Doris Molleca is a nurse who had a long list of illnesses she never wanted to have. Breast cancer wasn’t even on that list because, with little family history of the disease, she felt she had little reason to fear it.

Nonetheless, her annual mammography in February 2005 at Pottstown Memorial Medical Center revealed a mass. A biopsy the next month confirmed she had breast cancer.

Over the next year, Doris received treatment at Pottstown Memorial Regional Cancer Center and Pottstown Treatment and Scanning Center. Now Doris is in remission.

“The staff in all the specialized areas know how to do their jobs and they also go the extra mile to help each individual patient feel very special,” Doris said. “I feel blessed they know as much as they do so they could do what they did. The working together of disciplines is amazing.”

Doris’s care involved caring and knowledgeable staff and several state-of-the-art treatments.

Among them was a Mammotome® biopsy, which is a breast biopsy that is guided by ultrasound. Within two days of the biopsy, Doris had a breast cancer diagnosis.

That diagnosis was followed quickly by a lumpectomy and sentinel lymph node dissection. For the lumpectomy, a radiologist inserted a thin gauge wire through the center of the tumor, then a surgeon followed the wire and removed the cancer. In the sentinel lymph node dissection, radioactive dye pinpoints lymph nodes that the tumor drains into so those nodes can be removed to test for cancer. Two to five nodes are removed, whereas up to 20 nodes may have been removed from a breast cancer patient as little as five years ago, according to Edith Behr, MD, a breast surgeon at Pottstown Memorial Medical Center. Removing only targeted nodes reduces trauma to the underarm and the potential for nerve damage and arm swelling. Also, no drain is needed.

Lumpectomies themselves are a progression in treatment, Dr. Behr said.

“The majority of patients get lumpectomies,” she said. “We’re trending to less and less surgery. We spare the breast as much as we can.”

Another state-of-the-art treatment allows the surgeon doing a biopsy to remove the tumor entirely by using a large bore needle rather than by making a larger incision and removing a wedge of tissue. It’s less invasive and, therefore, requires less recovery time.

“It makes a woman more likely to do something about it,” Dr. Behr said.

A few days after her lumpectomy, Doris returned to the operating room to have a wider margin of tissue removed from the area where the tumor had been and to have a port inserted for chemotherapy. A variety of scans and blood tests followed. Then Doris had chemotherapy followed by radiation treatments. The radiation treatments, known by the acronym IMRT, are progressive in that the radiation is targeted narrowly at the cancer-affected areas.

Even one of Doris’s caregivers, Kathy McGonigal, holds a position that’s a recent addition to breast cancer care. Ms. McGonigal, an oncology certified nurse, is Pottstown Memorial Medical Center’s breast care coordinator. She’s been helping women with abnormal mammograms since the breast care coordinator role was created five years ago.

Ms. McGonigal’s job is to guide patients through treatment at the center, beginning with an abnormal mammogram or ultrasound.

“If the radiologist recommends a breast biopsy after a mammogram or breast ultrasound, I meet the patient in the radiology department and explain exactly what is going on. I try to allay her fears. Eighty percent of those who have abnormal breast screenings will not have breast cancer,” Ms. McGonigal said.

Once a patient does have a diagnosis of breast cancer, Ms. McGonigal tries to see every woman the day of surgery. She is always present for their first visit with the medical or radiation oncologist and otherwise keeps tabs on them as treatment progresses.

“I give them the support they need,” Ms. McGonigal explained. “I listen to what they say. I call a lot in the beginning. As they get into their treatment, they begin to rely on other nurses.”

Ms. McGonigal also follows the paperwork through the treatment process “to actually save [the patients] the anxiety of being caught up in red tape.”

Pottstown Memorial Medical Center enlists all the latest advancements available for the treatment of breast cancer, according to Dr. Behr, who adds that new treatment options are on the horizon, including biological drugs that may one day make the disease a chronic, rather than a life-threatening, illness, and gene typing that delineates which tumors are higher risk.

“We would like to get to the point where people don’t get cancer anymore,” Dr. Behr said.