DENHAM SPRINGS — Liz Smith is a breast cancer survivor who wants to encourage and inspire others to do what’s best for themselves when facing a diagnosis like cancer.
A wife, mother and law school student, Smith was in her late 30s when she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer.
Smith discovered the cancerous lump on the inside of her right breast in 2019. Her doctor initially thought it could be a fibroid, because she’d had fibrous tissue in her breasts before.
Smith thought the spot would disappear as other fibroids had before, but it wasn’t happening this time. One night her dog that had been sitting on the back of the couch, climbed down the couch and stepped on the spot at her breast. She said the pain was bad.
“It hurt so bad, but if you tell a doctor that you have a lump that hurts, the doctor will automatically tell you it’s not cancer. They say that the cancer doesn’t hurt,” Smith said.
She felt confident that something was wrong, and because the lump wasn’t going away, Smith’s doctor ordered a mammogram and ultrasound. When they didn’t see blood flow to the lump, the doctor biopsied the spot.
“They told me it was, in fact, cancer and it was triple negative,” Smith recalled.
Triple-negative breast cancer tends to be an aggressive form that can spread quickly, according to the American Cancer Society.
Smith started intense treatments to battle the cancer, including multiple rounds of the “red devil” chemotherapy and other drugs. She continued to do her treatments while attending law school and would even bring her laptop to work while getting the infusions.
Smith’s doctors highly recommended surgery in addition to the treatments. While a lumpectomy was the “minimum” option, she said most women with this form opt to get a double mastectomy, which was what she decided to do as well.
When scheduling the surgery, a patient is supposed to have been off of chemo for two to three weeks to give the body time to heal before the intensity of undergoing surgery, Smith said. However, she told her doctors she would not be finishing her treatment before the double mastectomy.
“I told my oncologist that I was not going to do the last two or three rounds of chemo, because I was going to have my surgery while I was on Christmas break from law school so I could finish my last semester,” she said.
While her doctor wasn’t very happy, Smith went ahead and did as she wanted. “I had my double mastectomy, went back to law school for the final semester, graduated and finished.”
When the doctor performed a biopsy afterward, the cancer was completely gone. She was cancer-free by the end of 2019.
She credits much of her healing to the decision to stay positive and not let fear take over. She also doesn’t fear getting cancer again.
“Treatment isn’t just about your doctor and the medication they give you,” she explained. “Treatment is your faith and the mindset that you will get through it. And there’s a ton of research papers and medical studies done to show that your state of mind and your belief system has everything to do with your healing.”
Now, Smith said she would change how she decided to approach treating the cancer based on her personal research and what she’s read in different medical journals about cancer treatment.
Smith advises people to listen to their bodies and not just the word of their providers. If something doesn’t seem right, “get 15 opinions” and advocate for yourself, she said.
“Don’t hear something, accept that it’s true and base all your decisions on what they tell you you should do. It might not be right for you.”
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