Peace of mind hard to come by after breast cancer

Shiela Burns looked like she didn’t have a care in the world. She greeted me at the door of her northwest Las Vegas home with an infectious smile and talk about a beautiful day.

Pretty soon we’re laughing about how she and husband Tim — he owns a construction company — decided on the spur of the moment recently to fly to San Francisco to watch a baseball playoff game between the Giants and the Chicago Cubs.

We’re just two people having a good time shootin’ the breeze on a Chamber of Commerce day — who wouldn’t feel good when it’s 85 degrees with high sunlit clouds drifting across a clear blue sky?

And then I had to get around to why we were getting together.

The last time I saw the mother of two grown children was in August 2013. She was wheeled into a Sunrise Medical Center operating room to have a double mastectomy. Though she had a cancerous tumor removed from her breast six months earlier, every test since that time had showed she didn’t have cancer in either breast.

The surgery on that day was done at her request, to help quell her fear she’d die of breast cancer like her twin sister did in 2011. Research showed such surgery reduces the risk of breast cancer by more than 95 percent.

I visited Burns, 49, on Wednesday, hoping to hear she has more peace of mind. She kinda does. “I still have that fear but it’s back here,” she said, solemn as she pointed at the back of her head. “Every six months when they take blood, I get nervous. Once I asked if I could have cancer growing in me even though it didn’t show up in my blood. They said yes. … That worries me.”

Since Breast Cancer Awareness