Patient Profile

 In our Disease class, we looked into the different systems of the human body and how they can malfunction, naming the diseases we were familiar with and categorizing them, and then being assigned this final project. The project was to test our knowledge and creativity to see if we could build our own patient profile on someone we know who's had a disease. Interviewing the person, writing the story of their fight with the disease and how it affected them, as well as diagrams showing which body systems were affected.

Metastatic breast cancer is a multifactorial type of cancer that starts in the breast and spreads to other parts of the body. It forms in the cells of the breast that grow into lumps. Breast cancer can be caused by many things, you are at higher risk if a family member has had it or it could become higher of a risk through inherited genes, old age, being born female, radiation exposure, and obesity are just some of the risk factors. My patient's mother had breast cancer when she was very young and died when the patient was at the age of ten. ¨There are genes where there were genetic mutations. I had not been tested at the time but I suspected I had it, so I went early for my first mammogram.¨ She had suspected she would get it eventually because of her mother and only started getting suspicious that something was wrong when she started breastfeeding her first child. 

The patient was young when she got her first mammogram. The usual age to get your first mammogram is around the age 40 and she went when she was 35. The test came back negative for anything suspicious but two years later, after having her first child, she started to nurse her. She noticed something off about her left breast, there was a lump that wasn't there before. At first, the patient thought it could be leftover breast milk but she wasn't going to avoid it so she went in for a mammogram. The doctors kept trying to reassure her that she was too young for it and it was probably nothing so she waited and the test came back positive. After that, the patient was noticing constant pain in the left breast; she had a lumpectomy shortly after. A lumpectomy is a surgery done to remove the main lump concerning the disease and after that she moved on to chemical treatment or chemotherapy doing it four separate times each being equally painful to endure. The point of the shots was to lower the amount of cancer cells as quickly as possible since cancer cells are known for being fast-growing.
The chemotherapy´s side effects were equally as horrible to endure, one of the effects that the patient struggled with the most was the loss of hair. Her hair used to be very thick and long brown brown hair and losing that was an awful experience. She had a wig but she didn't find it easy to wear and it just wasn't the same as what she was used to.

She had a total of four doses of chemotherapy, all equally painful, with multiple tests for her blood and the
decreasing numbers of her white blood cells making her have a severe headache and nausea. The thinning of her white blood cells also made her vulnerable to infection and she had a lecture to do at a conference that summer so she had grown even more sick on top of trying to deal with the chemo. After the chemo had completed, it was time for radiation treatment. The patient had radiation therapy a total of 30 times during her first wave of breast cancer.

The chart below describes which systems of the body were effected by cancer (shown by the yellow) and also the side effects of chemotherapy (shown by the blue) . 

This chart shows where the cancer appeared each time the patient had cancer as shown by the red shaded in bumps.

It's been fifteen years since the patient's successful fight with breast cancer and she went in to get her yearly mammogram. The news came that the cancer had come back and stronger this time. There was nothing to do other than to go through with reconstructive surgery after removing the lump. The surgeries were done three times taking muscle for her scapula and rebuilding the breast as it was. After that was another 4 rounds of chemo, this time hitting even harder than the last with the patient being fifteen years older. Handling a job during treatment was tough; the chemo and radiation both factored into a very strong fatigue that loomed over the patient the entire time fighting which made things quite difficult. Treatment had paid off eventually though and she was back to her healthy self within a couple months.