34-Year-Old Mother of Two in San Angelo Battles Fatal Diagnosis

Nicole Klinesmith will be 43 years old nine years from now when she reaches the end of the average lifespan for women with stage four breast cancer. In nine years, her daughter Madison will be 12 and her son Tyler will be 14. Her husband Eric may then be a single father.

Now the woman battling cancer is using her situation to raise awareness, sharing her story with women and sending a message that just because you’re under 40 doesn’t mean you’re cancer free.

Nicole, 34, has been getting mammograms since her 20s because her sister was diagnosed with breast cancer at 33. She’d had one as recent as August 2014, so when a mysterious pain surfaced under her right arm around Christmastime, she didn’t think much of it.

“I thought I had just pulled a muscle or something, so I was like, ‘I’ll give it two weeks,’” the 34-year-old said.

When after two weeks the pain dissipated, Nicole almost canceled her appointment with her gynecologist. If she had, she may not be here today.

“I got my diagnosis on January the 30^th,” she said. “The day that I’ll never forget.”

In January, Nicole was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer, a curable type found in the breast and axillary lymph nodes. For the next two months she underwent a marathon of testing and surgeries 275 miles away from home in Dallas, but despite repeated negatives on the battery of tests, something still was not right.

“My first surgery was when they went through my mouth to get into the area near my lungs…it’s the lymph nodes that are by the lungs,” Nicole said. “We had that done and it came back negative. It gave us false hope.”

Around the same time, Nicole had a port put in for the chemotherapy she will one day need, and underwent bone biopsies in her hips where a PET scan had illuminated something suspicious. All of her tests initially came back negative, but a second PET scan still highlighted the original tumors and areas in her chest and hips.

“Even though the tests were negative they were like, ‘we just can’t move forward…’” Nicole explained. “The treatment for stage two is completely different from stage four, so if they would have gone on and treated for stage two…and not caught that it had spread, it would have spread horribly and my chances of survival would have been not good.”

Once more Nicole went into the operating room, this time for a more thorough surgery in which doctors took seven samples from her lymph nodes. When the pathology came back from those in mid-March they were positive. In a span of less than three months, the cancer had metastasized and Nicole was upped to a stage four, a fatal diagnosis.

Immediately thereafter, Nicole went traveled to Houston to get a second opinion from a doctor at M.D. Anderson, one of the nation’s leading cancer treatment hospitals. Still, the results were not good.

“She gave me two options of treatment she thought would work best for me and one of them is a brand new drug,” Nicole said. “At that time, it hadn’t even been on the market for a month.”

The pill, Ibrance, is taken for 21 consecutive days, followed by a 21-day break. Each 21-day cycle costs over $11,000 just for that one medication, and Nicole has been prescribed the drug for an indefinite period simply defined by when the pill stops working. In most cases, Nicole explained, the drug will remain effective for two to five years, at which point the cancer mutates and another medication will be substituted. This cycle will continue until she has run out of options and must resort to chemo.

“It targets the death clock in your cell,” Eric Klinesmith said, explaining how the pill works. “In your cell you have something called a death clock. It tells the cell it’s time to divide and make a new cell and the old one dies. [The pill] targets the death clock in the cell to stop the cell from making a new cell.”

The medication only targets cancer cells and prevents them from dividing to create new cells, but the cell targeted still dies, so the tumor ultimately shrinks when the medicine is working.

“It’s called targeted therapy,” Eric said. “They’ve managed to break down the cell process to each step a cell takes in its life cycle and they’re aiming at one specific thing and then it kills it dead right there. It’s a pretty cool thing.”

So far, the therapy is working. Nicole’s tumor has dramatically reduced in size and the family will know more after a scan next month. But despite the current positive prognosis, ultimately the course will change and the cancer will overcome the medication keeping it in check.

“The best way the doctor put it, it’s like your yard with weeds,” Eric explained. “You can pull the weeds, you know, it looks good, but the roots are still in there. And that’s the problem with these cells. The genetic malfunction is still there, so eventually, it’s trying to beat the medicine and…that will find a way to mutate itself around the medicine and the death clock will start again.”

