to number five, the most important thing that I will say to you tonight. You not only have to believe, you have to know that you are going to get better. You have to know that you are going to get healthy. You may not be able to make all of these changes that you need to make today, tomorrow, the next day. You may not be able to make the changes that you need to make in the next year. You may not even know about all the things that you need to do. But this is what you need to know. You need to know that you will get better. You need to know that you will restore your health. You need to know that you will be healthy. And you need to picture yourself in that state of health. Put yourself there, transport yourself there, and I promise you, the journey will come. The number one predictor of how long you live is how long you believe you will live. That is the number one predictor. And we hear stories of this all the time. I've had at least 100 patients that I knew exactly when they were going to die. Dr. Jen, I just want to live for my daughter to get married. Dr. Jen. I just want to live to see my daughter graduate from high school. Dr. Jen, I just want to watch my son be bar mitzvahed. And do you know all of those people died the following day, the day after the bar mitzvah, the day after the graduation, the day after the wedding. Now, let me give you the converse. I have a patient who I started to see, I want to say, four years ago, maybe five years ago. She was in her 20s when she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. And she was a hairdresser at the time of her diagnosis. So, you know, working in a toxic environment with all the aerosols and the chemicals and that kind of thing. But she was also having a breakup with a business and life partner. When she was diagnosed, she was told that she will never, ever be free of disease, that she had metastatic breast cancer and it was just a matter of time, but that she would die of her disease. And she went through about a year of treatment, had chemotherapy, definitely reduced her disease burden, but they stopped the chemotherapy, and the tumors started to come back. And she had done some research during that time to try to figure out how to heal herself. I saw her about a year into the process, and she had, like, three or four sites of metastasis at the time. And we went through her world, and I said, you know what. What do you think your diagnosis is trying to tell you? Because your body's trying to tell you something. Your body is screaming at you. So what do you think your body's trying to tell you? And she said, you know, I. I know. I know that I need to move on. I know I need to walk away from this business that I built, from this partner that is this partnership that is so toxic. And she sold her part, and she actually moved out of state because she just needed to get physically separated away from all of that. And we worked together over a year, and, yeah, she was away from the cleaning products, and she cleaned up her diet a little bit, but, I mean, she wasn't overweight. She was a vegan. She was eating well. She, you know, she had a lot of good things in place. And about a year after us working together, she went to go see her medical oncologist, and her medical oncologist asked for a PET scan because he wanted to know if, you know, she needed to go back on meds. And she had her PET scan, and she called me the next day and she said, Dr. Jen, I have something to tell you. My heart sank because I was kind of afraid of the way that she approached it. And she said, I never thought I would say these words, but I have no disease. And that was over three years ago. She is now a health coach. She helps women with breast cancer diagnoses to recover their health just like she recovered hers. I am telling you that you can recover your health. It is in you. But you have to believe it. You have to know it, and you have to put yourself there and every single day. What would healthy me do? What would healthy me do in this situation and do that? Live that life. And we, again, we are not talking about a life without regrets. We're talking about living an examined life. Wake up. That's what your diagnosis is trying to tell you. Wake up. You have a life that is worth living. Go get it. Go get it. So that is what I had prepared for you tonight. I would love to hear any questions that you guys have, anything that came up for you. I will tell you that if you like what you heard tonight, I do have some offerings for you. First of all, if you need to know the questions to ask, if you need to know how to examine your life, if you need to get guidance on how to figure out your why, on how to make a plan on how to live like that future you I do have a course. It's called My Answer to Breast Cancer. It's an online course. You can consume it at your leisure, however you want to consume it. And then for anyone who hasn't already read my book, I highly recommend that you do. It is it is just a plethora of inflammation and the response to the book has been so tremendous. It is an invaluable resource and it's what to do when you're diagnosed, it's what to do after you're diagnosed, it's what to do if you're living with the disease and it's what to do moving forward. And it's essentially a how to move forward. And so it has all of my resource guides. It has everything that you need to really educate yourself about the diagnosis but then find yourself in there. Because we are not our diagnosis, we are not our disease. We are individuals with opportunities. So unfortunately I have my 14 year old son staring me down so I have to go do homework. But it was lovely to see all of you tonight. I hope this was super useful for you. I hope that you leave here inspired tonight and that you are going to take control of your health. Picture that healthy, vibrant woman 20 years from now and ask yourself today, what would she do? Bye for now. Sa.