Kristine's Cancer Recovery Effort

Thank you for taking a moment to read my story about Kristine. She is my beautiful sister who is super funny, loves her family, cats, camping, cats, her long hair, and last but not least, she loves cats. Kristine recently found out she has breast cancer. I find it ironic that after 10 years taking care of her mother-in-law fighting skin cancers that morphed into stage 4 lung cancer, that she would be preparing for her own cancer diagnosis and fight for her life. It's a devastating blow to her, her husband, and their two kids in college. While she has medical insurance, it's just not enough for the lengthy rehabilitation and reconstructive process following the incredibly invasive double mastectomy surgery. This is projected to take a year and a half, minimum. She will require multiple surgeries, check-ups and treatments, start-to-finish, creating a mountain of medical and post-care expenses. Please consider contributing to Kristine Bayles's fundraiser to help with her medical costs. Thank you so much.

In Kristine's words: "I found a lump that was growing in my left breast and thought it was another cyst. Several years before, I had a biopsy on my right breast that came back benign, since my breasts have cysts and are very dense. I tried to find someone to drain the lump in my left breast. I finally got in for a biopsy on both breasts. Funny enough, I was told the right side had a lump that looked 'scary' by the radiologist, but that one was benign, and the left one came back as ductal carcinoma in situ, which is stage 0 breast cancer.

Wouldn't that be wonderful if that diagnosis were true? However, because my MRI showed a tail going over to a lymph node, my breast surgeon wanted another biopsy done. This time they found that it was indeed invasive ductal carcinoma, provisional Nottingham grade 3 out of 3, and metastatic carcinoma of the lymph node, which equals stage 3 cancer out of 4, level 3 aggressive out of 3.

I'm also triple negative, which, funny enough, in breast cancer is a bad thing. It means you can't do hormone suppression, which equates to less chemo. The only good news that I received was that my PET scan came back only showing the cancer in my left breast and lymph node.

I'll need to have 6 months of chemotherapy and immunotherapy, then a double mastectomy, then depending on if the cancer is gone or not after surgery, 6 months of immunotherapy if it's gone and 6 months of chemo and immunotherapy if it's not."