Elevate Your Health Colorado After battling cancer twice, the focus is now joy of each day

Terrie Rill’s mind was on a lot of other things five years ago when she got the news that changed her life. 

She was a 42-year-old single mother, the director of nursing practice overseeing 200 personnel on three medical campuses in Northern California and in the middle of union negotiations. 

“I was actually more anxious to try to get back to work,” said Rill, who now works as an administrator overseeing medical offices in Denver’s western suburbs. 

In July 2006, she was investigating a lump in her breast that had been giving conflicting signals. She discovered it herself in November 2005. It was small and scar tissue from earlier breast reduction surgery made it hard to detect. A clinician who examined her couldn’t find it. 

It didn’t show in a mammogram. An ultrasound detected something suspicious but a needle biopsy was negative. 

She had the lump removed. Assuming the pathology report would be clear, she wanted to wind up her post-op appointment and return to negotiations. 

When her surgeon told her she had cancer, “I really thought ‘this poor woman has the wrong patient,’ and I leaned over to look at the ‘path’ report and sure enough it had my name on it.”

The surgeon then went through a thorough explanation, concluding by asking, “Do you have any questions?

“And I remember telling her all I heard was, ‘You have cancer, blah, blah, blah, blah…’ like the Charlie Brown teachers. I heard nothing else.”

She got another briefing later and scheduled a mastectomy in two weeks, the day her youngest daughter started the first grade. 

Family concerns
When Terrie Rill was 6 years old her mother — then only 24 — was diagnosed with colon cancer. She was advised to put her affairs in order, to find someone to raise her children.

As her mother’s oldest daughter, she did her best to shoulder some of the load as caregiver. As it happens, her mother survives and at 65 remains close to her daughter. 

When her own cancer diagnosis sunk in, Rill’s concern turned to her youngest.

“When I was a single parent going through this, I was really worried about my daughter and who would raise her, and would she remember me?”

And there was David Rill— the man in her life. A friendship born of their shared interest in playing guitar had grown into something much more. 

“I gave him a ‘get-out-of-this-relationship-free card,’” Rill joked. 

But he stuck around. 

And he would be there when the cancer returned. 

Bad news after bad news
Terrie Rill’s recovery was going well.  The Lakewood mother of four accepted a job running a medical office in Wheat Ridge in December 2009, a position that gave her the chance to return to her native Colorado.  

That spring, she was running and working out. She was losing weight. Her blond hair was getting long again. More than four years had passed since she discovered the lump in her breast and she was looking forward to the crucial five-year mark. Maybe soon she would reach a point where she would not think of her cancer every day. 

But there was a pain deep in her underarm.  No big deal. She had just increased the weight she was lifting in the gym. But why was it on only one side? Why was it not going away? 

Her Kaiser Permanente primary care physician, Dr. Laura Clarke, ordered an ultrasound. The decision, Rill says now, “saved my life.”

A cancer diagnosis means confronting mortality. Cancer treatment can mean loss. For Terrie Rill, it meant loss of the ability to work full time, to ride a bike or to play guitar.

Now she was looking at going back. 

It took all the strength she could muster to call the oncology department. 

A biopsy revealed the same cancer had returned. Five lymph nodes tested positive for cancer. 

More chemotherapy was not promising, her oncologist advised. 

“I had already had the toughest chemo and I took every drop of it.”

A PET scan brought even more bad news. A small tumor was growing under her collarbone between a major artery and her lung. 

Surgery would likely kill her, explained Dr. Edward Vaughn, a Kaiser Permanente surgeon. If she managed to survive, she would be disabled. 

“I thought (Dr. Vaughn) was going to cry when he told me he could not help me,” she said. 

Terrie noted that one of the strange dynamics of being a cancer patient is that you have to also be a comforter to those around you.  

Panic sets in
Her next stop was a radiation oncologist. When it seemed to be taking a long time to be seen, she started to panic. 

“I was thinking, ‘OK, all the tools are out of my toolbox. My oncologist can’t do chemo again and the surgeon said I can’t do surgery.’ I said to myself I bet the reason this is taking so long is the radiation oncologist is looking at my PET scan saying I can’t help her either.”

Later, as Dr. James Jacobs, a Kaiser Permanente radiation oncologist, described what he was going to do, he noticed she was distracted. 

Terrie explained she felt like she was running out of options, that she was doomed. 

“Are you talking about that tumor underneath your collar bone?” he asked. 

“He said, ‘I’ve got that, Terrie. It’s as big as your thumbnail. I have all this Star Wars equipment. I do this every day. I love my job. We’re going to get that tumor with radiation.”

But there was one item of business to take care of before treatment began. 

“I told my husband if we were going to get married I wanted to get married before I started treatment again because I wanted to have hair in my wedding pictures,” Rill said. 

They married in Rocky Mountain National Park in June 2010.  (see picture above)

Success
Six weeks of ‘Star Wars’ radiation vanquished her tumor like the Death Star erasing the planet Alderaan. After the radiation treatment, she underwent an experimental chemotherapy protocol her oncologist, Dr. Alex Menter, had found. 

Dr. Menter, along with Drs. Clarke, Jacobs and Vaughn have earned permanent places on her “hero list.”

A year later, Terrie Rill is taking experimental oral medication to keep cancer at bay and accepts the idea that she may be a chronic cancer patient.

But more importantly, she has her life back. She runs three times a week. She rides her bike. She plays guitar with her husband. They played gospel and country music all night during a recent family reunion in California. 

“Every day is a bonus day,” she said. It’s a phrase she borrowed from her father but it has special meaning to her. 

“I really try to focus on the joy of the day. I often tell my survivor friends that we do not want to lose the joy of today by worrying about something that might happen to us tomorrow.”

Breast Cancer Prevention Facts

Best steps toward prevention:

• Maintain a healthy weight
• Exercise regularly
• Eat a diet rich in fruits, vegetables and whole grains
• Limit alcohol intake
• Don’t smoke
• Women over 50, get a mammogram every one or two years

 Did you know?

• 70 to 80 percent of women with breast cancer have no family history of the disease. 
• Stage 0 and stage 1 breast cancers have a 97 percent cure rate 
• Women have a one in eight chance of developing breast cancer
• 80 to 85 percent of 10 breast lumps are noncancerous