Caring Magazine

"My first thought was I was going to lose my life," Barreto says, recalling the moment she learned she had ductal carcinoma in situ, a type of breast cancer. Barreto lost her left breast to a mastectomy and admits that like many women in her situation, she feared losing her husband because of it. Yet instead of being about loss, Lisa Barreto's story is about what she has gained from her challenging journey.

"I learned that breast cancer isn't a death sentence," the 47-year-old Venturan shares. "It's a life sentence. It makes you look at life in a new way."

Barreto's new view of life began in February 2002 when she went in for a routine annual mammogram. The results showed two tiny suspicious spots that warranted a biopsy.

"Waiting for the biopsy results seemed like an eternity," Barreto remembers. Four days later on Good Friday - "I don't know what was so good about it," she now jokes - the bad news she feared came back: breast cancer. The good news, however, was that it had been caught as early as possible in Stage 0. Still, "cancer is cancer," Barreto says. "It's very scary."

With her world spinning wildly, Barreto refused to be knocked off her axis. Instead of feeling sorry for herself, she focused on the challenge at hand. "I researched the disease," Barreto says, noting that she tries to live by a word she coined: "actitude," which means taking action using a positive attitude.

Barreto decided to be her own advocate and began by selecting her own medical team that included oncologist Dr. Rosemary McIntyre, general surgeon Dr. Michael Sparkuhl, and reconstructive surgeon Dr. Sam Bern. "They are all absolutely fabulous," she says. Shortly after being diagnosed, Barreto sought a breast cancer support group on campus at Ventura College - where she had recently enrolled - only to discover there wasn't one. But she found support nonetheless. Her English professor, who himself had battled cancer, couldn't have been kinder. Her Spanish professor was likewise "incredible" after noticing Lisa crying in class one evening.

After discussing her treatment options with her doctors, Barreto made the decision to have a total mastectomy to remove the entire left breast. It was an emotional decision, to say the least.

"Many women worry their husband will leave
them because he won't love them after they lose a breast," explains Barreto, adding she felt the same way. "I believe breast cancer is not just a medical

illness. For a patient it is a social illness because of the way we think about women's breasts. I felt like that part of me, my breast, was being erased. For a long time I couldn't even go to the bookstore and look at books on cancer. When I finally did go, I couldn't find one thing about hope. If someone could just give me a word."

Displaying "actitude," Barreto sent out postcards and e-mails asking individuals to give her just such a word. "I got words that helped put things in perspective," she says. "I got words all the way from Oxford, England."

"Headlights" was an especially powerful word for her, arriving as the title of an essay that talked about not worrying over what you can't see in the dark off to the side or behind you, but rather focusing on the illuminated road directly in front of you.

On June 5, 2002 - a date Lisa can recall as quickly as her birthday or wedding anniversary - the road led her to an operating room to have a mastectomy. Lying in her hospital bed afterwards, Barreto looked out the window at a tree.

"It was a windy night," she shares, "and I thought to myself: 'I'm as strong as that tree. My roots go deep. If my cancer hasn't spread, I've got to do something to help others.'"

With her cancer completely removed - "there's a 99 percent chance it won't return," she allows - Barreto wasted no time in keeping her word. During her hospital stay, a nurse told Lisa she also had breast cancer and asked for a word of hope.

"I gave her the word 'headlights,'" Barreto says. "Now my role had turned. Two months later I was in the waiting room with that nurse's husband and father while she had surgery."

Further keeping her word to help others, Barreto in 2002 founded the Ventura College Breast Cancer Education & Advocacy Group. She also routinely visits breast cancer patients when they go into the hospital for surgery. She provides a calming influence and hope. After all, in addition to her mastectomy operation, Barreto underwent a series of three separate reconstructive surgeries at Community Memorial Hospital: tissue expansion, saline implant, and nipple surgery. "It's not a simple process," says Barreto. "I called other women who had reconstructive surgery. It's a very personal thing. I decided it was right for me."

Asked how she finds the time and energy to help so many others while being a wife, working part time as a paralegal specialist and pursuing her bachelor's degree at the University of California Santa Barbara (at the Ventura Center) on a prestigious Regents Scholarship, Lisa Barreto replies simply and succinctly: "Headlights."

Indeed, she is a beacon illuminating the journey ahead for others.