Hannah Gardner's story highlights the challenges of living with secondary breast cancer. After initial successful treatment, the cancer returned multiple times, eventually spreading to her liver.
After a double mastectomy, followed by chemotherapy, Hannah Gardner was confident that she'd beaten breast cancer . Even when cancer was detected in her chest wall four years later, she wasn't overly worried. 'It was an unmistakable pea-sized lump in the breast which I'd had reconstructed,' says 38-year-old Hannah, a clinical trials manager who lives in Twickenham – and a scan confirmed the worst.
'I was treated at the Royal Marsden Hospital , and after surgery to remove more tissue, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, I was assured that I had a very good chance of living cancer-free.' Hannah, who was 26 when she was first diagnosed in 2013, felt so reassured that she and her husband Peter, a firefighter, decided to start a family. A daughter, Lilah, was born in July 2020. So Hannah was blindsided when a routine scan a few months later, in November 2020, revealed cancer cells in the lymph nodes under her arm. 'The only sign had been a strange throbbing sensation in my armpit which had started a few weeks earlier,' she says. After radiotherapy, Hannah once again dared to hope for the best. But two years later, a routine scan revealed the cancer was back. This time it had spread to her liver. 'The oncologist made it very clear: this was secondary cancer and there was no cure,' she says. 'It was my worst nightmare.' Hannah is one of an estimated 57,000 women in the UK living with secondary breast cancer, according to a study of NHS admissions in 2021 – a figure that's been rising year on year since 2018. Between 10 and 40 per cent of UK patients diagnosed with primary breast cancer go on to develop secondary breast cancer. The good news is that while secondary breast cancer remains incurable, treatments have improved dramatically
BREAST CANCER SECONDARY CANCER TREATMENT SURVIVAL HOPE
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