ShawneeDispatch.com

At 29, Lisa Fiatte Hinkle didn’t expect to be told she had breast cancer.

And after a year of chemotherapy treatments, she didn’t think the cancer would come back with a vengeance; doctors have told her she may only have two years to live.

But that hasn’t stopped Fiatte from trying to live her life to its fullest for her two children.

She formed her new outlook on life not long after her first cancer diagnosis. As she dealt with the depression that set in, her mother offered her some wise words.

“Mom looked at me and said ‘You know, if you had two weeks to live, and you spent those two weeks crying, do you think you would’ve spent it productively?’” Fiatte said. “I think just from that statement alone — there are bad days, but now I focus on being the best mom I can be, making sure that my kids know who I am. I’m still co-president of the PTA at my son’s school; I plan to be the coach of my daughter’s soccer team this fall. We’re still doing the normal stuff, I’m just battling cancer on top of it.”

And a big part of that battle is raising funds for the American Cancer Society, which is why Fiatte will speak Friday at the Shawnee-Lenexa Relay For Life, which begins at 6 p.m. at Swarner Park in Shawnee.

Fiatte said while she knows that raising funds for research likely won’t help her, she hopes it will help her children.

Fiatte grew up in Kansas City, Kan., and moved to the Turner area as an adult, sending her son, Joshua, to Bluejacket-Flint Elementary School in Shawnee and becoming involved in the Shawnee community.

On Sept. 4, 2007, she found two lumps in her breast.

“I went into the doctor that day, because it felt like somebody had sucker-punched me in my chest and in my ribs, and up underneath my armpit,” Fiatte said.

The doctor thought she had mastitis, an infection in the breast that can occur after breast-feeding, which she had stopped doing with her then 2-year-old daughter, Lillian, a year earlier.

After a week of taking the medicine the doctor prescribed with no relief, Fiatte went back and got a sonogram, but that came back negative. So Fiatte went to a surgeon, who also thought it was a bad form of mastitis. She went through the routine again: a week on medication with no effects, then a sonogram that came back negative.

“He didn’t know what was wrong with me, and his exact words were, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you, why don’t you come back in about a month,’” Fiatte said.

At the time, Fiatte’s marriage began to break down, and she says as her stress increased, so did her pain. But she focused on her duties as a mother and in October found another doctor, who thought Fiatte had cysts and sent her to a breast specialist.

This time, the specialist did a surgical biopsy in November, and Fiatte finally received a correct diagnosis: triple negative breast cancer, Stage 3b, a cancer that often occurs in younger women.

“Cancer was never really brought up because I’m ‘too young’ to have breast cancer,” Fiatte said. “The other big thing was pain and cancer don’t go together, but in my case, the pain and cancer did go together.”

Extensive treatments

Because triple negative is one of the worst kinds of cancer, Fiatte’s treatments were extensive: 16 rounds of chemotherapy and a double mastectomy, with 23 lymph nodes removed. After her surgery, she said there was still a pea-sized cancerous lump left in the breast tissue and four lymph nodes that tested positive for cancer. So she did 33 rounds of radiation to try to tackle the remaining cancer.

Fiatte’s treatments started the first week of January and lasted through Sept. 8, 2008. Her husband had filed for divorce, so she relied on her parents and friends to help her with her children and the illness that came along with her treatments.

“If there was a side effect to be had, I had it,” she said. “… I would do my treatments every two weeks on a Monday, and it would take a week and a half later for me to feel well enough to even take care of my kids.”

Children are focus

Fiatte said being a good mom has become the main focus of her life, but she knows her children have been affected by her battle with cancer.

“If you ask my kids, especially my son, ‘What is the most important thing that mommy tells you,’ he says, ‘It’s to be a kid,’” she said. “I know that my children have had to grow up in a different sense because of all this. It sucks, but I know my kids are going to be so compassionate in life. They’re not going to be selfish; they’re going to truly understand what fighting for your life means.”

After her treatments, Fiatte tried to get back to some sort of normalcy. But in January, she started to have pain in her lower back and right leg, and the doctors told her it was probably her sciatic nerve.

Fiatte and her mother finally insisted her doctors do a diagnostic to rule out cancer in March. The results came back positive — the cancer had spread to her leg, so much so that she had to have a rod inserted into her leg for stability. The cancer is in her femur, hip socket, right and left ilium, tailbone, fifth rib, right humerous, chest lymph nodes.

Now, she takes a bone-building drug and various cancer drugs to fight the disease and gain as much time as she can.

Coming to terms

Fiatte said the Relay For Life was one event that has helped her come to terms with her situation.

Last year, she had hoped to form own team, but in the end her treatments and divorce proceedings kept her from doing so. Instead, she met up with the Wilm’s Warriors team, formed for Jillian Sharp, the daughter of Bluejacket-Flint teacher Staci Sharp.

Fiatte said the all-night event raising funds for the American Cancer Society touched her.

“It’s just an amazing feeling when you are there,” she said. “…When you’re told you have cancer, you go into a deep, dark world of ‘why me,’ and you feel like you’re alone. When you go to the relay and see the survivors in the purple shirts, you know that they’ve been there in your shoes at some time or another, and you connect.”

Fiatte visited a friend’s team earlier this month at the Kaw Valley Relay For Life in Bonner Springs and hopes that the Shawnee-Lenexa relay can impart the importance of supporting the fight against cancer to the community.

“It’s almost a sense that you can celebrate another day, and there is life after cancer,” she said of the relay. “Even being diagnosed with stage four cancer… not everybody knows what they’re going to die from, but I’ve been given the ability to know that I will probably die from this disease. But I also know that I’m here on this earth right now, and today matters.”

Comments

1. 

   wrestlingchampmom (anonymous) says…

   Lisa - If I could pick a Hero - You are it!!! I love ya girl... If there is one person (I know there are many) in your corner right now... it is me! Love ya Girl!
   -Ana Roach

   June 24, 2009 at 5:11 p.m.

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