Vanessa Rissetto’s first symptom of breast cancer was itching

When Vanessa Rissetto found out she had breast cancer last year, she sat in her car for four hours.

The registered dietitian and frequent nutrition expert on the TODAY Show had just dropped her kids off at the mall and was pulling into the garage when she got the call. “I sent them upstairs,” she recalled to TODAY.com. “And I just sat in the car and worried for about four hours.”

She called her husband to explain her absence. “I thought, ‘Hey, I have breast cancer.’ Please leave me alone. Bye.'”

She was eventually joined in the car by her best friend and cousin, and they remained by her side throughout her treatment.

When the four hours were up, Rissetto focused her thoughts. Next year she will quickly and carefully organize herself to try to get better. She was about to exhaust all the resources available in her network of fellow clinicians. She was going to ask as many questions as possible, to as many experts as she could turn to, to chart the most effective course.

She wasn’t going to waste a second that could be devoted to getting better. And so her work began.

Itching was the first sign that something was wrong

In the year leading up to her diagnosis, Rissetto knew something was wrong. Her chest was very itchy. “I knew itching could be a sign of cancer,” Rissetto shares, so she saw a doctor.

Her first mammogram was normal. And when the itching persisted, Rissetto returned and took more. Again, this was clear. A friend of a friend who worked at the institution examined her personally and recommended that she see a dermatologist. “Maybe it’s eczema,” he said.

The dermatologist prescribed her a steroid, but it didn’t help. For months afterward, Rissetto continued to excuse herself from events and summits where she was raising money for her company, rushing to the bathroom and scratching herself.

She eventually switched to a new primary care doctor, who sent her for her third mammogram. This time the radiologist noticed something.

Not such a surprising diagnosis

Three days after his third mammogram, Rissetto was called back because the radiologist found calcifications that required a biopsy. “It could be something, or it could be nothing,” the radiologist said.

Because her biopsy was performed on the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend, Rissetto didn’t expect to hear the results until next week. But she received a call the next day, May 26, 2023. Rissetto had stage 1A HER2 triple positive breast cancer. She was shocked, but not surprised.

“It’s kind of woo-woo, but I would wake up in the middle of the night, go to the bathroom, look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘I have cancer.’ And I felt crazy because everyone was saying, ‘You’re not doing this,’ but I knew something was wrong,” Rissetto says.

Thanks to another friend, Rissetto’s appointment with the surgeon was already scheduled for the following Friday at Mount Sinai.

“This is the most well-studied breast cancer, and the treatments are curative,” Rissetto recalled surgeon Dr. Christina Weltz telling her at her first appointment. She talked to Rissetto about her treatment options and explained that since she only had calcifications and no tumor, she would have surgery first, followed by chemotherapy and radiation.

Treatment plan that helped her

Although she was not opposed to this treatment plan, in the three weeks between her diagnosis and her scheduled surgery, Rissetto sought further opinions. It’s not that she didn’t trust her doctors: “I need to get the full picture,” Rissetto says.

She first went to another hospital, where the doctor gave her an aggressive and lengthy course of treatment. It was “pretty stressful,” Rissetto said, so she continued researching.

She needed a treatment plan that wouldn’t completely destroy the life she knew. She had only told a handful of people about it and wanted to keep it that way for now.

Her next stop was the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in New Jersey, where she spoke with an oncologist who, within two hours, outlined treatment options that would be most effective and least disruptive to Rissetto’s life—reminiscent of the original oncologist’s plan. at Mount Sinai, Dr. Amy Tiersten has already come up with.

Confident that she would receive the best possible treatment, Rissetto returned to Mount Sinai.

On June 14, 2023, Rissetto underwent her first surgery. When she woke up, doctors told her that the edges appeared clear, meaning there were no cancer cells left, and her lymph nodes were also free of cancer. “And then maybe a week later, my surgeon said the pathologist doesn’t like these margins and I need you to come back,” Rissetto says. So, on July 5th, she returned for re-excision surgery.

Then, on July 13, Rissetto began her first course of Kadcyla, a powerful chemotherapy prescribed by Tiersten that targeted Rissetto’s cancer and saved her hair. She received infusions every three weeks, followed by 16 courses of radiation. After a mammogram on Dec. 1, Rissetto’s doctors found no signs of cancer, and she completed treatment in April.

Fighting the new reality

Now that Rissetto is cancer-free, she lives a life very different from the one she always knew.

Her oncologist, Dr. Tiersten, continues to monitor her health. “Of course, we make sure she stays up to date on breast imaging results and other cancer screenings,” she told TODAY.com.

But although her physical health is good, Rissetto can’t seem to shake off the anxiety.

She maintained a brave face throughout the year. Appearance on the TODAY showcaring for her family and running her company after morning infusions she didn’t know about. And now that it was over, the burden of her illness remained. “I think there is always a low level of anxiety about the fact that I had cancer and that my body created cancer and maybe it will create cancer again. And it sucks,” admits Rissetto.

She does not smoke, does not drink alcohol, does not use drugs, and exercises daily. “I feel guilty if I don’t eat vegetables for lunch,” she says. And it still happened.

A life-changing diagnosis can sometimes give a person a new perspective. They begin to live each day as if it were their last, spending time with loved ones, taking risks that they would otherwise put off. And Rissetto did that to some extent. She says her diet has become more plant-based and she’s working on coping with stressors and saying “no” more often to prioritize her needs, but she continues to feel frustrated.

“Sometimes I have dinner with friends and I think, “Wow, they have peace of mind and freedom because they wake up in the morning and just think about how their kids didn’t clean their room.” , right?’ I mean, I know they have stressors, but they don’t have to think about mortality the way I do, and that’s very hard. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever get over this.”

Rissetto now struggles with the tension that cancer has left in its wake: the tension between her health, family, livelihood and legacy. When she was diagnosed, she remembers thinking, “(Less than) 100 Black women have ever raised over a million dollars in venture capital funding, and I’m one of them. I raised $25 million; I started a business. I have people who don’t usually believe in people like me, and I have a whole team of hundreds of employees, so what does that mean? Will everything really go to hell?

These thoughts still visit her every day.

IN Instagram post In which Rissetto went public with her diagnosis earlier this month, she wrote that cancer will never be in her rearview mirror, but she is hopeful about the future of medicine that will inform the rest of her life. While she doesn’t yet know what moving on entails, she knows there are lessons to be learned from her experience and staying silent hasn’t helped anyone. “Press your doctors,” Rissetto advises. “Get answers about your body.”

She is where she is today because she trusted her instincts when she felt something was wrong. She listened to her body and early detection saved her life.