[00:00:00] Adam Walker: From Susan G Komen, this is Real Pink, A podcast exploring real stories, struggles, and triumphs related to breast cancer. We’re taking the conversation from the doctor’s office to your living room.
[00:00:17] You may have heard in the news that younger women are being diagnosed with breast cancer at higher rates than before. While women under 40 only account for 4% of breast cancer cases in the us even a modest rise in breast cancer incidents is a call to action for young women to understand their personal risk and to know what’s normal for their breasts so they can be aware of any changes that should be reported to a healthcare professional.
[00:00:43] Joining us on the show today is Dr. Virginia Borges, a medical oncologist at the University of Colorado, whose research focuses on young women’s breast cancer. Dr. Borges is committed to finding answers, and today we’ll share what is being studied as well as how young women can be empowered to take charge of their breast health
[00:01:02] early. Dr. Borges, welcome to the show.
[00:01:05] Dr. Virginia Borges: Thank you so much, Adam. Happy to be here.
[00:01:08] Adam Walker: Well, I’m glad to have you. I do, you know, I’ve interviewed a lot of women under that, that were diagnosed at, under the age of 40. And so I, I feel like we’re trying to bring more attention to this and so I’m glad to have you and talk more about it.
[00:01:21] So, but let’s start with you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and how you came to focus on research in young Women’s Breast Cancer.
[00:01:29] Dr. Virginia Borges: Sure. Well I grew up in Jersey and then did all my medical training up in Boston, and it was while I was there finishing my training and in my early years on faculty that I like to say young women’s breast cancer found me.
[00:01:47] It was a pivotal time in breast cancer medicine. We were changing from where we were focusing on using very high doses of chemotherapy as a investigative tool to figure out if we could improve, cure rates in breast cancer. And then we also were starting to identify that there could be targeted therapy therapies that were much more specific to what was driving the breast cancer.
[00:02:14] And one of the big, discoveries of the time was the gene, HER2, and what that did for breast cancer in terms of making it more aggressive and the first targeted therapy for that a monoclonal antibody. So this was a big game changer, not just in breast cancer, but in cancer medicine overall. The development of these types of drugs.
[00:02:36] And because of the clinical trials I was running back then, I was seeing a ton of young women because young women have a higher likelihood of getting diagnosed with a HER2 positive breast cancer than women who are diagnosed at an older age. And it was just very obvious to me. I myself was a young woman at the time, so some of these patients were actually my age or older than me and what.
[00:03:01] It felt like to take care of them, what I was seeing them go through, what it was doing to their lives, where they were in their lives when they were dealing with this diagnosis, how aggressive their cancers were behaving. It was a lot different than the other patients I was seeing in my regular clinic.
[00:03:18] And so it really became a passion of mine to try and figure out why this was and what was happening. When I moved to the University of Colorado, which was back in 2003, with the support of my colleagues, we started a very specific program focused on young women’s breast cancer, both the clinical side and what they need that is different in clinical care, but also the research that I’ve done ever since.
[00:03:43] Adam Walker: I love that you’re focused on that. Like it, I, it is an important topic. It sounds like you’re hyper-focused on it. I think that’s so important, and I appreciate the research that, that you’re doing. So, so let’s talk a little bit about that because I think, you know, when listeners hear there’s an, there’s a rising number of young women being diagnosed.
[00:04:01] The question is why, obviously you’re trying to answer that question. So can you share with our listeners sort of what you’re studying and what you’re currently learning about?
[00:04:10] Dr. Virginia Borges: Sure. So one of the main areas that I’ve focused on for the past 20 years has been the interaction of getting diagnosed with a breast cancer in relationship to becoming a mother.
