[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] All right, joining me on the show today, I’ve got Mallory. Mallory, welcome to Real Pink. Thank you. Well, uh, Mallory, uh, tell us, tell us your story. Like, you know, like who are you, what are you about? What, what does your family look like? You know, give, kinda give us the flyer of, of, of who you are. And then after that I wanna talk about, uh, your, your breast cancer experience.
[00:00:40] Mallory Tucker: Okay. Um, I’m a wife. I am a mother of four children. I have a 16-year-old, a 15-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a 2-year-old. Um, the 2-year-old just turned two on Sunday, so she has flipped her 2-year-old switch, which is obviously a lot of fun. Um, let’s see. I am a hairstylist, but I decided to stay home to take care of the four year after he was born because COVID was going on and the people I had in my life that helped me take care of
[00:01:21] my older two are no longer with us, so I did hair for about 18 years and I plan on going back. But, um, that’s, that’s pretty much me. I’m in Warner Robins, Georgia. Up here because of the military family. Not, well, my dad and my grandparents and we moved back here to be closer to them, so.
[00:01:47] Adam Walker: Oh, that’s fantastic.
[00:01:48] I love you got four kids, man. That keeps you real busy. I bet. Especially that 2-year-old sounds like real busy.
[00:01:54] Mallory Tucker: Yeah. So I question my sanity every day.
[00:01:57] Adam Walker: Yeah. Two year olds will do that to you. Yeah. Yeah. I love that when you said, uh, I’m, I’m glad you went through it. Like when you said four kids, like, oh, I gotta know the ages now.
[00:02:05] Like, it paints a really good picture there. Yeah. So, uh, yeah. That’s fantastic. Well, all right. It’s, so, uh, now let, let’s, let’s talk about your breast cancer journey. Like where, where, like, give us, give us the flyover, give us the story, and then where you’re at right now.
[00:02:19] Mallory Tucker: Okay. So. Um, a month before I turned 40, which was last April, I was sitting downstairs playing with the baby.
[00:02:30] She wasn’t even a year old. She was 10 months at the time and we’re just playing around and she grabbed me on my left breast really hard and I thought, she’s the strongest baby I’ve ever known in my life. She gave me hematoma, so it bruised it swelled. I told my husband I have to go to the doctor to
[00:02:50] make, make sure everything’s fine. Well, a little bit of background is that both of my grandmothers had breast cancer, but that’s actually considered a weak family history. But in my case, my mom was the only child of two, only children. My dad has a brother, so I was the only granddaughter until I had my own girls.
[00:03:14] Adam Walker: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
[00:03:18] Mallory Tucker: I told my husband, I’m gonna go to the doctor. Both of my grandmothers had passed away. I didn’t have, um, very much, very many memories of them having breast cancer because we didn’t live here. We were stationed in other states.
[00:03:33] Adam Walker: Right.
[00:03:34] Mallory Tucker: Um, so I didn’t know much about that. And both of them hated to talk about it.
[00:03:38] They did not wanna talk about it all. So I go to the doctor and they said, we’re gonna send you for an ultrasound. I said, okay, when I get there to get an ultrasound, they said we won’t do an ultrasound without a mammogram. So I was a little frustrated. It took a couple extra days to get the referral for the mammogram too.
[00:04:02] Adam Walker: Right.
[00:04:04] Mallory Tucker: Um, so I ended up having the ultrasound, having the mammogram, and a couple days later my OB called and said, there’s some suspicious looking. We need to do some biopsies.
[00:04:18] Adam Walker: Right.
[00:04:19] Mallory Tucker: So I went and did the biopsies. Three days later, the results came in and I was positive for invasive ductal carcinoma.
[00:04:29] Adam Walker: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:31] Mallory Tucker: I did notice that I loved to sleep on my stomach. It was a little uncomfortable on my left side, but I didn’t think anything of it because I had just had two small children.
[00:04:42] Adam Walker: Right. Yeah.
[00:04:42] Mallory Tucker: And all of the changes that you go. It’ll work itself out.
[00:04:48] Adam Walker: Right. So
[00:04:48] Mallory Tucker: I should have been, I guess, a little bit more proactive about that.
[00:04:53] Um, I’ll also go back a couple years because of my grandmother’s history, both of them. I was gonna start my mammograms at 35, but my mom was sick and I was a caretaker.
[00:05:06] Adam Walker: Mm.
[00:05:06] Mallory Tucker: So all of the things that, um. I should have been doing for myself, kind of got put on the back burner.
[00:05:15] Adam Walker: Right.
[00:05:16] Mallory Tucker: Not even the back burner.
[00:05:17] They weren’t even on my mind.
