Although Breast Cancer Awareness Month was in October, the stories of women battling the cancer linger.
The last week of October, Shannon Kirk was declared cancer free.
Overjoyed that she’s now a survivor, Kirk,42, of Blue Springs, had been fighting an aggressive form of breast cancer this summer and fall seasons.
At that time, Kirk found a suspicious lump upon self-examination.
She had a mammogram just three months prior to the discovery. “My cancer grew from nothing to 2 centimeters in three months time,” Kirk said.
Scary stuff, Kirk acknowledged, since she felt fine. She had no other symptoms. And breast cancer does not run in her family.
Her intuition told her, from the moment she discovered the lump, it was cancer.
“If you listen to your body, you know,” Kirk said.
She says women need to be their own health advocates because “crazy things do happen.”
Immediately, Kirk called her doctor. She underwent a biopsy. On April 27, two weeks after finding the lump, the biopsy confirmed what she felt.
She had breast cancer. She had triple negative breast cancer, a rare and aggressive form that strikes younger women.
Her life would drastically change.
Kirk said she had never been in the hospital in her life other than when she gave birth to her daughter, Makenzie Kirk.
“I think you’re in shock at first,” Kirk said. “But I didn’t allow myself to stay there that long, to dwell on it. I decided to be proactive. I wanted to find out what to do to get a handle on this. Being young and having a young daughter, I thought about doing whatever it takes to survive this.”
She got three opinions from three different surgeons.
Kirk went to a doctor who planned on surgery as the first step. But Kirk felt uneasy about that treatment plan.
She went to the University of Kansas Hospital in search of a second opinion. Her doctor there said chemotherapy would be first, not surgery.
The doctors put Kirk through 16 rounds of chemotherapy, which was quadruple the number of rounds other doctors had suggested.
“It was rough,” Kirk said of the massive drugs pumped in her body.
She got two types of chemotherapy, with the strongest coming first.
Because of the form of cancer, which was fast-growing, Kirk received four rounds of chemotherapy treatment every two weeks instead of every three weeks.
