[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] Three years after finishing treatment for stage one breast cancer, Lea learned she had metastatic breast cancer for which there is no cure today. Even after having to fight for an initial screening, not receiving a recommendation to start tamoxifen and not experiencing transparency from her doctor, Lea Leach kept advocating for herself and making changes to be treated as a whole person.
[00:00:41] Today, she’s living her life with purpose and is passionate about advocating for breast cancer awareness, particularly for women of color. Lea is here today to share her story and how she lives her days with courage and faith. Lea, welcome to the show.
[00:00:55] Lea Leach: Thank you so much for having me, Adam. I’m so grateful to be a part of this platform, to be able to discuss something personal with me that can bless others hopefully.
[00:01:06] Adam Walker: Well, I’m looking forward to hearing your story. So let’s actually dive in right there. I mean, we, I talked about self-advocacy in the opening and I think you’ve mentioned before that it started at the beginning. So tell us about your first diagnosis and about the need for self-advocacy.
[00:01:20] Lea Leach: So in 2016 I found a lump in my left, left breast, and at the time didn’t really know what to really do with it other than to go to the doctor.
[00:01:31] As I tell people all the time, nothing happens by chance. I just happened to be there the month before Breast cancer awareness month. And so I went and had a conversation with my doctor and the first thing I mentioned was, Hey, how about a mammogram? And she kind of was very dismissive and said to me, no, I don’t think a mammogram will work for you.
[00:01:53] You’re too young. And it wasn’t until I said, I have family history, like, I need you to order this mammogram. Even after saying that, she still was very dismissive and said to me Well, the insurance is not going to cover it, but I’ll let you go to a mammogram. And so she ordered a mammogram in November of 2017 and it came back abnormal.
[00:02:15] I was told to wait six months. And so in the following year, 2017, in April of 2017 I had to do a six month biopsy as well as a check to see what this actually was. And in May of 2017, I was diagnosed with stage one breast cancer. Thankfully I followed my instinct and kind of was pushy about what I needed to do.
[00:02:42] And so I decided to elect for a double mastectomy. Eventually that’s what ended up happening with me after having a surgery to see that. It not only grew, the mask grew, but that there was really no change in my diagnoses. And so I elected in September of 2017 to have a double mastectomy where I had both of the breasts removed and thought that was going to be the end of my journey.
[00:03:09] Was told that was pretty much going to be the end of my journey. Went into remission a year later and was doing great until 2021.
[00:03:19] Adam Walker: Wow. All right. So tell us about 20 20, 20 21. I assume that’s when you were diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, so let’s walk through that.
[00:03:27] Lea Leach: Absolutely. So in 2021 March of 2021, this was right after COVID.
[00:03:32] We were all in lockdown and was, you know, getting myself back in shape, mentally, physically, emotionally, wanted to get myself to better weight loss and just feeling better. And I started riding my bike. That was kind of the first start of it. And I noticed that I kept having this aggravating pain in my right leg.
[00:03:51] Didn’t seem to let up no matter what I did, I could have stretched, took medicine, nothing seemed to be working. And so in March of 27, I’m sorry, March of 2021, I went to urgent care and they treated me for sciatica. They thought I had sciatica pain. That’s what I pretty much went in there saying that I had a problem with.
[00:04:11] And by June of 2021, I could barely walk. It was to the point where my spouse was actually picking me up and putting me into a car or she was navigating me to walk. And so June of 2021, it was actually Father’s Day of 2021. I went to the hospital. I was in grave pain, couldn’t walk, couldn’t do anything.
[00:04:34] And God always leads me to say certain things and I kept saying, I’m having pelvic pain. Like, I need you to explore this because I’m having real bad pelvic pain. And so it ordered them and prompted them to order a ct abdomen and pelvis. And it came back that I had tumors not only in my right hip, but in my left hip and in my sockets by left and right sockets and as well as my femur.
[00:05:05] I was told to follow up with my primary care doctor and that they couldn’t tell me if it was benign or malignant. And so. Couple days later, I went and had my MRI, and on my 41st birthday of 2021, I was diagnosed with stage four metastatic breast cancer.
[00:05:23] Adam Walker: That is not a great birthday gift to say the least.
[00:05:28] Whew. Okay. So they told you that it’s stage four. What goes through your mind at that point? What’s it like to receive that diagnosis?
[00:05:40] Lea Leach: I thought I was going to die. To be perfectly honest with you, when you hear stage four, you hear in your mind, I heard terminal. I didn’t hear quality of life. I didn’t hear, you know, chemo, radiation, I didn’t hear any of those things.
[00:05:52] I just heard death. So immediately my heart sunk because I had, at the time, small, ch smaller children. I mean, of course they were pre-teens, but I had so much to do with them. I had a spouse who had just had our seven year wedding anniversary then. It was a lot going on in real time. And now you’re telling me I have this cancer that’s incurable.