[00:04:21] And so we’ve known for a long time going back into the nineties that all women. Whether they’re very young or older at the time that they start having children, starting their families, they have a period of time where they actually face an increased risk of getting diagnosed with breast cancer, which is
[00:04:39] different than what we typically tend to think about. We think about childbirth and nursing our children as protective against breast cancer, and it is, but you have to navigate this window of time where the risk is actually increased. And if a woman is young, 25 or under that period of risk is about 10 years and the increase in risk is not that high in comparison to some of the other things that
[00:05:03] increased breast cancer risk. But if a woman is having her children over 30 or over 35, which many professional women do choose to do that increased risk is higher, and the length of time for which they are at increased risk. Goes out further. And in my area of research, what I was really looking at is why were my young women having a higher likelihood of their cancer recurring or spreading to elsewhere in their body and threatening their lives or taking their lives.
[00:05:34] And so we also identified that there’s this interaction with being a young mother at the time of being diagnosed with breast cancer. So if a woman gets diagnosed with a breast cancer and she has children at home who are under five years of age or even under 10 years of age, her risk of going and ultimately developing
[00:05:54] A metastasis or recurrence of this breast cancer that will then become what we call metastatic breast cancer where she’ll be under treatment for the rest of her life and potentially very much have her life expectancy shortened since my patients are 20, 30, 40 years old. Is what we have focused on and
[00:06:14] more recently after we figured out that was the issue, more recently, we focused on, well, why is this happening? What can we learn from the lab and what can we bring back to the clinic with the ultimate goal of figuring out are there more unique ways that we could be treating these cancers than just the advances that we have in the field overall?
[00:06:35] Adam Walker: So I wanna make sure that I heard you correctly, so did I hear you say that a young mother, essentially with young children in the home. It has an increased risk of developing metastatic disease. Is that correct?
[00:06:49] Dr. Virginia Borges: Yeah, it’s both. So she has a short period of time, a decade or so where there’s an increased risk of getting breast cancer in general.
[00:06:57] And of course these are women for whom, most of them are not of the age where screening is recommended yet because they’re, you know, 20 and 30. Some of them are in their forties, particularly as women are waiting until their later thirties or even early forties to have children. So when I think of young women’s breast cancer, I think of it up to the age 45 because of what women are doing.
[00:07:20] And then, yes, those cancers depending on the. Subtype of the breast cancer and the stage at which it’s diagnosed can have a higher likelihood of becoming metastatic disease.
[00:07:32] Adam Walker: Okay. I just, I, it just seems so, like, it’s so counterintuitive to how I think about this. That’s why I just needed to clarify to make sure that I understood.
[00:07:41] So, so talk a little bit about the unique needs younger patients have when they’re diagnosed?
[00:07:49] Dr. Virginia Borges: Yeah, that list is long. So some women don’t have a lot of support in life. They have not yet found their person, their partner, who they wanna go through life yet with. They may have parents and family who can be supportive of them, but not always.
[00:08:08] So just the emotional support and the team around that woman Getting diagnosed at a young age varies greatly, right? There’s also a lot of financial toxicity risk. There aren’t too many people, 20 and 30, even early forties, who have been out in their profession, established their careers, or been working long enough to have a big nest egg, to have disposable income to have.
[00:08:33] The extra money to handle then what gets thrown at them with the copays, the added things that they have to cover as part of their treatment, the time off of work and just the hardships that they can bring. Many of these women are also facing things like having to be paying off student loans from their education, and some of them even do have young children already, so they’re having to navigate
[00:08:58] childcare and healthcare and just everything for their family. And then of course there’s the double whammy of, some of them are in the sandwich generation where they have children, but they also have pa parents who are starting to age and starting to develop their own health issues. And they have a torn responsibility between their medical needs, their family, their children, their parents.
[00:09:22] So it can get super complicated really fast. So the financial toxicity of young women’s breast cancer is, I think one of the biggest differences. Not that we don’t see older women who have this issue too, but there’s just a little bit more likelihood that woman might have their person in life a partner, children, a family resources, because they’ve had the opportunity to build those over time.
[00:09:46] Equity like they might own their home,
[00:09:49] et cetera. Not trying to figure out how to pay rent.