[00:05:19] Adam Walker: Right, right, right. Yeah.
[00:05:19] Mallory Tucker: So, um, my mom passed away when I was 37, 39 with my breast cancer diagnosis. Um, and I started my treatment. So I got my port a couple weeks after my diagnosis. They did the genetic testing, which came back negative. And um, I got my port and I started my treatment right before my 40th birthday.
[00:05:47] Adam Walker: Wow, that’s wild. And so now, I mean, that was a year ago, right? I mean, you got, you founded it a year ago. Mm-hmm. Where year, where, what’s your status now? Where are you at now with the, in your journey?
[00:05:57] Mallory Tucker: I’m cancer free.
[00:05:58] My treatment was called TCHP and it was a combination of hormones and chemo because it was HER2 positive. Um, it was fairly large. It was a five by seven centimeter mass, which is very big. Yeah.
[00:06:19] Adam Walker: Yeah.
[00:06:20] Mallory Tucker: And it’s, um,
[00:06:25] it’s just miracle it hadn’t spread to my lymphnodes.
[00:06:30] My, um, first round of chemo that I did. Um, the first, I was supposed to do six treatments, but I could only do five because after the fifth one I was having to get too many fluids. I lost too much weight, and they said the benefits don’t outweigh the side effects.
[00:06:47] Adam Walker: Right, right, right.
[00:06:48] Mallory Tucker: So I did five treatments, of the TCHP, and it shrunk my tumor to less than a centimeter.
[00:06:55] So October 1st, I had a bilateral mastectomy. I got clear margin. They, um, removed two sentinel lymph nodes. Those were negative. And, um, after the pathology came back from surgery, my tumor did not have a full pathological response to the first hormone treatment.
[00:07:21] Adam Walker: Mm-hmm. So
[00:07:23] Mallory Tucker: in December I started Kadcyla, so I’m still taking, um, infusions.
[00:07:30] It’s a chemo hormone treatment, right? Um, every three weeks. And then in December I should be able to start an oral regimen.
[00:07:41] Adam Walker: So, so I’m curious to talk about your family for a minute. If, if you’re up for that, uh, you’ve got. You know, two older kids that have their own unique perspective on the world. For sure.
[00:07:54] You have two like tiny kids that have their own unique perspective on the world. Like, can you talk about like, how did you talk to the older ones versus the younger ones about it? How, how did, how did you help them cope? You know, going through the process, you know, like for each, each group?
[00:08:12] Mallory Tucker: So the two older cannot be more yin and yang from each other.
[00:08:16] Um, the oldest is a boy, the next oldest is a girl. Um, and my son has a lot of anxiety, is diagnosed very young with anxiety. Um, and when my family, like my mom and my grandmothers were sick. He was very close to them, but when they became sick, he pulled away from them. So I knew that that was probably a possibility.
[00:08:43] Um, it a coping mechanism and I think a way for him to not feel as hurt if something happened to me. Um, but I actually started talking to them about what was going on with me when I found out I needed to have the biopsies because they would be old enough to notice like, Hey, mom’s not able to pick up the kids.
[00:09:03] She can’t, you know, put the baby on the changing table for a couple weeks and that, that kind of stuff. So I started talking to them early and I told them, I said, you know, there’s a lot of things this could be, it could be fibrocystic tissue, it could be anything. We’re not going to stress about this.
[00:09:21] We’re just gonna take it day by day every day. No matter what happens day by day. Um, we’re not gonna anticipate the worst, and we’re gonna hope for the best. So my daughter was, um, super close. She would come and lay down in the bed with me, you know, watch her, her, she watches all kinds of podcasts. Um, or she’d come in and read beside me while I was laying in the bed.
[00:09:47] My son wouldn’t really come in the room very much, but if I asked him for something, because his bedroom’s right next to. If my husband was busy with the little kids, he would go get me my medicine or some water or something like that. But it was kind of a in and out kind of thing. And I, I, I recognized that was just, he was scared and he didn’t wanna see how sick I was.
[00:10:11] Adam Walker: Right. Yeah. Yeah. And, and what, and how about the little ones, how did you, how did you talk to them? How did they respond? You know.
[00:10:19] Mallory Tucker: So the baby just, she really doesn’t of course know anything. She, but she was a mama’s girl, so like, she was all about me. And so when Daddy had to step in and take over, um, it was a little bit of a transition, but she did really good.
[00:10:34] Okay. And so it, it took a while for when I was better and able to get down there, kind of get on and be around. She was a little more hesitant to be around me. It was daddy, daddy, daddy, you know?
[00:10:51] Adam Walker: Right.
