Breast Cancer, Caregiving, and Courage: Lessons from Loretta Donovan

In this episode of Beyond My Diagnosis, I talk with Loretta Donovan, a coach, educator, and healthcare leader who brings wisdom from both her professional and personal experiences navigating illness. Together, we explore how curiosity can steady us in moments of fear, how language shapes our emotional responses to illness, and why mindset becomes an anchor when life feels unpredictable. Loretta’s insight is grounded, compassionate, and full of lived truth.

In this conversation, you will learn:
 • How curiosity and inquiry-based thinking help us face overwhelming diagnoses
 • What clinicians and patients both need in order to communicate compassionately
 • How Loretta navigated breast cancer while supporting a daughter with metastatic disease
 • Why mindset, language, and reframing change the emotional landscape of illness
 • How to stay grounded and purposeful even when life feels unpredictable

About Loretta:
 Loretta Donovan is the President of iAttain and a Professional Fellow with the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School. She is a former Chief Learning Officer in healthcare and an educator who has guided leaders and clinicians for more than a decade. As a patient, mother, caregiver, and lifelong learner, Loretta brings deep empathy and perspective to conversations about healing, mindset, and resilience.

Loretta’s Links:
 🌐 iAttain: https://about.me/iAttain
🌐 Appreciative Inquiry Consulting: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/48345/
🌐 ReInvive Coaching & Leadership: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13322073/

