A Warrior’s Battle Cry
When you look up the words “survivor” or “resiliency” in the dictionary, a picture of Lupus Warrior Cheryl Yetz would suffice as the definition for either.
Cheryl has spent most of her adult life battling lupus, the autoimmune disease that attacks nearly every major organ and system in the body. In the last few years, the battle has intensified, including a breast cancer diagnosis. Her lupus made treatment nearly impossible.
“I have and always will fight with an army behind me,” she said.
Her story began at the young age of 28, when she suffered a stroke. Over the next two decades came liver disease, life-threatening pneumonia, pericarditis, bowel obstructions and, in 2006, Crohn’s disease. In 2008, the ducts in her left breast became so inflamed they had to be removed, and it took more than 20 interventions over a year to repair the breast. Those healing problems led her doctor to refer her to a rheumatologist, and in 2009 Cheryl was finally diagnosed with lupus.
“There was a sense of relief just having a diagnosis,” she said. “For all these years, we were just treating the symptoms and not the underlying cause.”
An avid runner, Cheryl completed two Boston Marathons before her illness made running impossible. So she turned to fundraising instead. With family, friends, and colleagues from IBM, she formed the team “Are We There Yetz?”, which has raised more than $200,000 for lupus research and awareness through the Lupus Foundation of Texas Gulf Coast Chapter.
“If I wasn’t going to beat lupus, I sure was going to fight it,” said Cheryl. “If I couldn’t run, I was going to fundraise.”
When the Battle Becomes a War
The past few years have tested Cheryl like never before. After 11 years, the drug that kept lupus in check stopped working, and she was forced to switch to something different.
“There are not many targeted treatment options left,” she said.
All the while, Cheryl’s lung capacity continues to shrink, and her liver is now significantly damaged. Her Crohn’s disease has flared after years of remission. In the past few years, she’s been hospitalized eight times, and bone loss from taking prednisone has cost her two broken ribs and three bones in her foot.
Then came the news neither Cheryl nor the army behind her were prepared for.
In May, a routine mammogram found a tumor in Cheryl’s right breast. She has no family history of breast cancer, though testing later showed she carries a gene mutation linked to it.
The standard treatment for her type of cancer is surgery, a lymph node biopsy, and often radiation. For Cheryl, all of it was off the table: her history of severe complications made surgery extremely risky, and a lymph node biopsy and radiation were out of the question.
“Imagine being told you have cancer, but they can’t treat you,” she said.
At MD Anderson Cancer Center, she met with a team of specialists.
“The surgeon said, ‘I wouldn’t operate on you. I could hurt you,’” Cheryl recalled. “The radiologist said, ‘This will be a quick discussion because the only patient I won’t offer radiation to is a lupus patient.’”
The oncologist, however, had an option: cryoablation, which freezes the tumor and the surrounding tissue. Because her tumor was small, Cheryl was a good candidate. But between waiting for an appointment, fighting for insurance approval, and an extra procedure to replace a marker that her body had pushed out of place, 110 days passed before her treatment could begin.
“I wasn’t sleeping, and I couldn’t focus on anything but the cancer,” she said. “I went into a lupus flare and a Crohn’s flare. I was emotionally and physically exhausted beyond what I can explain. I was losing hope.”
In September, Cheryl finally had the cryoablation, and it went well. Because no tissue was removed, doctors can’t know for certain whether the cancer had spread, but the tumor’s small size is in her favor. She will take hormone blockers for at least five years and be monitored at MD Anderson every six months.
Armed With Hope
Stress is a major trigger for lupus, and the past several months have taken a toll. But Cheryl focuses on the blessings in her life, especially her children and grandchildren, visiting them in Los Angeles whenever she can.
“There was a time when I believed I would never see my son get married and never meet my grandchildren,” she said. “Today I have four of them, and I want to live to see them graduate.”
She is also encouraged by research into CAR-T cell therapy, which has put several lupus patients into remission.
“It may be too late for patients like me with advanced disease, but if I can contribute to finding a cure through fundraising and advocacy, in my mind, I have beaten lupus.”
For anyone newly diagnosed with lupus, cancer or both, her advice is simple.
“Hope is the most important tool you have,” she said. “Find your tribe and let them hold you up when you can’t stand. Give back because it feels so good. And find one reason every morning to be grateful. It’s difficult to have a bad day if you start out with a feeling of gratitude in your heart.”
As a survivor, she embodies resilience and continues to inspire us all.