[00:10:51] Mallory Tucker: Um, Charles, the 4-year-old, well he just turned four in February, so he was three through most of this. Um, he would come up here and lay down in the bed with me to take his naps.
[00:11:05] Mm. And he would still fall asleep in bed with me at night. He would, um, my husband would just come in and put him in his own bed. Yeah. But, um, all, all I really told him was he just said, mommy has the doctor’s appointment, you know, she’s not feeling good. Um, and he was okay with that. And now he has heard so much
[00:11:34] of me saying, I have treatment on this day, treatment on this day. And I say, mommy has an appointment. He says, are you going to get your treatment?
[00:11:41] And sometimes
[00:11:42] it’s yes, and sometimes it’s no. Yeah. If it’s treatment, he knows I’ll be gone longer. He wants to know how long I’ll be gone.
[00:11:48] Adam Walker: Yeah.
[00:11:48] Mallory Tucker: Um, if it’s just a different appointment, then he knows I’ll be back a little sooner.
[00:11:53] Adam Walker: Okay. And, and like how did it, I mean, and or, or did it affect like other family dynamics? Like, like vacations and like, like did it, like, I’m, I’m just curious about like sort of the overall impact of this sort of on all the family dynamics. Any, any thoughts on that?
[00:12:11] Mallory Tucker: Um, yeah, so my dad is still in town. And he, um, he would have some vacations planned that he wanted to go on or, or things that he would wanna do, and he would always put that aside to be over here and help.
[00:12:28] Like he would, he lives a couple blocks away. I actually live in the house that him and my mom bought when we grew. We moved here. Oh, that’s cool. We live in my old family home.
[00:12:37] Adam Walker: Nice.
[00:12:39] Mallory Tucker: Um, so he would come, it was just too big for him when it, you know, my mom passed and nobody else was here.
[00:12:45] Adam Walker: Mm-hmm.
[00:12:46] Mallory Tucker: So he’s, uh, he would drop anything anytime and schedule all of his appointments around my treatments.
[00:12:54] Um, my husband is huge into seeing volleyball. He loves playing volleyball.
[00:13:00] Adam Walker: Wow, okay. Interesting.
[00:13:03] Mallory Tucker: Yeah, he is really, really good. Um, he would say he’s not so good right now because it’s been a while since he’s played. Right. But, um, we used to take trips down to Florida and he would play in the a DP tournaments and stuff like that all the time.
[00:13:17] Um, now of course we didn’t go since Covid. Yeah, because then we had the baby, well we had both babies and then, you know, once Charles was old enough that, okay, I think we can take him to the beach, then I was pregnant with Maggie.
[00:13:32] Adam Walker: Yeah.
[00:13:33] Mallory Tucker: So, um, he also has some friends here that has some volleyball courts and he likes to go out in the sand and do that kind of stuff.
[00:13:42] But I tell him to go and he just kind of wants to stick around, make sure everything’s okay. On. Yeah. But I did tell my daughter she misses going on trips and gonna the beach and stuff, and I said, when I’m better, we’re gonna go to the beach. We’re gonna go explore things in Georgia that we haven’t to do.
[00:14:05] We’re gonna, we’re gonna get out more. It’s just been a complicated five years. Yeah.
[00:14:11] Adam Walker: Yeah. That’s been a, a very complicated five years. Yeah. Mm-hmm. For sure. Wow. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I, I’d imagine going from, you know. Covid to baby, to, you know, small child to breast cancer. That’s a lot in a very short ..
[00:14:28] Like, like how do you, like, how do you deal with that, all of that emotionally? Like how do you, how do you keep going? How do you keep a good attitude?
[00:14:37] Mallory Tucker: So I actually started going to therapy. Well, I should say, first of all, I very strong relationship with God, there was not a day where I didn’t
[00:14:48] sing myself to sleep to some kind of praise song or old hymn when I just felt like I have nothing else to say. Mm-hmm. I have no more words to pray.
[00:14:57] Adam Walker: Sure, sure.
[00:14:58] Mallory Tucker: Like you’ve got this, help me rest. And I would always fall asleep. But, um, I also started therapy because my mom passed away in 2019, January. Her mom passed away in 2019, two months later.
[00:15:16] My dad’s mom passed away within a year, half and a half of them. My A brain. Oh my gosh. A brain tumor.
[00:15:22] Adam Walker: Wow.
[00:15:23] Mallory Tucker: And then, um, with my mom being an only child of two, only parents, um, I ended up being a caretaker for my grandfather. Conservator guardian.
[00:15:33] Yeah. He was an assisted living. He ended up having dementia, Alzheimer’s, and he was my favorite.
[00:15:40] He was completely different.
