Real life with breast cancer: a survivor’s five lessons
Dana Sherer shares her perspective on going through a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment as a mom to a newborn and toddler.
A breast cancer diagnosis is disruptive at any stage of life. For Dana Sherer, the news interrupted a particularly cherished—and exhausting—time: caring for her newborn baby. She found a lump in January 2025, two weeks after giving birth to her second son, Hudson, and was ultimately diagnosed with stage I breast cancer that required surgery and chemotherapy.
With the help of her oncology team at Penn Medicine Princeton Health, Sherer is now cancer-free and on the road to recovery. Here, she offers five lessons she’s learned over the past year of living through a breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship.
1. Anyone can get breast cancer.
Sherer was 41 years old at the time of her diagnosis, barely old enough to start receiving breast cancer screening mammograms. She didn’t have any clear risk factors, so breast cancer wasn’t her first thought when she found a lump shortly after Hudson was born. She initially thought it could be related to breastfeeding, maybe a clogged duct or mastitis.
“One morning I woke up and I had a lump, about the size of a kiwi fruit,” Sherer recalled. “I was experiencing zinging pain from my chest up into my armpit area, where my lymph nodes are…. I always felt like I was a really healthy person. I tried to eat the right foods, do the right amount of exercise. You don’t think you're going to get breast cancer. It wasn’t in my family.”
She notified her OBGYN at her next postpartum appointment and they agreed to keep an eye on it. After a few weeks, when the lump hadn’t disappeared or caused other symptoms associated with breastfeeding, her doctor ordered an ultrasound and biopsy, followed by an MRI. By March 2025, she had been diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), which was upgraded to more invasive stage I HER2+ breast cancer after her mastectomy.
“It was really surreal,” Sherer said. “I don’t actually think I believed it at first. I didn’t feel like a sick person. It wasn’t until we started talking about surgery that my brain caught up and I realized I had to start understanding the gravity of this.”
2. Self-care is essential.
“I'm not quite sure how I kept such a cool head on my shoulders,” Sherer mused. “I always say it goes back to yoga. You know, you just breathe through it.”
Sherer turned to yoga during the COVID-19 pandemic and found refuge in slower styles, like yin yoga, which uses passive poses held for several minutes each to calm the nervous system, release deep connective tissues in the body, and build mindfulness. Five weeks after giving birth to Hudson and her diagnosis, she was back in the yoga studio and continued to find strength, relief, and peace in her yoga practice throughout her 12 weeks of chemotherapy infusions.
“I knew with this diagnosis, I had to have a part of my life that felt pulled together. When I'm at yoga, I feel pulled together. I can close my eyes and I can breathe,” Sherer said. “Breast cancer is one of those things that brings you to your knees. And it forces you to be selfish, which is not easy to do when you're a mother. Yoga helped me give myself that self-care and that ‘selfish time’ I needed to reflect on all the fear and the uncertainty so that I could move forward with confidence.”
3. Cancer treatment can be planned around your life.
One of Sherer’s biggest worries when she was diagnosed was that it would affect her ability to breastfeed Hudson, but her breast surgeon, Ashley Newman, MD, developed a treatment plan that would allow Sherer to continue breastfeeding for as long as possible.
“I just knew that she was going to be the person I could trust,” Sherer said of her first impression of Newman. “I could tell she wasn't just listening with her ears. She was listening with her eyes, with her heart.”
The treatment plan they agreed on together allowed Sherer to safely breastfeed Hudson for five months. After her diagnosis, Newman advised Sherer to only nurse on the breast without the tumor, and Hudson breastfed for the last time before Sherer went in for her first chemotherapy infusion with her oncologist Sheetal H. Shrimanker, MD.
“She was incredibly, incredibly sensitive to the fact that I was a breastfeeding mom,” Sherer said of Newman. “That meant the world to me because she wasn't just thinking about my health. She was thinking about the time I had with my baby and having all those memories. To fit that part of the puzzle into the care plan made an incredibly big difference to me and my son.”
After her mastectomy, Sherer underwent breast reconstruction with plastic surgeon Evan Katzel, MD, who Sherer appreciated for always making her laugh.
“Having that lightheartedness during the seriousness of breast cancer was a nice counterbalance,” she said. “Between him and Dr. Newman, my family and I didn’t feel scared.”
4. Managing complicated health care with a family is easier when everything is in the same place.
After having both of her children at Penn Medicine Princeton Health, Sherer didn’t have to travel far for breast cancer treatment. The oncology clinic is on the same floor as her OBGYN’s office and only a short walk from where she was still receiving postpartum care. Nurse navigator Karen Davison, RN, BSN, OCN, helped ensure her supportive care appointments, including nutrition, weight management, and social work, were all coordinated within her comprehensive care plan.
“It was easy to have all of my appointments in one app,” Sherer said. “The patient portal saved my life. I would plug it into my work calendar. Since my husband and I work together, we would share our calendars.”
Having a single place to track appointments helped Sherer and her husband balance her treatment, their work schedules, and the demands of raising two young children, including coordinating childcare when Sherer had an appointment or her husband was traveling. Hudson accompanied Sherer to most appointments and her 3-year-old son Dallas frequently joined them too. No matter which specialist they were seeing that day, the reception was the same.
“Everyone was so welcoming and honestly pretty joyful to see two little kids come into the room with me,” she said. “They would take time to hold the baby, talk to the kids. They never made me feel like the kids were in the way. They just knew that this was my life, and the kids were part of the journey.”
5. You can do hard things.
Raising an infant and toddler while undergoing cancer treatment wasn’t easy. Whether she was dealing with a crying baby, a hungry toddler, or a new medication schedule, Sherer relied on two powerful messages to get herself through each day, one moment at a time.
“In yoga, they teach you that you can do hard things. They always tell you to give yourself grace. And those were the two mantras that I took with me through my cancer journey,” Sherer said. “Whether it was a tough hour, or a tough week, or a tough month, that's how I got through it. Whenever I thought, ‘How can I do this?’ I told myself that I can do hard things. Whatever it was, I took it one second at a time, five minutes at a time, and somehow pulled through. And I just did that every step of the journey: ‘You can do hard things.’ I can do hard things.”