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Hot Springs nurse diagnosed with breast cancer months before wedding
Kristin Dunn, 31, of Hot Springs is a highly organized woman. Her planner holds a year’s worth of vacations and school activities. She has been working as a labor-and-delivery nurse at CHI St.Vincent Hot Springs for nine years and plans to complete her Doctor of Nursing Practice degree online through the University of Tennessee in Memphis next May. She was busier than ever in October 2016, when she was planning her wedding to James Dunn to take place that December. What Kristin did not plan on, however, was finding a breast lump just months before the big day. “It definitely wasn’t my plan,” she said. “God’s plan is his own, and it’s not yours.” At the time, Kristin was working at a family-practice clinic as part of the clinical rotations for her doctorate program. She had performed two breast exams on patients that day, she said, and when she got home, she decided to conduct a breast self-exam while waiting for the water to warm up in her shower. “I didn’t end up taking a shower,” she said. After finding a pea-sized lump on her left breast, she called her mother, a registered nurse at the CHI St.Vincent Surgery Clinic in Hot Springs, who arranged for Kristin to visit the hospital’s breast center the following day. Doctors performed an ultrasound, a mammogram and a biopsy, she said, then called her the next day with a diagnosis. She had stage 1 breast cancer. “The first thing I thought was we had to get it taken out immediately,” she said, adding that she decided to have a bilateral mastectomy, rather than a lumpectomy, because she had a family history of breast cancer and did not want the cancer to return later. “I knew I had to have surgery and recover before my wedding because I didn’t want to wait until after my wedding,” she said.“I wanted it to be out of my body.” The first week of November, Dr. James Hagans, a breast-surgery specialist at Baptist Health in Little Rock, performed the mastectomy. During the same operation, Dr. David Bauer, a plastic surgeon at Arkansas Plastic Surgery in Little Rock, inserted chest expanders to begin the breast-reconstruction process. The expanders stretched Kristin’s skin in preparation for implants, and she had to have weekly saline injections during the six weeks leading up to her wedding. She said the process was not only uncomfortable, but nearly upended her wedding plans. She had her dress altered before the expansion process was completed, and when she tried on her gown the night before the wedding, it did not fit. “I just started bawling,” she said. “My seamstress was altering my dress the night before the wedding, this ginormous wedding we were having with all these people.” Despite the snag, the Christmas-themed wedding that Kristin, her mother and their wedding planner had been working on for eight months finally came together Dec. 17, 2016. She and James were married at First Baptist Hot Springs, where both their families attend church, and celebrated with a reception at Hotel Hot Springs. “It was the best day of my life,” she said. “It was so beautiful.” Having cancer changed her wedding-day priorities, she said, adding that the little details that often concern brides did not seem to matter anymore. “My wedding was still the most important thing to me,” she said, “but I really focused on different things than I normally would have if I wouldn’t have had breast cancer, like enjoying myself and being with my family and marrying my best friend.” Kristin’s honeymoon plans would have to wait, however. During the mastectomy, doctors removed four lymph nodes, one of which contained cancer cells, so she had to have chemotherapy treatments to ensure that she was cancer-free. She said she waited until after the wedding to begin treatment so she would still have hair on her big day, and sure enough, she lost her hair on the 14th day of treatment. The treatments also caused anaphylaxis, an allergic reaction that left her feeling terribly sick. Because her husband’s work as a firefighter prevented him from joining her for every treatment, she said her father took time off work to be by her side throughout her recovery. “He’s not a medical person by any means, like my mom is, so he just kind of held my hand,” she said. “My mom was there to help me change my bandages and do all the medical stuff, and to be my mom, and my husband was there, emotionally supportive, for me.” She had two more surgeries in Little Rock to finish her reconstruction, and because her tumor was the type that grew in response to estrogen and progesterone, she began taking tamoxifen, an oral hormone-therapy drug, after she finished chemotherapy. Although most patients take tamoxifen for five to 10 years, Kristin said she only took the drug for six months because she and James planned to start a family. Doctors advised her to wait a year after chemotherapy before becoming pregnant, she said, and she also waited for six months after finishing the tamoxifen. The couple visited a fertility specialist to explore the possibility of freezing her eggs and implanting them later, Kristin added, but the procedure was expensive, and there was no guarantee it would work. “My husband and I — my whole family — we’re very strong Christians,” she said. “We prayed and prayed and asked God, whatever his will was, that it be done.” By February 2018, Kristin’s hair was growing back, and she and James finally honeymooned in the Dominican Republic. A few weeks later, she found out she was pregnant. Her baby girl is due in late November. “It was the miracle baby,” Kristin said. “We’re very proud.” Since she ended her tamoxifen regimen early, she said she visits her oncologist every two months, instead of every three or four months, to ensure that the tumor markers in her blood are low. She plans to continue taking tamoxifen one month after she gives birth, she added. She said her experience strengthened her Christian faith and taught her an important lesson about relinquishing control. “It really makes you give all your worries to God because you have no control over anything,” she said. “The only thing you have control over is your attitude and how you handle it.” She added that she hopes her story will encourage all women to perform monthly breast self-exams, noting that she had passed a breast exam with her doctor just a few months before she found the lump.
“I wish I could do breast exams on everybody, but everyone needs to do the exams themselves because you’ll find it,” she said. “You know what wasn’t there the month before.” If a woman does find a lump, she should seek medical attention as soon as possible, Kristin added. “You have to be super tough right then,” she said. “You can’t be scared to go to the doctor and go ahead and schedule your appointments or chemo. The sooner and quicker you get treatments or interventions taken care of, the sooner you can grow your hair back.”