When Kannie Yu LaPack turned 40 in July 2019, she made an appointment to get her first mammogram, just as her doctor had recommended. Not one to waste time, Kannie underwent screening a few weeks after celebrating her birthday. She wasn’t worried about what the mammogram might show, not even when her doctor asked her to come back for a follow-up screening.
“I really thought it was nothing,” she said. “I’d had lumps in my breasts when I was in college, but they turned out to be benign fibroadenomas. I figured this was more of the same.”
Kannie quickly realized it wasn’t when, shortly after her follow-up screening, her doctor called and asked her to come to her office instead of sharing the results over the phone. That’s not a good sign, she thought. At the appointment, her suspicions were confirmed: She had breast cancer. She was stunned.
The diagnosis was surreal, in part because Kannie, who is executive vice president of publicity, public affairs, and social media for longtime BCRF Lifetime and A+E Studios, was in the middle of developing materials for the 25th anniversary of the network’s Stop Breast Cancer for Life public service initiative.
Oh my God, now I’m the one with breast cancer, she thought.
Once the shock wore off, Kannie took action, quickly getting in to see her surgeon and get a second opinion. There was some good news: The cancer had been caught at an early stage and hadn’t spread beyond her breast. And it was triple-positive, so her doctors had several targeted treatments at their disposal.
Still, Kannie was worried, especially about how she could shield her kids from her illness. At that point, she and her husband, Landon, were still struggling to find a way to tell their children, Logan (then 8) and Kaiya (then 4) that she had breast cancer. Maybe we don’t need to tell them anything, she thought. Maybe she would only need a lumpectomy and could avoid chemotherapy.
But when she met with met with her surgeon, she learned there would be no hiding the disease. Neoadjuvant (pre-surgery) chemotherapy to shrink the tumor followed by a double mastectomy was a better approach, the surgeon said. It was then that Kannie had her first good cry. She and her husband would have to break the news to her children.
It was painful experience. Logan teared up and asked her if she was going to die. Kaiya’s reaction was even more heartbreaking.
“She wouldn’t even touch me, wouldn’t want to hug me, nothing,” Kannie said. “She thought she was going to catch the cancer.”
In October 2019, Kannie began chemotherapy. Even though the treatments were, in her words, “a grueling slog,” she wanted her life to remain as normal as possible. Luckily, the side effects were tolerable, which allowed her to continue exercising and participating in her kids’ activities. Even when she started losing her hair, she tried to remain positive (“’Woe is me’ is not my vibe”), and found she loved wearing wigs. Her children, now less afraid of the situation, had a blast trying them on, she recalled.
Kannie even kept going to work—a choice that mystified her coworkers. “I explained that if stayed at home, I was going to think about having cancer,” she said. “But if I work, I don’t think about it.
Scans taken midway through chemo showed that her tumor had shrunk considerably, and she was able to stop chemotherapy in February 2019. Surgery was scheduled for the following month. In the meantime, she and her family went on a much-needed vacation to Hawaii. This was around the time that the media started to report on the appearance of a new virus, COVID-19. At first, no one was sure what to think, but concern quickly grew. By the time the family was due to return home, fear was palpable. On the day of their departure, Kannie watched as people frantically bought hand sanitizer at the airport shops. She’d stocked up herself earlier in the trip.
Already nervous about her upcoming surgery, she was now more frightened than ever, especially when she learned that one of the first Americans to get COVID was being treated at the same hospital where her mastectomy was scheduled.
“We were all pretty freaked out about everything,” she said. “But it was a necessary surgery, so I had to get it done.”
On the day of her mastectomy, Kannie entered the hospital at 5 a.m. with no friends or family at her side, as was common especially in the pandemic’s earliest days. When she awoke from surgery, the pain was intense, and other than the nurses, she was all alone. But not for long. Prior to the operation, her surgeon had told her something shocking.
“You’re not staying at the hospital,” the surgeon said. “You’re going home the same day. There’s no recovering here because of the pandemic.”
Kannie was horrified. “I don’t want to go home. Don’t push me to go home,” she begged the nurses when she awoke from surgery.
But she had no choice. She could tell that the staff were scared for their patients—and themselves. People were dying of COVID, and staying in the hospital would increase her chances of getting exposed. So even though she was vomiting repeatedly from a bad reaction to the anesthesia, Kannie left the hospital that evening.
The kids were thrilled to see her so soon, even though they cried at first when they saw how sick and tired she was. The first few days following surgery were rough, but she felt better as the anesthesia wore off. The support from Landon, her “angel nurse,” was critical for her recovery: “He made sure I had everything I needed.”
Kannie’s breast cancer journey wasn’t over, however. She still had to finish a year of Herceptin treatments—a lonely experience now that her friends and family couldn’t come to the infusions with her due to the pandemic—and she also began a 5-year course of Lupron, an estrogen-suppressing medication that helps prevent early-stage, hormone receptor-positive breast cancer like hers from recurring.
Five years after her diagnosis, Kannie feels like she has her life back—and she’s incredibly grateful to the research that provided her with so many treatment options. “BCRF supported the early clinical trials that sped the development of Herceptin,” she said. “It’s amazing to me that my treatment was possible because of the researchers they fund. I’m still here because of it.”
Kannie hopes that one day, no one will have to know the fear and pain of having breast cancer.
“The more research there is, the more possibility there is to figure out why breast cancer even happens, and maybe we can eradicate it at some point,” she said. “There are so many new drugs in the pipeline, including vaccines that could prevent breast cancer. It’s incredible.”
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