[00:09:52] Adam Walker: Yeah. I mean they, I mean, I’ve never thought of it that way. They’ve built up a system, you know, they’ve had the time to build up a system to build up that support network.
[00:09:59] Dr. Virginia Borges: Yeah. And that, that’s just kinda like the social aspects of it.
[00:10:03] Yeah. And then you get into some of the medical aspects of it. So all women getting diagnosed at a young age, we want them to, very seriously consider getting tested for one of the nine genes that can predispose a woman to getting diagnosed with breast cancer at a young age. Yeah. It helps us offer her information about her personal risk for more breast cancer in the future, so she could make
[00:10:29] decisions related to her surgical choices. And we want that information upfront because because if it’s going to inform her surgical choices, that’s gonna be happening relatively early on in her breast cancer treatment. Also, some of those genes come with other cancers that woman is going to be at risk for as she gets older.
[00:10:49] So we need to kind of create the homework list so we make sure that we’re protecting her against other cancers or screening for them, or if there’s options for prevention, she knows what they are and she can make that choice. Also, that information has implications for her family. A lot of my patients have siblings, have cousins have their own children who will one day come of age and there’s even one gene that we wanna know about if they have children because it can affect childhood cancers as well.
[00:11:17] So it gets super complicated. So you take a young woman whose life has just been turned upside down by her own personal diagnosis, and then you start factoring the fact but if we find one of these genes, there’s implications for her family and her future and other cancers as well. So that gets pretty overwhelming, pretty fast.
[00:11:34] Yeah. You know, and then there’s the unique aspects of where a woman is in her life. So a few of my patients come to me having very clearly made the decision that they don’t wanna have children, and that makes things easier. A few have come to me having already had their children and feeling done.
[00:11:55] That’s great. But a large number come to me either not having started their families at all yet, or being kind of in the middle. Maybe they’ve had a child or two, but they weren’t thinking they were done. And so we have to immediately start talking to them about what are their desires there and how strong are those desires, and do we need to get them set up to see an oncofertility team, a team of specialists who will work with that woman to identify what her current fertility is and the options for preserving that from anything to banking her eggs to creating embryos if she has a partner whose sperm she wants to use. Right, right. Yeah. And, but you know, that comes with cost. Yeah. And not all of the insurance companies cover it. And in different states there’s different legislation about what will or won’t get covered.
[00:12:48] And so sometimes that’s not a that’s not even an option for some of our patients to be able to go forward with, even though they are given the information and aware that it would help them preserve their choices for later on down the line. So that starts getting very emotionally upsetting at a time that they’re also worried about their own life.
[00:13:06] They’re also worried about what they’re gonna have to go through for their treatment. Yeah. You know, so, so notice I haven’t even gotten to the cancer yet. Right, right. Yeah. So these are all the issues. These are the two big issues we have to think about right when a woman gets diagnosed or the three big issues and then finally we start to talk to them about.
[00:13:26] What exactly have they gotten diagnosed with and what are we gonna have to ask them to do to put all the eggs in the basket of making sure that they can be cured. Wow. Sadly, a lot of young women get diagnosed with pretty advanced stage breast cancer, stage three, and sometimes even stage four.
[00:13:45] So stage four means it’s already metastasized. It’s already spread to other body parts. That’s hard because then we don’t currently have the technology and the drugs available to routinely cure women who have gotten diagnosed with a stage four breast cancer, so they know they’re gonna be facing that for the rest of their lives.
[00:14:05] Right. It definitely takes away choices of having further children because we don’t quite know how to do that and get women through a pregnancy safely if we still have to keep treating their breast cancer in the majority of cases. And so just depending on exactly where a woman is diagnosed, this is a huge upheaval.