[00:15:42] Adam Walker: Yeah.
[00:15:43] Mallory Tucker: And that was really, really hard for me to reconcile in my head.
[00:15:48] Adam Walker: Hmm.
[00:15:49] Mallory Tucker: Um, so I decided I was taking a little bit of all those emotions outta my family. So I believe it was January of last year. I told my husband, I said, I’m, I’m gonna go to therapy. I need somebody. So he said, okay, that sounds good.
[00:16:08] And so I started gonna therapy and she said, wow, you’re dealing with a lot of compounded grief.
[00:16:14] Adam Walker: Yeah.
[00:16:14] Mallory Tucker: Which I had never heard the word before.
[00:16:16] Adam Walker: Right.
[00:16:16] Mallory Tucker: And I said, okay. So we start working through all of this, and then we start having to deal with my potential diagnosis and all these tests and well turns out she had been referred to me by a friend of mine and said
[00:16:33] conflict of interest. You know, I can’t see you. Right. But here’s, here’s one of my coworkers. Yeah, she’s awesome. So I start seeing her, well, she’s actually a breast cancer survivor and she had it when she was 28. And she was able to help me understand a lot of the emotions that I was going through. A lot of the questions in my head, um.
[00:17:01] I had never heard about when I was done with chemo, that’s called chemo letdown. And my body had, I had a lot of anxiety and I’m not an anxious person and I could not figure out what was going on. So she explained to me the adrenaline that your body is producing while you’re fighting and going through chemo.
[00:17:27] And when you stop chemo, you still, your body’s still generating all of this. Energy towards fighting, but there’s nothing for it to, to work towards. So that was so eye-opening and not something that I had heard about through talking to friends and people that I’d already known that are survivors themselves.
[00:17:50] Um, so therapy has been a huge help. I still see her. Um, she’s been extremely flexible with me. Of course, she was 28 when she had breast cancer. So that was encouraging to me. Yeah. That at such a young age there was the possibility of me surviving it, but also, you know, the, the survival rate for breast cancer has increased so much.
[00:18:15] Adam Walker: Yeah. Dramatically. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:18:17] Mallory Tucker: Dramatically. Yeah. So, um, yeah, that was, that was really encouraging and I just feel like, uh, God has his hand in everything, right. And he put me in her office
[00:18:29] exactly when I needed it.
[00:18:30] Adam Walker: Yeah, I love that. I love that. Mm-hmm. So, I, so I gotta ask though, like, I, I feel like a lot of people’s excuse about therapy is like, I just don’t have the time. Right? Like, I just like I, and you’ve got, you know, you got four kids. I mean, it sounds like you were dealing with a lot of big, heavy things.
[00:18:46] I mean, in 2019, even before Covid, like how did you carve out that time for yourself? And prioritize yourself to, to take that step to do the therapy? Like, tell me about that.
[00:18:58] Mallory Tucker: Well, at the time my husband was working full-time for, um, a, a golf course that the city owns here in town.
[00:19:06] Adam Walker: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:06] Mallory Tucker: So he was gone every day.
[00:19:08] Um, my dad is retired, so he was available to come over and watch, but also enrolled Charles in a church program.
[00:19:19] When it became a little, my sister-in-law’s actually the director of it, so it was like brand new, very low, uh, volume of children. Right, right. Um, so I was like, you know, I’m gonna put Maggie in. She’s old enough, she can go for parents morning out. So I scheduled, my treatments aren’t like my therapies mm-hmm. For the days that both
[00:19:46] of the kids would be in school, so I can drop them off at school, I can go have my therapy or if I’m not able to do that, my dad would come over and keep them.
[00:19:56] Adam Walker: Got it.
[00:19:56] Mallory Tucker: For me, so. Got it.
[00:19:57] Adam Walker: And so, so you arranged your schedule to facilitate your own thing that you needed for your own benefit to be okay. Right?
[00:20:06] Yeah. So let, let’s talk about that. So like what, like talk to me because you’re, I mean, again, like mad respect mom of four, like so, so much going on. Talk about the importance of self-care for you. because it sounds to me like you’ve got, like, you value self-care. I think other women, I mean, to your point, like you even said you were so busy taking care of your mother, uh, that you didn’t have time to, to go to the, like you, you, you weren’t doing self-care.
[00:20:31] Now you are. Um, tell me like, why is that important? Why do you value it? How do you, how do you think about self-care?
[00:20:40] Mallory Tucker: Um, to be honest with you, I was getting burned out. I was in constant fight or flight mode.
[00:20:46] Adam Walker: Yeah.
