An actress was told “not to worry” about a lump she found at 25. Then she was diagnosed with breast cancer

Actress Annie Bond was 25 when her then-boyfriend felt a lump in her left breast.

She led a healthy lifestyle, went to the doctor every year, and had no family history of breast cancer – or any major medical problems, for that matter. “I took my tonsils out and that was it,” she recalls.

During her annual appointment with the gynecologist, Bond discussed the lump with her doctor. “They told me, ‘Oh, you’re so young. You have no family history, there’s nothing to worry about,'” she recalls. “I’m like, ‘Okay, great.’ Who am I not to believe a doctor? »

A few months later, her primary care doctor recommended she have an ultrasound of the lump, but her insurance declined it. Still, the doctor repeated what she had heard previously: that she was too young to have breast cancer and that there was probably nothing to worry about.

Then things changed. “I started to get quite numb in that area and it felt like my armpit was swelling,” Bond says. The lump grew and became visible to the naked eye, and she began to feel tired.

Her doctor pushed her insurance company to do an ultrasound, which quickly led to a diagnosis of breast cancer. “After about a month of doing every scan imaginable on your body, I found out I had stage four breast cancer,” Bond recalls. “My oncologist at the time told me it was incurable, that I had two to five years to live, and that’s if I’m lucky.”

Trust your instincts

Bond became a “regular” at the hospital, passing there almost every day. A nurse was the first to talk to her about her fertility rights and how the treatment might change her future plans. Then aged 26, Bond wasn’t yet sure she wanted to have children. “The oncologist I had at the time didn’t tell me about it at all: that chemo could kill half of my eggs and that all these other things could affect my fertility,” she says. When she spoke to the oncologist about it, he told her that it was too dangerous to freeze her eggs. “His exact words were, ‘I’ll fire you as a patient if you do that,'” she recalled. “He didn’t explain anything.”

Bond says the meeting was “strangely a good thing”, because it pushed her to make the decision to leave his guard. “I probably wouldn’t be alive if I had stayed there,” she says. “But it led me to get a second and third opinion.”

Finding the right treatment

Bond found his oncology match at the City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte, California. “This doctor is aptly named Dr. James Wiseman. Wisecome on,” she jokes. “But he was very knowledgeable about the research.”

She learned that because she had Luminal A HR positive/HER2 negative breast cancer, her growth was slower. The medications worked to slow the cells from multiplying, and she took an injection to reduce her estrogen levels, which can also slow the growth of cancer cells. “And because of this medication, my tumor shrank – no IV chemo, nothing like that,” she says.

Bond also required additional surgeries and treatments, including a lumpectomy, liver resection and radiation therapy. Eventually, she also had her ovaries removed, which was a turning point. “Once I had my ovaries removed, I felt like everything was okay.”

A positive outlook

Due to the nature of the disease, “remission” is not technically possible. But it’s been 11 years since Bond was first diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, and she hasn’t had any active tumors in nine years.

Because Bond’s cancer thrived on estrogen, it was essential to cut off that supply. It also meant putting her body into menopause in her twenties. Now 37, she says: “I feel like I’m reaching the age where people say, ‘Oh, (are you experiencing) perimenopause?’ And I’m like, “Wait, what happened to ‘You’re too young’?” » she jokes.

Although he does not have a tumor, Bond lives with a chronic illness. “I still get scanned all the time. I still take medication, which also has many side effects and is very expensive,” she says. “But I actively don’t have any tumors in my body and I haven’t had one in a long time.”

Now a staunch advocate for people with breast cancer, she shares memes and advice on social media. “It’s so great now that we have things like social media and these online communities where, within the breast cancer community, we update each other all the time,” she says.

She also credits the Breast Cancer Research Foundation for including metastatic cancer patients, a group that often feels underserved in conversations and research. “I look at a large organization like BCRF that has had a focus on stage 4 research and has always wanted to work with me and my community,” she says.

One of her pinned videos on Instagram is a tutorial on breast self-exams. “When I meet people I know who don’t know much about breast cancer and don’t have a family history, I often ask them, ‘Do you do self-exams?’ Would you know if something was abnormal if you did one today? ” she said.

For Bond, this is what self-care means. “I think the initial instinct is always to feel guilty or ashamed for not having done it yet,” she says, but instead she recommends they rephrase the situation: “‘Oh, I could just start now.’ “

Read the original article on People