[00:14:24] Adam Walker: Yeah, I mean that, like it never occurred to me in talking about young women’s breast cancer, like the amount of long-term decisions that you have to make so quickly. Right. Like, like I really appreciate you highlighting that because like, that’s gotta be crushing. I mean, because you’re dealing to your point you’re dealing with your health, but then you have to make all of the family decisions that you had not wanted to make yet, maybe right then.
[00:14:50] Which is, I mean, that’s, I can’t even imagine..
[00:14:53] Dr. Virginia Borges: Or even known, there are so many things that could be going on Yeah. In a relationship in a young family. Where knowing what you were gonna do just in terms of job security, finances, you know, what do we really want as a young couple? And then kaboom, all of a sudden you have to make these choices.
[00:15:13] Like, hello how about we know by Tuesday and. And maybe they weren’t ready to make that just in general. And now they’re being a little bit forced to, if they wanna have the options in front of them.
[00:15:27] Adam Walker: I mean, that’s just so much harder in so many ways. Yeah. So, so then how has your research affected how you approach supporting your young patients through treatment?
[00:15:38] Dr. Virginia Borges: So. We built a very specific clinic to have our young women be able to come in and see us in a very organized fashion. So it makes for a long day, but we run our program and what’s called a multidisciplinary clinic. So I am there, my surgeon is there, the radiation oncologist is there. Oftentimes we’ll even have the plastic surgeon available if that’s going to be a part of the conversation for one of our gals.
[00:16:08] Because let’s face it, if we’re talking about major surgery and someone who’s a very young woman, we also have to have the ability to offer them reconstruction if they would like it. So that Right. The body they’re gonna be walking around with for the rest of their lives is something that they can feel okay about.
[00:16:26] Adam Walker: Yep.
[00:16:28] Dr. Virginia Borges: And not all my women choose reconstruction. Some choose to do mastectomies with just flat closure and they’re very happy about it. Out here in Colorado, I have a lot of serious rock climbers and they will prioritize their athleticism over Yeah a physique. But you know, these are the types of very nuanced decisions You wanna spend a lot of time and have all the resources to be able to offer a young woman.
[00:16:53] So wherever she ends up on the backside of all of this, she feels like she at least made the choice that. Was her choice at that time. Yeah. We have a nurse navigator. A team of nurse navigators actually, because there has to be a point person who is really guiding this young woman in. I’ll never forget years ago when I did a panel discussion with some of my patients, one of them pointed out the fact that when they were first diagnosed and
[00:17:19] they were talking about all the things that were gonna have to happen, and they said, well, you’ll need to come in and have an MRI and then yada yada, yada. The conversation went on and she didn’t feel comfortable telling the person who was talking to her that she had no idea what an MRI was.
[00:17:35] And so the things that we take for granted with our medical vernacular, with the things that we just are so familiar with ourselves, sometimes you have to pause and realize a 20 or 30-year-old may have zero experience in the medical world other than having seen their pediatrician growing up.
[00:17:51] Adam Walker: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:17:51] I mean, a lot of them probably have zero experience and good for them if that’s the case. Right, right. So, yeah. So so with the recommended age of mammograms being 40 what can young women do to know their normal so they can identify changes early?
[00:18:10] Dr. Virginia Borges: So I’m a big fan of women being familiar with their breasts and their bodies in general.
[00:18:16] It doesn’t have to be any sort of formal scripted exam, but most of us take showers reasonably often, and you know, that’s a perfect opportunity to be, you know, feeling their breasts. Making sure that they’re not seeing anything different. When you’re toweling off, if there’s a mirror in the bathroom, are you noticing any changes?
[00:18:38] Is one breast looking different than the other? Is there a dimple in the skin? Does the skin look red or something unusual. And then, you know, if you have someone else in your life who you like, have them be touching your breasts often too, because you’d be surprised the number of times that one of my gals got diagnosed because somebody else found their lump their partner in life or someone that they were having a very close relationship with.
