After losing her mother to breast cancer, Carole Kruzick vowed to do everything she could to catch the disease early—and she did
For Carole Kruzick, breast cancer seemed inevitable. After all, she had watched her mother, then in her late 50s, get diagnosed, receive minimal treatment, and succumb to the disease about three years later.
“To be perfectly honest, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop all these years,” she said. “I was religious about getting my mammogram every year.”
At an annual mammogram six years ago, Carole felt a shift in the room and knew something wasn’t right.
“I saw people talking, and one of the techs said they were going to step out for a few minutes,” she remembered. “I texted my husband, Michael, who was in the waiting room because I’m always a wreck at my annual mammogram. I said, ‘They found something. I know they did.’”
A few minutes later, the radiologist came in to look at a specific spot in Carole’s breast and confirmed what Carole suspected: There was something suspicious.
“I heard once that if you saw black on an ultrasound, you were in trouble. I looked at the screen and saw black,” she said.
Carole was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer and soon met with her surgeon to discuss her options—opting to do a lumpectomy, radiation, and hormone therapy.
“Because of research, we knew that with the lumpectomy, I could have the same survival rate,” she said. “And I could have it in about a week and a half; a mastectomy was going to take about two months. I was not waiting two months. I knew the tumor was in there, and I needed it out.”
After surgery, Carole’s doctors used the Oncotype DX® test to determine that, because her risk of recurrence was high, she needed chemotherapy—a finding made possible by BCRF-supported research.
“Obviously, chemo isn’t fun—you know that going in. But it wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be. Because of research, it’s not the same chemo that it was 20 years ago,” Carole said.
Since completing active treatment, Carole has hit the halfway mark of her 10-year course of hormone therapy to reduce her risk of recurrence. Managing ongoing side effects of this treatment—joint pain, dry skin, complications with another underlying condition—has been difficult. But she’s determined to do everything she can to avoid breast cancer again.
“The worst part is navigating the unknown,” she said. “Wondering if the cancer is really gone or if it’s going to come back—it’s constant. And then every six months you go to the oncologist and wait for your bloodwork and deal with the anxiety that goes along with that. It’s almost harder now, when I’m not in active treatment. Before, I felt like I was doing something. Now I swallow this pill and hope.”
During treatment, Carole was grateful to have had an incredible support system, including her husband of more than 40 years, Michael, and her daughter, Stef.
“While I knew I had the best husband in the world, after breast cancer, I know for a fact I have the best husband in the world,” she said. “Michael came to all of my appointments—and with research he had looked up.”
At the time Carole was diagnosed, Stef was working for BCRF’s longtime corporate partner The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) and had learned about the Foundation through ELC’s Breast Cancer Campaign.
“I remember I found out my mom had breast cancer while I was at the office. My desk was right next to a big poster for the Breast Cancer Campaign,” she said. “I called my mom while I walked around Central Park, and it all felt incredibly surreal.”
While job searching several years later, Stef saw a post for a role on BCRF’s Marketing and Communications team and jumped at the chance to apply.
“At the time, I was looking to move into nonprofit marketing,” Stef said. “With everything my mom and grandma went through and my background, it really felt meant to be.”
Today, Stef is BCRF’s associate director of digital marketing, helping increase awareness of the Foundation and raise funds for research. Carole said she was so proud to learn that Stef was taking a role at BCRF.
“Stef is so talented, and her creative mind is just unbelievable,” Carole said. “When I heard where she was going to work, I was so proud she was going to use that creative little brain of hers to do something good. It felt like a full-circle moment.”
When Carole looks back at her experience, she also sees the multitude of ways that research has improved since her mother was diagnosed.
“She was part of a generation for whom cancer was incurable. She never got mammograms,” Carole said. “After her first diagnosis and lumpectomy and radiation, she was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer. They thought that was caused by radiation, which research has now debunked. She only did minimal treatment. In her mind she thought: What is the point? She was going to die anyway.”
Unlike when her mother was diagnosed, Carole notes, today there are treatments for metastatic breast cancer and inflammatory breast cancer.
“My mother’s diagnosis wasn’t that long ago,” she said.
Carole benefitted, too, from early detection, the option to have a less-invasive lumpectomy instead of a mastectomy, and even the Oncotype DX test that gave her the reassurance that chemotherapy was necessary—all developments that have been made possible by research.
“Research is so important,” she said. “I don’t want to see Stef go through this, but if she does, I want her to have a better outcome than I had. I want it to be treatable.”
Read more stories from BCRF’s Research Is the Reason storytelling initiative here.
