Mom diagnosed with breast cancer at 37 gets tattoo celebrating chemotherapy

After a bruise on her breast didn’t heal, Jenna Beyersdorf visited her doctor, who became concerned about a lump she felt. Tests revealed that Beyersdorf had triple negative breast cancer, a surprising diagnosis because she was only 37 and had no family history of breast cancer. Instead of focusing on the negatives and the hardship, Beyersdorf focused on the positives, such as her successful chemotherapy treatment. To celebrate, she wanted to get a tattoo. But a pink ribbon wasn’t her style.

“I wanted to the molecular formulas of my chemotherapies to put that on my arm as a constant reminder of ‘I’m a fighter, but without modern medicine I wouldn’t be here,'” Beyersdorf, 39, a nurse from Colorado, tells TODAY.com. “People always tend to look at chemo negatively for the side effects, and sometimes people don’t have successful chemo (treatment). For me, I’m an example that all that hard chemo … (did) everything I needed it to do.”

A bruise that never went away

In the fall of 2021, Beyersdorf and her son, Chadwick, then 4, were playing and he sent his monster truck off a ramp, and it careened into her right side.

“I was like, ‘Oh that hurt a lot more than it should have,’” she recalls. “I just wrote it off.” About a week later, she noticed she didn’t fit into her bra anymore and wondered if she had gained weight. The underwire also caused her pain so she decided to wear sports bras instead.

“Not long after that, my breast started turning almost like a bruise,” Beyersdorf says.

She scheduled a telehealth appointment with her primary care physician, who reassured her that the pain and discoloration were probably from the truck accident.

“They were like, ‘You had a little trauma to the area. It’s probably a cyst or you have a little ... bruise,’” she says. “We left it at that.”

But then she says she started developing “little bumps,” so she called her doctor back and she went in for an appointment. The doctor still thought it was harmless until she performed a breast exam and felt the spot.

“She kept poking at it,” Beyersdorf says. “She got this concerned look and she’s like, “OK, well sit up,’ and she’s like, 'I don’t like that. I don’t like how it feels. It doesn’t feel like a cyst, it just feels like a hard mass.’”

Beyersdorf went for a mammogram and then an ultrasound. After about 45 minutes, the tech left the room and returned with the radiologist, who told her that he didn’t “like how that looks.”

“He’s like, I’m pretty sure it’s probably a breast cancer,’” she says.

A biopsy confirmed that she had an invasive ductal carcinoma that was triple negative and stage 3.

“It was a 4.5 centimeter mass that was sitting above my pectoral muscle,” she says. “I didn’t have any lymph node invasion.”

Triple negative breast cancer means it doesn’t have any estrogen or progesterone receptors and also does not produce HER2 proteins, according to the American Cancer Society. Triple negative breast cancers don’t have as many treatments as other breast cancers and doctors rely on chemotherapy to treat it.

“It’s a very aggressive cancer that has a pretty high recurrence rate. And being triple negative takes a lot of options off the table,” Beyersdorf says.

She started chemotherapy immediately, which went until May 2022. In July 2022, she had a lumpectomy and started radiation in August 2022, which she completed last fall. Then she started a “mop up,” treatment, a pill to make sure that all the cancer is gone. Between the end of radiation and the start of her chemotherapy pill, she had a brief window of time to get a tattoo.

“I wanted to express that I had cancer, but I didn’t want to put a pink ribbon on me,” she says. “I wanted to do the molecular formulas as a humbling reminder that I’m not the only one fighting.  (The formulas) that are tattooed on me also treat other cancers.”

Gratitude for science and appreciating every day

The chemotherapy formulas she had tattooed on her arm include, taxol, carboplatin, Keytruda, Cytoxan, doxorubicin and xeloda. Beyersdorf received each of these to treat her breast cancer, and she feels overwhelming happy that they exist.

“A lot of times chemo gets a really bad rap. … Not only is it saving us, it also can make us really sick. I was hospitalized for sepsis twice just because of a low white blood cell count,” she says. “When we run a fever, it’s not like, ‘Oh I’m going to take a couple ibuprofen and be fine.’ It can be life or death.”

Beyersdorf gained about 40 pounds from the steroids that help with treatment and needs to undergo regular echocardiograms to make sure her heart remains healthy. Still, she feels indebted to her treatments.

“I’m so grateful and I’m so thankful,” she says. “There is so much negativity because we feel like garbage and people want to speak about it and have support about it. Yeah, it really is a crappy, crappy journey, and I wouldn't wish it on nobody, but without chemotherapy, we would die a lot sooner.”

She’s returned to work as a nurse, and while she doesn’t treat cancer patients, people often ask about her tattoos and share their experiences with cancer.

“When I’m outside, I tend to look at things more, take deeper breaths. I appreciate life and the little things I took for granted. I enjoy being able to play with my son,” Beyersdorf says. “Now, I’m like, I’m exhausted, but ... I’m going to enjoy every waking moment that I have.’”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com