[00:19:01] And anytime anything is detected, you know, it’s worth being thoughtful about. Many young women will have dense breast tissue or cyst or something that will be benign. And so the current recommendations is if a woman is very young, twenties or thirties, early forties, and she notices something that if it’s still there after she’s gone through one cycle of her period, or if she’s not regularly getting periods because she has a an IUD in or for whatever reason, if it’s there for a month.
[00:19:34] It now needs to get checked. Nothing should be there for more than a month. And so then I think the biggest issue is women transition into becoming young adults. They need to get an adult doctor.
[00:19:48] Adam Walker: Yeah.
[00:19:49] Dr. Virginia Borges: So I myself was a little guilty of being busy during medical school and such, and not necessarily having a primary care provider who I could have gone to should I had a health issue.
[00:20:01] But that really is something I’d like to see change and women need to transition out of their pediatric care and get themselves a good primary care provider. It could be an internist, it could be a family practitioner. It could be their OB GYN, but just someone who is doing a formal breast exam on them at least once a year.
[00:20:19] And someone who they can go to if they detect something about their breasts that are concerning. It’s not just the breasts, it’s also the armpits. So any lump or bump or pain out in that area should absolutely, you know, get brought to medical attention if it’s been there for more than a couple weeks.
[00:20:37] And you know, that woman needs to have a relationship with their doctor where they feel like they can go in and get hurt.
[00:20:46] Adam Walker: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:20:48] Dr. Virginia Borges: I all too often see women falsely reassured, particularly young mothers who are nursing. Or in the period of time after nursing where their breasts are kind of changing because breasts change a lot when a woman is pregnant and then nursing and then when she is done nursing.
[00:21:05] And yes, there can be milk milk ducks that get enlarged. There can be all sorts of things that are benign, but again, those are gonna go away. So anything that’s lasting for more than just a couple of weeks or a month absolutely should get evaluated And. You know, my mom was very fond of saying the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
[00:21:26] Adam Walker: Yes, it does. That’s right.
[00:21:28] Dr. Virginia Borges: It annoyed me a little when I was young, but now I find myself saying it to my patients and and you know I think they just have to sort of say, look, I want an ultrasound, look, I want this evaluated. I’m not sure it’s okay. And there’s. Very little harm in getting an ultrasound.
[00:21:48] That’s right. They don’t hurt, there’s no radiation. And and a lot of young women get breast cancers that can be a bit aggressive. And so if we don’t capture this diagnosis fairly soon, they can end up coming to me with a stage three, stage four breast cancer. So yeah. Again, anything that persists.
[00:22:11] Adam Walker: Yeah.
[00:22:12] Dr. Virginia Borges: Yeah. And then here’s the other key feature. So sometimes a woman notices something and she goes in and she gets the imaging. And at that moment in time on the imaging, there really isn’t anything to be seen.
[00:22:26] But it doesn’t go away. So all of a sudden it’s a month or two or three or more later, and what was originally brought to medical attention appropriately and looked okay.
[00:22:40] Now is growing or feeling different or bigger or more painful when you reassure a young woman who is incredibly busy in her life that something is okay. It’s gonna take longer for her to realize, you know, I don’t think this is okay.
[00:22:57] Adam Walker: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:22:58] Dr. Virginia Borges: And that’s where I see the big differences. So even if a woman goes in, gets evaluated and is reassured that it seems okay if it doesn’t go away, if it is changing, if it is growing she needs to go back and she needs to make herself her priority in life. That’s right. That’s right. Not everything else that’s on the to-do list.
[00:23:17] Adam Walker: No, that’s great. And so, so two things that you said that struck me. One is. In all of the interviews I’ve done, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard someone articulate
[00:23:28] If there’s a lump and it persists longer than a few weeks, you’ve gotta go in like, like, like I, I really kind of like that timeframe idea for it, you know? So that they’re not dismissing themselves, you know, thinking, oh, I’m younger, I don’t need to worry about it. Like, no, you do. And then I mean, obviously the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
[00:23:46] Like that’s, I mean you’ve gotta advocate, you gotta, we’ve talked about this show so many times, you’ve gotta advocate for yourself over and over again because you know yourself and you know your body, right.
