Young breast cancer survivor: Chemo Friday, back to work Saturday

It was just an ordinary September day, a year ago, and Tylithia Burks was home from her night shift as a nuclear pharmacist, vegging out on the couch. Somebody on TV was talking about breast self-examination. Even though she was only 33, not knowing of any family history of the disease, Burks decided self-examination was a good idea. She found a lump.

"Had I not done the exam, I would never have found it," she says now. "It could have been six months or a year." What happened after that discovery offers a look at the new face of breast-cancer treatment. Instead of immediate surgery, Burks embarked on a 16-round course of chemotherapy to reduce the size of the tumor. And instead of feeling sorry for herself, Burks went indoor skydiving at iFLY and posed for a set of glamour shots.

Over the five months, the chemo shrank the tumor from 3 centimeters to 4 millimeters. Burks worked her night shift at Triad Isotopes through the whole thing. Some nights, it was hard. "My co-workers knew," Burks says, "and they looked out for me." Enter Dr. Tejal Patel, Burks' doctor and a breast medical oncologist at the Houston Methodist Cancer Center. She doesn't think patients need to put their lives on pause for cancer. "There's not a lot out there about patients who do wonderfully," she says. "We can control the side effects, and it doesn't have to take away your life." For Burks, who is naturally bright-eyed and ebullient, keeping her life as routine as possible was the goal. "The thing is, prior to starting, I told myself I wanted to work and do other normal things, not just have cancer," she says. "I did it for normalcy." 

If she had chemo on a Friday, she was back to work on Saturday night. Burks also drew on her network of friends and fellow church members - she had people to take her to chemo, people to get food to her, people to pray for her. Burks' mother died of lung cancer in March 2008. "She tried to be private and keep it to herself," she says. "I'm very private, but this was not a time to do that." Because chemo can play havoc with a woman's reproductive organs, Burks' friends ran a GoFundMe crowd-funding campaign to raise money to freeze her eggs.

Burks, who is single, likes to joke that her children are on ice for now. She had her mastectomy in April and her reconstructive surgery in September. No cancer was found in her lymph nodes, and she has about a 15 percent chance of recurrence. She does not have the BRCA mutations that can be a signal for cancer. "Everyone has life happen to them," Burks says. "If you let it take you down, what are you living for?" Breast cancer in young women is relatively uncommon.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, only about 11 percent of new breast cancers are discovered in women younger than 45. Patel, who likes to point out that there are now 15.5 million survivors of breast cancer, says the new supportive treatments that make chemo more bearable work for patients at any age. "That's my goal," she says, "not to have to live in a bubble, but to work, go to church and go shopping." But care has to be ongoing, says Patel, because anxiety can surface, along with hot flashes and nerve pain. Fatigue, sexual dysfunction and, of course, financial worries can afflict survivors. Burks, who grew up in Killeen, the daughter of a career Army father, sees unusual symmetry between her cancer and her mother's.

Both were diagnosed in September. Her mother died in March; she finished chemo in March. She is looking forward to getting a tattoo of two ribbons: one white, for lung cancer; and one pink, for breast cancer. Right now, in memory of her Korean mother, she has a small tattoo of the Korean character for strength on the back of her neck. Burks is upbeat. "It's not the end of the world. You can beat it and have a normal life," she says. "Don't let it change you."