There's a sense of peacefulness out in Liberty Hill.
Amy Clemmons doesn't just own a horse, she owns an equine clinic in Liberty Hill and a small animal clinic in Austin.
Believe it or not it's her experience as a veterinarian that helped her make decisions about her own health.
"I deal with cancer every day in animals. The staging and the decision making is still similar," she said.
Her mother died from cancer and her sister is a seven year cancer survivor. That's what led Amy to genetic testing.
"If there's something that can definitively be done, I just want to do it and move on from there," she said.
There were only a couple of options for Amy. Clemmons took doses of tamoxifin to prevent breast cancer. But the side effects were too much to handle.
"Tamoxifen wasn't working. If I don't take [it], I didn't want to sit and lie and wait," she said. "Can I really pursue this?"
She was referring to removing her breasts and breast tissue. Basically getting rid of what's at risk of infection, a preventative mastectomy.
"I knew it was radical when I considered it, but I had so much family support," Clemmons said.
 |  |
 | |  |
| | | | | | | |
Life changing decisions
For these two women, beating cancer involved making some life changing decisions.
 
| | |
| | | | | |
|
Clemmons made a move more and more women are considering. The rate at which women are having the procedure has more than doubled from 1998 to 2003.
"It was like a deferred sentence. It's like I knew it was just a matter of when," Clemmons said. "My chances were pretty high … Do I wait until I'm potentially less or healthy or do I do something about it?"
That's basically what Dinora Niedzwiedz wanted to do when she found out she had the breast cancer gene. Then life threw her a curve ball.
"Just a couple of months later, I felt a lump. And, more than anything, I was really irritated," she said. "I was like, 'No, we already made this decision. We were supposed to pre-empt everything.' "
A tumor about two centimeters in size was on her right breast. She found it while her mother was dying from ovarian cancer.
"She was with me for the first three months through treatment and was here taking care of me at the house … just doing everything she could like a mom does," Niedzwiedz said.
A life lost and a life saved.
"We just thought my mom was a fluke. She's just one of those people [who] got cancer; [I thought we] wouldn't have to worry about it and went about our lives," Niedzwiedz said. "The genetic testing pushed everything to the forefront and made us realize we're susceptible to this."
Genetic testing took these two women on a journey of survival.
For these women, they've rounded the bases, are coming home and taking cancer out. There's still more innings to play and more strides to make. Even though they've reduced they're odds, the disease could strike again.
But these bold and brassy no-nonsense women are ready to strike back.
