Camille Mills recounts her experience with breast cancer and how she found the strength to successfully fight it.

Camille Mills had a feeling her diagnosis would be cancer. “I had two biopsies and had been told that I probably would not hear until the following Monday from the doctor,” she says. So she went to work and later that day got a call from her doctor who asked her to bring her husband to his office on their way home from work.

On November 20, 2008, Camille was diagnosed with Stage I non-aggressive ductal non-invasive carcinoma. The tumor was very small; less than one centimeter.  And, it was caught very early, thanks to her annual mammogram.

“The first thing I asked my doctor was, ‘Am I going to die?’” Camille says. “And he said, ‘no.’ Once I knew I was not going to die, that was very important to me.  I accepted it, I didn’t get angry, I didn’t say why me.   All I wanted to know was now what do we do to make it better.  And since I knew that it was small and I was not going to die, nothing else mattered.”

Taking charge

Camille immediately began reading up on breast cancer, on stages of breast cancer, and what it meant, as well as what tests and treatments she would likely receive; anything to give her an overview of what she was going to face. 

“Seattle Cancer Care Alliance sets you up with a team of doctors,” Camille says. “You get a radiation oncologist, a medical oncologist, and a surgeon.  And I thought about which doctors would make me most comfortable, and I decided I wanted all women.  And one of the ones they ’d given me was a man  and normally, I don’t have a problem with that, but with breast cancer it was really important for me to have women as my doctors, so I asked for a switch.  And I think that between the knowledge I was learning and my taking control of the doctors I was going to have, it made me feel in control of the situation so that I wasn’t feeling frightened, I was just ready to continue on with the next step.”

Treatment

Surgery was simple because of the small tumor size. Camille had a lumpectomy followed by radiation.

 
“I had three options (for radiation therapy).  I had the option of a six-week external beam radiation, which is a normal radiation treatment.  Or, I could have the same treatment on a three-week course, which is, you just receive more radiation.  The one I ultimately chose was called interstitial breast brachytherapy.  Its’ more invasive to your body, it takes less time, but the main reason I chose it was because my heart and lungs would not be exposed to radiation.”

Camille researched brachytherapy, and “it was a little more terrifying because they surgically implant catheters into your breasts, and then the radiation source puts the radiation through the catheters.  And so it’s very localized radiation.  But you can’t imagine that when they put these catheters, I had 29 of them, which is more than usual, in your breast and they’re sticking out. But it doesn’t hurt!  And that’s one reason why I would really like women to know that if they have that option, it’s not terrifying at all. It’s not painful.  I would absolutely do nothing differently.”

Advice to others

Camille suggests that other women with cancer, or any disease, should look within themselves to determine what would make them most powerful. “For me, it was knowledge. I continued on researching as I progressed from the surgery to the radiation, to post treatment,” she says.

“Determine what’s going to make you feel most in control and most powerful and then that’s what you do. And never be embarrassed and never be ashamed.  I told everybody I had breast cancer because that’s who I was, I was Camille with breast cancer.”

Today, she says, “I’m Camille who no longer has breast cancer, but now perhaps a passion for helping other women who do have breast cancer. It doesn’t have to define the rest of your life.”