[00:20:46] Mallory Tucker: Um, when I didn’t have somebody to advocate for, whether it was my son in school because of a DH, ADHD and anxiety, whether it was my mom in the hospital.
[00:20:57] And I’m trying to explain to these doctors, I understand what’s going on better than you do. Yeah.
[00:21:02] Adam Walker: Like, yeah.
[00:21:03] Mallory Tucker: Um, with my grandparents, I mean, the day after my mom passed away, my grandma had an emergency and we had to push back the timing of planning the funeral because I had to go handle an emergency from my grandmother.
[00:21:16] Um.
[00:21:17] Adam Walker: Wow.
[00:21:17] Mallory Tucker: So I was just, I was getting so burned out. So, um, I, I’ll be honest, I took a lot of it out on my husband. I took a lot of it out on my kids. You know, they say, I guess you take it out on the people that love you the most.
[00:21:32] Adam Walker: Yeah.
[00:21:33] Mallory Tucker: Um, my dad would, I fuss at my dad for no reason. He is like an angel on earth.
[00:21:40] Um, so I realize that I have to get rest. I have to step away from the things that are exhausting me and honestly, like just take a break. Like I, and, and it was really important for me to not carry everybody else’s burdens because I couldn’t, I had to let everybody, I had to learn to let everybody process their own feelings.
[00:22:16] Not only my breast cancer diagnosis, but any feeling. I mean, if they don’t like dinner today, you know, I’m sorry, I can’t, I can’t fix that for you. You know? Um, you’re gonna have to process that yourself because it’s exhausting me. So I, I used to carry the burden of people’s feelings a lot, um, and I’ve realized that that was putting too much pressure on myself.
[00:22:45] I wasn’t gonna heal, and I’m not gonna continue to heal if I don’t let everybody just work through their own issues.
[00:22:55] Adam Walker: Man, that is, uh, that’s profound. I mean that, but you’re right. Like that’s, yeah. People gotta, you gotta let people deal with their own stuff. You can’t deal with it for them. Mm-hmm. As much as we might, we, we might want to, um.
[00:23:09] I mean, your, your, your family sounds beautiful. Um, thank you. And, uh, I really appreciate you sharing your story with us. Before we go, um, is there, do you have any, any final thoughts you’d like to share with any listeners that are, that are maybe dealing with their own breast cancer journey or maybe they have a loved one that’s dealing with theirs?
[00:23:26] Mallory Tucker: One of the, one of the things that I decided to do for myself in the very beginning, when I started going through all the testing
[00:23:35] not panic. Mm. I’ve had a couple different friends that have reached out to me, something suspicious has been found on A MRI or a mammogram, and I just try to encourage them not to get too anxious or worked up about it until they get some answers.
[00:23:51] Adam Walker: Yeah.
[00:23:52] Mallory Tucker: And then even after that, I didn’t wanna anticipate feeling bad.
[00:23:57] Adam Walker: Mm.
[00:23:58] Mallory Tucker: So I wanted just let the bad days come and deal with them as they came.
[00:24:05] I had a day where I felt stronger. I took advantage of it.
[00:24:08] Adam Walker: Yeah.
[00:24:09] Mallory Tucker: I feel like one of the hardest things to do is not to worry and get worked up and anxious about a potential cancer diagnosis.
[00:24:19] Adam Walker: Mm-hmm.
[00:24:20] Mallory Tucker: But, um, it’s not good for the, it’s not good for your mind. No. It’s not gonna be good for your healing journey.
[00:24:30] Um,
[00:24:31] if you anticipate the bad times. You’re already putting yourself there.
[00:24:38] Adam Walker: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:24:39] Mallory Tucker: So you’re gonna feel even worse.
[00:24:40] Adam Walker: Yeah.
[00:24:41] Mallory Tucker: When those bad days do come because you, you have the mindset that it’s gonna happen.
[00:24:47] Adam Walker: Yeah. I mean, if you anticipated the bad time, you’re ruining the good time you could be having right this second. Right, exactly.
[00:24:53] Yeah. Hmm. But it’s hard. And I mean, and it strikes me as, as being, I think, profoundly helpful that you had. A therapist to go to, to help you think through that stuff because like the, like what you’re saying is so healthy. But yeah, very few people I think, think that way. Um, and, and so it just reminds me of like, like the value of therapy to help kind of think through those things and really deal with those things and, and, and, and deal with those emotions like you talked about earlier.
[00:25:19] So, uh, Mallory, your, your story is incredible. Um, thank you for taking the time to share it with us today, and thank you for joining me on the show today.
[00:25:27] Mallory Tucker: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. I’m glad I was able to share part of my journey.
[00:25:32] Adam Walker: Me too. Me too.
[00:25:36] 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.