Toms River Nurse Fighting Breast Cancer Urges Women To Push For MRIs
TOMS RIVER, NJ — Like most new moms, Kristi Halpin was tired all the time. She thought the exhaustion was just part of motherhood.
She had lost weight but didn’t think about it because she was glad to be rid of the pounds she gained during her pregnancy. Recent back pain had surfaced but she chalked it up to having strained something picking up her growing son, Caiden, who just turned 1.
Then one morning in late September, Kristi was getting in the shower when she noticed something was wrong with one of her breasts and did a self-exam.
Find out what's happening in Toms Riverwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
“I felt a pretty big-size lump,” Kristi, 32, said in a phone interview. The discovery was a big surprise as she had undergone a mammogram in February that showed nothing.
Kristi called her doctor, who ordered a mammogram and an ultrasound. The results were mystifying: the lump wasn’t visible. But her doctor could feel it and ordered an MRI, which allowed her doctor to locate the lump for a biopsy.
Find out what's happening in Toms Riverwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
The biopsy was the day before Caiden’s birthday. On Oct. 13, life turned upside down for her, Caiden and her husband, Brendan: The biopsy showed the lump was malignant.
Kristi was diagnosed with metastatic interlobular breast cancer, which grows in the lobes instead of the ducts. It had likely been growing for at least six months to a year, she said.
“It isn’t that it was misdiagnosed,” she said, noting that because the cancer develops in the lobes, it makes it much more difficult to detect. Halpin said the radiologist told her AI programs have been used to examine mammogram images and have been unable to pick up interlobular cancer as well.
The irony, Kristi said, is she had dense tissue in her other breast examined more closely following her February mammogram, and that came back normal.
Her cancer is at Stage 4 as it has metastasized, spreading to her other breast, her spine, her sternum and multiple ribs.
“Once it’s at Stage 4 it is treatable but not curable,” said Kristi, who is a nurse at a surgery center. “They look at it (metastatic breast cancer) as more of a chronic illness.”
How long she will be able to keep it as a chronic illness is anyone’s guess, but Kristi said she and her doctors have moved quickly to begin treatments. The cancer is hormone-driven, so she is being treated with hormone blockers to halt the production of estrogen.
She also is being treated with radiation to her spine, because the cancer has caused tiny holes in her spine that led to a compression fracture.
“They try the least-toxic treatments first,” Kristi said.
The battle is hard in many ways. Because of the pain in her spine, Kristi is unable to pick Caiden up. Brendan, a firefighter and EMT, has taken off from work to be home to help her.
“He has been my rock,” she said.
“I’m not one to sit on the couch and do nothing,” said Kristi, who was an emergency room nurse at Community Medical Center but left there just before the pandemic to work for a surgery center.
“Nurses are the worst patients,” she said.
The cancer also changed the plans she and Brendan had for their future. With Caiden turning 1, they were discussing trying to have another child.
“We wanted to get started soon because I had trouble getting pregnant with Caiden,” Kristi said, adding she had a miscarriage before he was born.
Because her cancer is hormone-driven, the couple shelved those plans and decided against trying to harvest some of her eggs to freeze them for a potential pregnancy down the line. Harvesting eggs would have required hormone shots to cause them to ripen faster. It was a risk she and Brendan were not willing to take.
“It’s not safe for me to delay treatment,” Kristi said. “My husband said he wants me to be here as long as possible. I don’t want to waste any time.”
Kristi said she has been buoyed by an outpouring of support from family and friends. Family members have pitched in to help with Caiden, and friends have been making meals to take pressure off Brendan and planning fundraisers to help with the expenses.
One of those fundraisers is “Kristi’s Support Squad,” with a T-shirt being sold by her friend, Kate Daley, through Daley’s Etsy store Kate D and Company.
Kristi also has been chronicling her journey through a CaringBridge webpage.
She also has been sharing her story with friends and family members and urging all the women she knows to get their mammograms. More importantly, if they have dense tissue show up on their screenings, she is urging them to push for an MRI, which has a better chance of identifying the cancer.
Kristi said that message to be persistent about testing is even more important for young women, who are being diagnosed with breast cancer more and more often.
“The hard part is the insurance companies don’t automatically pay for the MRI,” she said. “But the cost of an MRI is so much less than a lifetime of radiation and expensive cancer treatments.”
Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.
Leave A Comment