Carla Bossart-Pletzer shares her personal connection to cancer research as part of OICR’s ‘Cancer Research Changed My Life‘ campaign.
Cancer research has fundamentally meant the difference between me seeing 40 years old and not seeing 40 years old.
I’m a mom of two small kids. I have a daughter who is six and a son who is nine. At the time I was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer in 2022, my kids were little and I was facing a really challenging situation. My surgeon said to me that if everything went perfectly, she’d give me a 70 per cent chance at being here in five years.
If it had been five years earlier though, she and I would have been having a very different conversation. My diagnosis was not nearly as survivable back then.
Cancer research has changed the kind of treatments that are available, and the way they approach breast cancers, specifically with neoadjuvant chemotherapy. In my case, some of the cancer treatments available to me were different than they were five years earlier.
And research has kept evolving since then. We’ve added immunotherapy to the mix, for example. We’re also enabling personalized medicine approaches – which is really cool.
In my work as a patient partner, researchers tell me they enjoy hearing my story because it’s a story of survival. It shows that research is helping move the needle.
It’s hard to put into words, but cancer research changed my life because without cancer research, I would not have a life to be talking about right now.
Carla Bossart-Pletzer is a mother of two small children and a freelance designer and illustrator. She was diagnosed with stage-III, triple negative, inflammatory breast cancer at age 34. She is focused on communicating the challenges of early adult cancer and the long-term health consequences of both life-saving and prophylactic treatments as a carrier of BRCA1, MSH-6 and ATM genetic mutations. Located in Sudbury, she advocates for expedient and socially equitable cancer diagnoses and treatment for patients of Northeastern Ontario.