Female Speaker: 52-year old adventure racer Louise Cooper was concerned after she had found a lump in her breast while training for an event in South America seven years ago. Louise had a biopsy done and, to her amazement, it was breast cancer.
Louise Cooper: I was healthy. I was athletic, I had a good diet. I did everything I was supposed to do and here I was diagnosed with this very aggressive form of cancer.
Dr. Marisa Weiss: There's no question that when a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer her first fear is I'm going to die. What's going to happen to my children, what's going to happen to my partners my family without me?
Female Speaker: Breast cancer is the most common cancer and most feared cancer in women around the world. But while more cases are being diagnosed, more women are surviving.
Louise Cooper: Your first reaction when somebody tells you is I think you're kind of numb it takes a while to process it.
Female Speaker: Louise underwent a lumpectomy, the removal of the tumor itself and a thin layer of normal tissue around it, but before beginning chemotherapy she got another surprise.
Louise Cooper: I think it was after my surgery when they told me, that I was HER2-positive which I had no idea what that meant.
Dr: Dennis Slamon: Mark our research we found that there's one particular subtype of breast cancer that has an alteration in a gene called HER 2. This occurs in about 25% of the women with breast cancer, it's a genetic alteration, but it's not inherited. It's something has acquired during the life of the individual. If the breast cancer has this alteration, it behaves much more aggressively. It recurs more rapidly and earlier. It forms metastasis much more readily and more widespread.
Female Speaker: Louise Cooper signed on to receive a new-targeted treatment specifically for HER2-positive tumors.
Louise Cooper: The visual that I had was this drug being injected into my body and it was blanketing the cancer cells and blanketing those receptors and it was thereby going to prevent any further production of the cancer cells. So, just that vision was helpful to me.
Female Speaker: Louise is also received chemotherapy.
Dr. Gabriel Hortobagyi: We are able to administer chemotherapy with far fewer side effects because in parallel with the development of new and effective anticancer drugs, we also developed new and effective drugs that prevent or control side effects. So nausea and vomiting for instance are much less common and much less severe today.
Female Speaker: Along with the advances in chemotherapy, modern day radiation techniques do a better job of treating the area at risk of recurrence and avoiding or minimizing the dose to normal tissue. Research has proven that anti hormone medications can reduce the risk of the cancer returning and also may reduce the likelihood that cancer will appear in the other breast.
Dr. Gabriel Hortobagyi: The major idea behind hormonal therapy is that female hormones, in this case estrogens are the fuel that helps breast cancer cells to grow and spread. Hormonal therapy is interfering with that fuel.
Female Speaker: Experts believe that as women understand the progress that's been made in breast cancer, the pervasive fear of the disease will begin to diminish.
Dr. Marisa Weiss: Our goal is to get rid of the cancer or manage the cancer, so that she can never see it again or at least push it aside and keep living her life in a way that she wants to.
Louise Cooper: My mother and my father who would always oppose to the kind of events that I was involved in, my parents are now so when is your next race they can't support me enough to because to them it symbolizes that I'm healthy and I can do it.
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