​Mom’s Hopeful Journey Battling Metastatic Breast Cancer

Jill M. shares her journey battling HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer and her experience enrolled in the HER2CLIMB clinical trial.  She is joined by her physician, Dr.  Bhuvaneswari Ramaswamy, M.D., of the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, who speaks to Jill’s treatment and the overall metastatic breast cancer treatment landscape. Learn more about TUKYSA.

Jill M. is from Florence, KY. Married with two children and a former pharmacist.

In October of 2015, when Jill was 36 years old, she found a lump in her right breast. She had been to her doctor a year prior and they thought it was a cyst and to keep an eye on it. By the time she went back to the doctor, a PET scan confirmed she had stage IV HER2+ MBC ATM mutation with bone metastases in her hips and femur. Current Treatment (6/17): TUKYSA twice a day every day (150mg 2x daily), Xeloda two weeks on one week off (three-week cycle, 1500mg in the morning/1500mg in the evening), Herceptin infusions (every three weeks). Jill reported that she had bad blisters on her feet in the beginning, but her doctors reduced her Xeloda dose, and it got better. She will have been on these treatments for four years in June 2021 and is considered to be stable. Jill says that she feels very fortunate to have a wonderful husband, and his family lives nearby. Jill and her husband built a house right next to his parents, her husband’s siblings live on their street, and Jill’s mom lives ten minutes away. Jill has a ton of family support and has a great group of supportive friends as well. Jill participates in a few online support groups, and has a friend who has the same doctor as her who she shares everything with. Jill is also part of an OSU advocacy group where she shares her story with others in a small group setting. Jill spends time reading about other people’s experiences with cancer, and spends as much time as she can with her family.

Bhuvaneswari Ramaswamy, MD, Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Bhuvaneswari joined the OSUCCC – James as a breast medical oncologist in 2006 and has since been very active in clinical and translational research in breast cancer. She is a principal investigator for several cooperative group and investigator-initiated studies and has authored more than 40 peer-reviewed articles published in scientific journals.

As a member of the Translational Therapeutics Program, her research is focused on investigating the biology of breast tumors at the molecular level to identify characteristics of tumors that are resistant to hormone-based therapeutics, such as tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors. Additionally, Bhuvaneswari has been recognized by Forbes as one of the top 27 breast medical oncologists in the nation. She was also selected as one of five women at Ohio State who have distinguished themselves as “Medical Center Marvels” and was featured in Health1 magazine. In addition to treating patients, Bhuvaneswari serves as section chief of Breast Medical Oncology and as director of the Medical Oncology Fellowship Program in Breast Cancer for The Ohio State College of Medicine.