My colleague and friend Nanette has been leading yoga for breast cancer survivors for the past few years in her community of Austin Texas, even as she's navigated the tough journey of recurrent metastatic disease in her bones. I think you'll love her spirit as she shares her story... Link to yoga4cancer: https://yoga4cancer.com/ Transcript: Today's guest is Nanette Labastida. She's in Austin, Texas, and she and I have been ambassadors together for Stand Tall AFC over the years. She is a realtor by trade, and her passion is yoga, which we'll talk about at the end of the interview. But I want to start out by asking Nanette about her background, diagnosis, and current, uh, treatment plans. Welcome Nanette. Hi, I am so excited to be here and chat with you. So yeah my history, my background diagnosis, I was originally diagnosed in 2010. I was 42, um, with breast cancer and it, it was--back then I didn't really pay that much attention to the words-- but I do know that it was ER/PR positive and HER2 negative. And I had chemo, like four rounds of chemo, no radiation. Um, and I had a mastectomy with implants, you know, with, uh, expanders and then implants. And I did tamoxifen for four years. and then in 2019 I explanted to flat. And so that's when I joined that community. It wasn't necessarily through any. um, implant illness Um, it was more like discomfort and never feeling like myself and knowing that at some point they'd need to be changed out and I'd rather not. I had the ability to do it timing wise and insurance wise--zero regrets. And then in 2022, um, I was diagnosed with, uh, stage four metastatic breast cancer. Um, so it was a recurrence, with mets to few spots in my bones, rib pelvis, and a couple on my spine. I think, um, a collarbone lymph node here, which is really the thing that got me into the oncologist. Thank goodness. And pleural effusion around my lungs. Uh oh. And then I started, uh, treatment at that time I was actually qualified for a, a clinical trial. My doctors did some research immediately and just based on like all the factors of my previous treatment and the type of cancer, all the stuff I, I entered this trial called the Serena--I might not remember the exact name of the trial, but the trial was a blind trial in which I was taking (a CDK4/6) Ibrance, taking two other pills. One was. Anastrozole. The other pill was a new drug called "SERD," or a placebo. So I would take both of them not knowing if I was getting which med I was getting. So I was getting treatment, I just didn't know which one. Okay. And it turned out in the end. Now, you just recently found out, uh, that you were on the blind arm of the trial, which means you were only taking a CDK4/6 inhibitor. It turns out I was not taking the SERD, the new trial drug, which was the blinded. So I was taking anastrozole, so I was on what I'd have been on if I wasn't on the trial, like the standard is like almost everybody or you know, a lot of people, they just do the, the CDK4/6 inhibitor and the AI and that's what I ended up being on for three years, almost three years. I didn't get the trial drug, which I've heard that it might be out later this year--a SERD on the market--an oral SERD. It's, it's, I think you had someone recently talking about fluvestrant and that's a SERD. Um, so it's kind of less, less quality of life and, and they all work a little differently anyway... For the sake of listeners who don't know what a SERD is, um, I personally got it mixed up with SERM, which is very similar. So there's selective estrogen receptor modulator. Or a SERD is the newer drug, which is a selective estrogen receptor disruptor. I believe those are the words. Degrader. Degrader, okay. Thank you. So it's, it's actually degrading the receptor site so that the receptor can't receive estrogen, right? Is that the mechanism? That's the mechanism, and so it's similar to an AI's to an aromatase inhibitor, but from a different like angle is what I understand. Well, it's similar to Tamoxifen, I think. Tamoxifen is a SERM where it's a, um, modulator, so it'll, it'll block the receptor so a SERM sits in the receptor and blocks it from receiving any oth other estrogens where a degrader, I think destroys the actual receptor. I love talking about the science. I, uh, I, I'm learning more and more, you know, especially 'cause I'm sort of such in the depths of it. And I also, like last year, attended the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, um, as a patient advocate. And it, I, I'm so glad I did in this progression because I am so aware now you know, and I can bring them up to my doctor. It was. It I thought it was like too much information, but there's definitely some that like settled. Awesome. Yeah, me too. I'm, I'm hooked. Yeah. Okay. So tell us about what happened. So you had Mets in 22. Okay. That's when you started the trial right away, when you started with your diagnosis of Mets. So that's three years ago. And then just this year in 2025,...
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Jun 14 202515 mins