[00:23:56] Dr. Virginia Borges: Yeah, and you know, the old teaching about following a lump through a cycle of a period doesn’t really fit well in the modern era because there are methods of birth control where women are not having regular periods.
[00:24:09] There are women who don’t have regular periods for a whole host of reasons going on in their body. Like there’s an issue called PCOS, which is an ovarian syndrome. So sometimes they don’t get regular periods. Also, if you’re pregnant or you’re nursing, you might not get periods. Well, you’re not gonna get periods when you’re pregnant and when you’re nursing you might not because lactation can sometimes suppress that, that sit that system.
[00:24:38] And yet these are women who are at risk of having an issue arise. So again, that’s why I like to just talk about it in terms of timing as opposed to something specifically related to a cycle that not all women have.
[00:24:53] Adam Walker: I really appreciate that approach. So, all right, so, so last question. On this show, we’re all about empowering people with knowledge to take charge of their health.
[00:25:02] So with that in mind, what would be your message to younger women as it relates to breast cancer risk?
[00:25:09] Dr. Virginia Borges: I break it down into that, which can’t be controlled, that which maybe can be controlled, but in the modern era, not really. And that which can be controlled. So what can’t be controlled is what you inherit from your family.
[00:25:25] We are stuck with our gene pool and sometimes there’s no escaping it no matter what the illness is. But it’s very important for women to understand who has had cancer on both sides of their family, mom and dad’s side of the family. And if there is an absence of information available because somebody passed away young or they’re adopted, or that side of the family just isn’t known.
[00:25:48] That doesn’t mean you don’t have a family history. It means we don’t know what family history you have. So factoring that in when you are talking with your primary care provider about what are the risks in your family and making sure that you’re being proactive about understanding when then you should start your cancer screening.
[00:26:07] So, not only is breast cancer rising in young women in this country, but so is colon cancer. So here’s an example. I have a strong family of history of colon cancer, so I started my screening at 40 for women with a strong family history of breast cancer, they could find out if any of the people affected by breast cancer in their family have ever gotten tested for a gene.
[00:26:32] And if they have it, if they have it, they should go get tested for that gene. If they haven’t then that person could consider going and getting tested for one of the inherited genes, or at least going and seeing a high risk clinic. Sometimes we don’t find a gene, but there’s still a very strong family history so.
[00:26:53] We don’t know why that is happening in that family, but that woman has a higher risk and there are models, mathematical models that a doctor can use to figure out based on a woman’s individual life history, when did she start getting her periods? Has she taken birth control? All these things and help calculate what her risk is.
[00:27:12] So then maybe that woman should start her screening younger. A benchmark is if there is a strong, if there is a family history and somebody in the family had breast cancer at a young age, we other relatives, first degree relatives in particular, so like sisters, daughters, or even second degree res relatives, cousins, perhaps, depending on the family history to consider starting their screening 10 years younger than the youngest age at diagnosis.
[00:27:40] Now if someone was diagnosed in their twenties, that gets a bit complicated because we’re not gonna be doing mammograms on teenagers per se. But these are the types of family histories we want identified. And that woman needs to be talking to her care team and figuring out, you know, should she come see a high risk clinic, which most academic institutions like mine out here in Colorado definitely have.
[00:28:01] Beyond family history, then there are the things that are less controllable. So we talked about, having a family. So if a woman chooses to take oral contraceptives, that can increase the risk for getting diagnosed with breast cancer. So while hormone-based oral contraceptives are a great way to control somebody’s life choices, and many of us
[00:28:28] took them and took them for many years. Just have to be cognizant of the fact that contributes to some risk. And if there’s an option for a non-hormonal method, that could be a consideration, particularly if somebody’s been on the hormonal types for a long time. Then there’s also, you know, what I think is not so controllable, which is the age at which we choose to have our families, if we choose to, you know getting our educations, building our careers.