Nicole is also on an estrogen blocker, because her type of cancer grows when exposed to estrogen and progesterone. For this reason, she also had to have a hysterectomy, in order to both stop her organs from producing estrogen and because the medicine may only be administered to women who are post-menopausal.

“I had to put myself into menopause,” she said.

“At 34 years old,” her husband added.

Despite all that has happened in such rapid succession since the first of the year, Nicole Klinesmith is determined to keep a positive disposition spend her time enjoying the things she’s got.

“I just focus on everything good,” she said. “I focus on everything that the lord has blessed me with. Anytime my mind starts going to this dark place, I just stop myself and say, ‘look, the time I have left I am not going to spend it being sad and miserable and depressed. I am going to focus on everything that is great, everything I have, and enjoy it.’”

Friends, family and the community at Glenn Meadows Baptist Church have been a source of non-stop support and inspiration, Nicole said, and her phone since the diagnosis has not stopped ringing with people looking to provide help.

The family is trying to lead a normal and happy life while she is able to continue on pill medications alone and before she is put on chemotherapy, which destroys the body. With her children so young they aren’t aware of the seriousness of what is going on, but do know their mother is ill.

“It was really hard on them because we were going to Dallas constantly through all of that treatment,” Nicole said. “We just told them that mommy is sick and mommy needs to see a lot of doctors and have stuff done to her so that we can make her better, and that’s what we left it at. I don’t want my children to focus on any negative anything. I just want them to be happy and content in their life and to keep going.”

Nicole admits she is scared, and there are times when she thinks about not being around to see her kids graduate high school and get married, but is determined to fight to beat the average for women with her diagnosis.

“Whenever she (Nicole’s doctor) told me that nine years is the average lifespan, I looked at her and I said, ‘that’s not good enough for me. I refuse to only live nine more years.’ It’s a fine line between accepting reality and saying it’s not good enough.”

Nicole’s sister has been in remission for stage two breast cancer for the past seven years. When her sister was diagnosed, Nicole was working at Shannon Women’s Imaging Center and has always had a passion for raising awareness. When her sister was diagnosed that passion grew, and now, Nicole wants to use her position to raise awareness about breast cancer, especially in women under 40.

“I’ve been having mammograms since my mid-20s because of my sister,” Nicole said. “So I have them once a year. I had one in August and there was nothing, nothing. So from August to January it started, made the tumor, spread and spread. From August to January, just in that amount of time.”

“We can’t think of where we’d be if we hadn’t gone anywhere and we waited till August for the next checkup,” Eric said. “We’d be in big trouble.”

Most women don’t have mammograms until they are at least 40, Nicole said. “I would have been dead by 40 if I had waited that late.”

“Don’t wait,” her husband said.

For years, Nicole has been involved in the community by taking part in cancer walks and awareness campaigns, contributing to the rodeo and other organizations. Recognizing what Nicole has contributed to the community, Jeff Wheeler, a friend of the Klinesmiths, has been working to organize a benefit event and fundraiser since early February.

“I felt like it’s the community’s time to give back to her for all the time that she’s donated, all the volunteering that she’s done,” Wheeler said. “It’s the city’s time to turn around and give something back to her.”

The fundraiser is scheduled to run all day today, featuring live music, auctions, lunch and dinner.

“It’s going to be at the VFW hall,” Wheeler said. “They’re going to do hamburgers and hot dogs and have bounce houses set up for kids.”

The festivities kick off at noon at 125 S. Browning St. with food and family fun offered up for donations. Live music from various artists will carry through the afternoon and evening, with a dinner being served from 5-7 p.m. for a $15 fee. The tickets include admission to the hall for the remainder of the evening, as well as to the live auction that will feature items such as a Daniel Defense V11 AR15, a Ruger LCP 380, autographed NFL Footballs, diesel oil changes, tools and four to five different Yeti coolers, among various other items.

Tickets for dinner go on sale at 4 p.m. and kids 12 and under are free. The live auction will begin after dinner at 7:30 p.m.

For more information on the event, visit the Nicole’s Battle Facebook page.

Private donations to the Klinesmith family for medical expenses may also be made online via a GoFundMe account set up by Wheeler.