As the old saying goes, “You never know what someone else is going through.” That’s especially true for Amanda Maggiotto.
She is battling breast cancer for the third time.
“I look like a normal person just walking around, but I am dealing with some heavy stuff,” she said.
Amanda was first diagnosed when she was 27 years old. She had noticed a lump on her breast and decided to get it checked out.
“I had no family history. I had no reason to worry that this lump was going to be breast cancer,” she recalled.
She wound up getting a double mastectomy. Then a couple of years later, the cancer returned. This time she had a lumpectomy and underwent radiation. She was once again cancer-free. However, in 2017, she would receive more bad news.
“I had a scan for something else actually and we found that the breast cancer had metastasized to my liver,” she said. “It was probably the worst day of my life.”
But, she didn’t dwell for long and quickly developed a treatment plan with her doctor at Cleveland Clinic.
“We put her on a treatment with a medicine called Palbociclib, or Ibrance, with anti-hormone treatment and she had amazing response. She’s doing really well. It’s been four years now and she has no evidence of cancer,” said Dr. Jame Abraham, interim chair of Taussig Cancer Institute and chairman of the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology.
Amanda is getting ready for her tenth scan and is hopeful everything is OK. She said it can be easy to worry but tries her best not to.
“I think you have to really just focus on what’s right in front of you. It’s easy to think about what-ifs and what can happen in the future. But none of us know. We think one thing and something completely different happens,” she said.
She encourages others to do the same and said she’s thankful to be able to share her story. “If I can help people, then it makes some of what I am going through worth it, frankly. It makes my own experience more meaningful, impactful if I can use it for good,” she said.