[00:28:56] That factors into things. If a woman does have a child if she can choose to nurse and if her life would support that reduces her risk of getting breast cancer. In fact, not nursing increases a woman’s risk of getting a young onset breast cancer. Again, not always controllable. I’m really aware that there are many women out there whose jobs would not support that, who are trying to just get by working three jobs and, you know I, if they can do it, that helps reduce the risk.
[00:29:30] And if they can’t, then they just have to be aware of that fact that is also something that could increase their risk. Then there’s the things that are absolutely controllable. Exercise. It is the most important thing that every adult on this planet should be doing because it reduces the risk of breast cancer, about 12 other cancers and diseases as well.
[00:29:51] And the thing is we only can make ourselves the priority to do that, and the recipe is about 150 minutes a week, which is a lot. But you know, you have to take the time and you have to make sure that you’re doing it for yourself. Because if a woman doesn’t do it for herself, nobody’s gonna make it easier for her to do it, and that can help reduce the risk of getting breast cancer as well as other diseases.
[00:30:19] And then the other one’s a little unpleasant, but it is pretty clear that drinking alcohol increases our risk for a number of diseases, one of which is breast cancer. And so if a person chooses to drink, they have to be mindful of how much they’re drinking. And definitely it would be recommended if you don’t wanna increase your breast cancer risk at all, don’t drink at all.
[00:30:42] If you are okay with a little bit of an increased risk, then keep it to maybe a couple drinks a week or a couple drinks a month, make it special occasions. Definitely if a woman is drinking two or more glasses of alcohol every day, she is increasing her risk for getting breast cancer in a meaningful way, and we would hope that would be something she could back down from if she was interested in reducing her risk of breast cancer and other diseases as well.
[00:31:11] Adam Walker: Yeah.
[00:31:12] Dr. Virginia Borges: So those are the main controllable aspects that we have in life.
[00:31:16] Adam Walker: That’s great advice. And the, I mean, the, you know, you mentioned 150 minutes a week. I mean, it’s a little more than 20 minutes a day. That’s, I think that’s doable. You know, it’s not easy, but it’s hopefully doable.
[00:31:27] So it’s not easy. Yeah. You know.
[00:31:30] Dr. Virginia Borges: Once upon a time I had two very young kids and was working very much full-time and also trying to help participate in the care of my parents. And yeah, it just gets to be a lot. Right. You also have to get the laundry done and the groceries bought. It’s true. True. And I realized I had a pretty privileged existence because I could hire in some help and yeah, and a lot of women out there don’t have that opportunity, or they don’t even have a, they’re doing it on their own.
[00:31:54] They don’t even have a partner raising their family with them. So you’d be amazed at how hard it can be depending on a person’s situation.
[00:32:04] Adam Walker: That’s true. That’s true. But even if it’s just jumping around in the living room to your favorite tunes of your favorite genre of music for 20 minutes, that’s good enough.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:13] Dr. Virginia Borges: Doesn’t have to go to the gym, doesn’t have to be fancy, you know? Yeah, put on the sneakers and go out the front door.
[00:32:19] Adam Walker: That’s right. Get some walking in. Yeah, absolutely. Yep. Well Dr. Borges, this has been great. I’ve learned quite a, you’ve shared quite a few things that I’ve never heard on this show and really appreciate it very much.
[00:32:29] I really appreciate the work that you’re doing, the research and and thank you so much for joining us on the show today.
[00:32:35] Dr. Virginia Borges: Well, thank you for having me. Happy to be here.
[00:32:43] Adam Walker: Thanks for listening to Real Pink, a weekly podcast by Susan G Komen. For more episodes, visit real pink.Komen.org. And for more on breast cancer, visit Komen.org. Make sure to check out at Susan G Komen on social media. I’m your host, Adam. You can find me on Twitter at AJ Walker or on my blog adam j walker.com.