[00:06:16] And so I was angry. I was pissed off, I was sad, I was depressed. I was all the emotions in terms of negative emotions. And I let myself, I lended space to be able to sit in that because I wanted to sit in those emotions. And so I, it, I had a hard time with the diagnoses. I still, from time to time, have a hard time with the diagnoses.
[00:06:42] But what I’m grateful for is that I had a village around me. It just so happened to be as I say, again, nothing happens by chance, everyone that could be around me at that time was around me. So it made it easier to bite and process and figure out what was next, what needed to be next in the journey of my healing.
[00:07:04] Adam Walker: Okay. That’s, I’m glad you had that support, that’s so important. And yeah. Yeah. It’s such a blessing. So I also understand you, you battled some feelings, a, about the time about having not gotten the care that you deserved and that ultimate ultimately could have, you know, partly led to some of your outcomes.
[00:07:21] Tell, tell us a little bit more about that.
[00:07:24] Lea Leach: Yes. So when I got diagnosed the first time I was young. I didn’t know what questions to really ask my doctor. I didn’t know what questions to ask anybody, really. And I felt, if I’m being honest, that through the medical system at that time, I was kind of dropped.
[00:07:40] Like no one did the due diligence of following up to say, Hey Lea, you need to get over here, or You need to be doing this, or you need to be doing that. None of those things ever happens. And so. It led me to a space of like feeling vulnerable in not the best ways. Like it just led me to like, who was on my side, who was for me.
[00:08:02] And so my first medical oncologist, I was with her for about five years, give or take, and I just felt that at a certain point she wasn’t transparent with my medical history. I felt at some points that she didn’t hear me. Because I believed in a balance of holistic and Western and none of that was supported in my journey.
[00:08:27] And it became, it almost came like a battle. Like I felt like I was battling not only the cancer, but I was also battling my medical oncologist and I made the decision with the support of my family and my friends to decide to look for another medical oncologist. I was nervous about it because I had to rebuild rapport again and just all of those things.
[00:08:49] But what I’m grateful for is that the same, the doctor that I’m with now, who I’ve been with now for four years in counting. He literally was in the same network as my current doc, my previous doctor, and he just made me feel comfortable. He made me feel like I was a whole person. It wasn’t just like I was just another number, another person with metastatic breast cancer.
[00:09:14] He broke it down for me. Like he, he made sure that I knew what this disease was and what the outcomes could be and what things we were going to do. We were going to try everything on the drawing board, and it made it easier for me to eat. It was almost like what my mom always says you eat the elephant one piece at a time.
[00:09:33] He made me be able to eat. Eat it one piece at a time, and that was important for me going forward.
[00:09:40] Adam Walker: I feel like there’s a thread in some of the stories you tell about sort of following your gut. You know, you talked about you sort of following that gut to say you had pelvic pain and then, you know, following your gut to leave one oncologist, which is scary and to go find another one.
[00:09:57] I wonder, I mean, can you talk a little bit about just like how you look at following your gut, the importance of that for life and the importance of that for your medical care as well?
[00:10:05] Lea Leach: Yeah, absolutely. My faith is very important to me and that’s been kind of the driving force through this diagnosis. Before I do anything, I always pray.
[00:10:15] I always ask God to give me a sign to show me that I’m going in the right direction. It never ceases to amaze me how he always shows me the sign in the most unconventional ways. Even just a steady conversation. It could be something as that. I’ll give an example. I was at Urgent Care for a completely different matter, nothing related to do with the cancer.
[00:10:40] It was something completely different. I think I was sick with a common cold or something like that, and I was talking to the doctor on staff and she asked me about my medical history. And of course the first thing that comes up always is I have metastatic breast cancer. And she said to me. Have you ever considered going to this particular doctor?
[00:11:01] And I said, well, what’s the doctor’s name? And she said, my current doctor’s name.
[00:11:07] Adam Walker: Ha.
[00:11:07] Lea Leach: And I was like..
[00:11:08] Adam Walker: Wow.
[00:11:09] Lea Leach: That’s not weird. That doesn’t happen in real life. Yeah.
[00:11:12] Adam Walker: Of all the doctors.
[00:11:13] Lea Leach: Yeah. Of all the doctors.
[00:11:15] Adam Walker: Yeah.
[00:11:15] Lea Leach: Fast forward a week later, I went to my gastro doctor again, completely unrelated to my first appointment.
[00:11:22] I’m talking to my gastro doctor and I’m telling her how unpleased I am with my medical oncologist at the time, and she says my doctor’s name again.
[00:11:33] Adam Walker: Wow. The new doctor’s name.
[00:11:35] Lea Leach: New doctor’s.
[00:11:35] Adam Walker: Yeah. Yeah. Right, right. Okay.
[00:11:36] Lea Leach: So now this is a second person that’s saying this doctor’s name again. Fast forward a week later, I’m having a conversation with my wife’s cousin who’s in the medical field.
