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Joanie Abdu Center helps patient through dense fog of breast-cancer treatment
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Krissie Moore didn’t need a fancy machine to tell her something was wrong. But it did take state-of-the-art imaging equipment to formally diagnose her with breast cancer.
Moore was two months removed from her most recent mammogram – performed at her gynecologist’s office. And at age 43 in 2014, it came back negative, the same as it had every year she’d had it done since age 30.
As she was showering before an event at her son’s school, her arm grazed across her chest and she felt something concerning.
“It wasn’t a lump like people think; it was more like a worm,” she recalled. “It was kind of like if there was a hot dog underneath your skin. It just didn’t feel right, and I didn’t remember feeling it there before.”
A quick trip back to her doctor resulted in a referral to get it looked at further. Moore chose to go to the Joanie Abdu Comprehensive Breast Care Center for a 3D mammogram.
At that initial visit, the technician put her films from two months ago on the screen and she could see the tumor. Her doctor’s office had missed it, she said.
“What some women don’t understand is when you go to your gynecologist’s office they might not have the latest equipment,” Moore said. “Mine was originally done with 2D mammography and those are more difficult to read. Had I had the 3D mammogram back in March they probably would have caught it then.”
By the time it was caught, it had already aggressively started to spread, she said.
Krista, the Joanie Abdu technician, performed an ultrasound and confirmed the existence of a large mass. She scheduled a biopsy for that same day.
Joanie Abdu staffers Krista and Jill sat down with her and held her hand and said, “We don’t feel comfortable with you leaving here before we do a biopsy,” Moore recalled.
“It wasn’t ‘Let’s find out if this is cancer or not,’ it was ‘Let’s see what kind of cancer this is so we can figure out a plan and start fighting it,” Moore said.
The biopsy results were rushed through and she learned her formal diagnosis just four days later.
“It’s like being punched in the gut,” she said. “My husband and I lost it. We were a mess. But when Jill said ‘I wouldn’t be able to do this job if I lost all of my patients,’ it gave us hope.”
Over the next 15 months, Moore would receive an aggressive chemotherapy and radiation treatment cycle overseen by Mercy Health’s Dr. Nancy Gantt and Dr. Ayla Kessler. She also had a double mastectomy with reconstruction.
“For that next year I felt like I was walking in the densest fog, the kind of fog where you can’t even see your hand in front of your face,” she said. “But I knew I had to keep walking, and I knew someday I was going to see light through that fog.”
Today she’s more than three years cancer-free.
“At Joanie Abdu I don’t think you can be in better hands,” Moore said. “I’m so thankful this is right in our backyard in Youngstown, Ohio. People travel all over the world to get the kind of care we get right here.”