[00:11:47] Again, we’re just having generalized conversation and she mentions the same doctor again. So three times I hear the doctor’s name within a three week time span. That’s not coincidence. That cannot be coincidence. So I use my faith as the driving force in every decision that I make. I always pray, I am always intentional about, before I make a move and do things in haste, I want to make sure that I’m doing this in honoring space, that this is what God is telling me to do.
[00:12:18] And thankfully it’s served me right every single time. So I’m grateful for it in that way.
[00:12:24] Adam Walker: I’m so glad. I’m so glad. So let’s talk a little bit about advocacy. We talked about it earlier but about your own advocacy for yourself. But why is it so important for women to speak up for themselves in generally, and why is advocacy, particularly for women of color, become so important to you?
[00:12:42] Lea Leach: Oh my gosh. Advocacy has been something that has driven me the last three years. The reason is because there are so many women that I have spoken to talk to along this journey. When they first get diagnosed, they don’t know where to go. They don’t know what to ask for. They don’t know what to say to their doctor.
[00:13:01] They’re letting their doctor lead the way, and they’re trusting that their doctor is actually doing what’s beneficial for them. Sometimes some doctors are doing that. Sometimes doctors are not doing that. And I have made it a point to help women to be able to ask the appropriate questions, to ask the questions that they wouldn’t know to ask if they didn’t have someone kind of leading the way.
[00:13:27] I to think of myself as a mentor and it doesn’t make a difference if the woman is 50 years old or she’s 30 years old. Like I give the same, I think wealth of knowledge across the board. The other thing is things are not always told to us. And sometimes you have to do this thing by trial and error.
[00:13:45] And what I’ve realized along that journey is time is of the essence. You can’t do this particular disease by trial and error. You don’t have that kind of time a lot of times because you’re already staged four immediately and you don’t even know what diagnoses is under that stage four. because there’s lots of diagnoses under stage four too.
[00:14:09] So being an advocate for someone else benefits them to be able to know, okay, these are the things I need to be asking for. These are the things that I know I need to do. And another part of that is women of color, I’ll speak for me. I was that person before I got diagnosed. We don’t like to complain.
[00:14:27] We don’t like to tell people when we’re hurting and when we’re struggling. We just don’t. We just struggle and suffer in silence. But what that ends up looking like is a lot of times we get diagnosed too late and we really can’t go and get what we need to get out of that. I’ve seen that countless of times of young women who have died of this disease that did not need to die of this disease because of their pride.
[00:14:50] Adam Walker: Yeah. Yeah. I’m glad you shared that. So, Lea, last question. What’s it like living with MBC and how do you choose to live your life now?
[00:15:04] Lea Leach: Yeah, so living with MBC, it’s ebbs and flows. It’s good and bad. It’s ugly and pretty. It’s all the things. I kind of compare it to parenthood because I’m a parent.
[00:15:19] There are days where you know, your kid is doing everything right, like they’re the perfect child, and then the next day you’re like. Like you, you want to jump off of a cliff?
[00:15:31] Adam Walker: I don’t know what you mean. What do you mean by that?
[00:15:33] Lea Leach: Listen, it’s rough and like, if we’re all honest about that, like we all need to get honest about that.
[00:15:39] Sometimes we love our kids, but sometimes we just really want to throw them off of a cliff. And so there’s ebbs and flows. There are days when I wake up and I’m completely joyful. There are days when I wake up and I’m saddened. But what I’ve learned to do is lend space for all the feelings, no matter how it is, no matter how ugly it gets, no matter how happy it is.
[00:16:04] I just lend space for all the feelings. And I talk to God a lot. I journal a lot. I chronicle a lot. So living with MBC has led me to a space to be able to chronicalize how I feel and to be able to share that with others. But I also live my life. I love dancing with my kids. I love going out with my wife for, you know, our,
[00:16:28] our date times where we have wine and we have Friday dates, like that’s what we do. We’re kind of corny that way. But I live my life. I don’t try to think about the end game. I don’t try to think about what my life will be a year from now, two years from now, I live day to day. And what I’ve noticed is when I do that, I feel more joyful versus thinking about, oh, I, this thing could take me out.
[00:16:54] It could take me out today. It could take me out tomorrow. I don’t want to live that way. I choose to live in joy, and that’s what I want to do.
[00:17:01] Adam Walker: Lea, I love your perspective on life, love your approach thankful for your advocacy and for you just sharing your story and your life with us in this interview.
[00:17:12] And we’ll have to have you back. I really appreciate it. Thank you for joining us on the show today.
[00:17:17] Lea Leach: Absolutely. And thank you, Adam, for having me. And shout out to Susan G Komen and the Pink podcast. Y’all are doing great things for us. So thank you for having me have a space to be able to share my story with someone else.
[00:17:37] 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.