Transcript

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(Music) Hello, this is Michelle Weston with Beyond My Diagnosis, a show that talks about living with a chronic condition. Those of you out there living with a chronic condition or family members, loved ones, partners, having a chronic condition, well, for me, means it's important to make lifestyle changes, to make sure you have the best quality of life. So Beyond My Diagnosis is a show with experts, with patients, with professionals, with coaches, with parents, with doctors, acupuncturists, to explore ways to create your best life. And I believe that after 25 years of living with multiple sclerosis, my life is better because of the changes I made with lifestyle changes. And no, that's not easy, but we all have a responsibility as patients. You're the patient, you're the body, the doctor is the doctor, and he or she does medicine, but you have to create your best life. And living with a chronic condition doesn't have to be a death sentence in the end of your life. And that's what I want you to understand with all of these wonderful people I interview for Beyond My Diagnosis. So today, I have one of my favorite people, and that is Loretta Donovan. She is a coach, and she has been involved with so many things. And now she is helping doctors, coaching them at hospitals and big firms, professional groups, to explore when things are more challenging, explore being the director, being the boss. So on that note, I'm gonna say, hello Loretta. Hey, Michelle, it's good to be here with you. It's a pleasure. Yes, when you talked about 25 years with your chronic illness, well, it's 20 years for me. We've wrapped up a lot of years in understanding what a chronic illness is, and for me, it has been breast cancer. I must tell you, most of us are not thinking when we're young that we're going to be faced with any kind of an illness. No, we're indefatigable, right? You cannot destroy us, yes. Well, and usually, some of these chronic illnesses pop up quite unexpectedly. And I was happily going along enjoying my career, my kids were out of college, and lo and behold, my regular mammogram showed up a problem. And that was 20 years ago. And our initial experience with any kind of an illness is not necessarily, goody, I'm ill. It's like, this is serious, and I wanna get away from it. I wanna deal with it. I want it to be over. And unfortunately, that doesn't happen most of the time. This is a broken leg. We can't put a cast on it. No. I must tell you, I was fortunate, because I was going for regular checkups, my breast cancer was discovered early. It was a level zero to one. Thank goodness. And so, I went through the treatment that was prescribed at that time, for that kind of an illness, which meant I had a love back to me. And when that healed, I went through seven weeks, 35 treatments of radiology. Yuck. And actually, it wasn't that bad. I will tell you- Good. I was fortunate. Many people experienced side effects of treatments, and I was one of the lucky ones. Knock on wood, right? Knock on wood. Exactly. But I will tell you, one of the things that was clear from the very beginning, once I get up after over the initial shock of the diagnosis, and I was moving forward, I will admit that by physicians, two females, breast surgeon in New York City, radiation oncologist in White Plains, New York. Both very optimistic, very open, very engaging. Wonderful. You would want a physician to be very hopeful for me. In other words, there was nothing at that point that looked like I should be looking at anything other than dealing with the present situation. Now, I look back now, and when you talk about taking ownership and being responsible for your own behavior, for your lifestyle, for your outcomes. When I started going through my radiation treatment, I chose to go for one of the earliest appointments in the day. That was 7.30. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. It was a fifth. I was 15 minutes away from the hospital. It wasn't a big deal, and God bless them. They had a valet parking situation. That makes it easier. My husband would drive me up. We'd both get out of the car. They'd take the car away. There was none of that kind of a nuisance. I would go in, and every day as I was getting up, it was summertime. I would go into my closet, and I'd pick out a cute outfit. Printed capris, a pretty shirt, a pair of sandals. I happen to be a fashionista. I think Michelle and I have this in common with my clothes. We do. And so there was no such thing as I was wearing the same thing day in and day out. I probably had like 10 outfits and rotation. I took a week or two before the nurses started to say, hey, what are you wearing today? We could laugh about it, but actually, that's a representation of where your head is. Yeah. If you say to yourself, I'm going to make this as good as it can be, it can start off with I'm getting up and putting up my makeup, or I'm going to wear a cute outfit, or I'm going to make sure my hair looks nice, or whatever you're doing that makes you feel better about yourself, as good as you could feel under the circumstances. And it's that kind of thing that carried me through. The other thing I did is somebody who had never enrolled in an exercise class in my life. Fortunately, I was a few blocks away from an exercise studio, a nice one that wasn't too big and filled with machines. And so I enrolled in that. And almost every day, I would go and I would spend a half hour there. And if the weather was better, not too hot and humid, I would go for a long walk with my husband. I would take a nap every day. So when you started to put all these things together, what I was doing is creating a framework around my life that said, we're going to do this with a positive attitude, a plan for being well, for taking care of ourselves. And you know, funny things. I mean, you know, I like I happen to like to cook, but at that time, you know, with all that was going on, I didn't want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. My husband was great. We planned a lot of meals out. Yep. Didn't didn't have to be fancy. So you didn't have to do anything. Just enjoy dinner with your husband. Just take away as many of the stresses as you possibly can. Now, when that was over, I was given an estrogen blocker. And unfortunately, after a couple of tries, it became clear that this was not good for me. Why? Because, you know, some people may not been given an estrogen blocker. Why did they decide to do that? And why did you have your reaction? It's still something that's widely used. Although what's on the market is a little bit different. Okay. And I'm not going to mention drugs or, you know, manufacturers, because people have to talk to their own physicians. I agree. Do not go by Google, guys. Google is not. No, please. What was given to me, I was probably on in a few weeks and all of a sudden it became clear that like, gastrointestinal processes had basically come almost to a halt. Oh, no. I wasn't digesting food. I wasn't eliminating properly. And I wound up getting violently ill and strangely enough at a conference that on women's health. And I was lucky. A very good friend was there with me. I convention that among the people who were there at the conference were Dr. Oz and, and, uh, uh, Oprah Winfrey. Oh my goodness. Dr. Nancy Snyderman, who used to be on TV. They loved her. Yeah. So here I am enjoying the conference and all of a sudden starting to feel very, very ill and called my husband who came and rescued me. Fortunately, uh, he was less than 10 miles away and, you know, and stopped taking medication. You know, your first indication of something wrong is like, let's stop. Take a pause. Yeah. Evaluate what's going on. And of course, you never sure. Is it the medication? Did I come into contact with somebody who had a communicable disease? What's going on? Waited two days, called the doctor. And, uh, they're like, no, you could get, you could keep on taking that. Go back on the medication and guess what? Three weeks later. Same thing. Same thing in an airport. No. I was traveling. Yes. No. And so these are the other things we start to learn. How do you actually deal with a chronic illness when it's not, you're not the, they're not that sick from the illness. There are side effects from the treatments. Yes, absolutely. Look, especially with cancer, you know, we're killing something and I don't mean to be that brusque, but we are, we're killing cancer and that's the job of having radiation and doing the things that you do is to kill the cancer cells. So that's a, if you think about that, wow, I'm killing something inside my body. Yeah. And that's why it's, that's why the more finesse we get, the better we get. That's why cancers, a lot of them, we found ways to, you know, fight it. Yeah. To fight it in a less intrusive ways. Yes. What starts to happen is we have to understand, we understand our body is a symptom. Women are well aware of the role of hormones and how it affects absolutely everything from your skin and hair and nails to the way in which your muscles are working, your brain. So I was, I was faced with a dilemma there. It was like, I can't do this again. This is not good for me. And fortunately, we had an acquaintance who was a very famous oncologist in New York city. Thank goodness. And so reached out to him. That's another piece of good advice for people with chronic illnesses, even though you may love your care team and they may be doing a terrific job for you. If you feel that there are some other thoughts that you need from someone who really knows what's going on, as Michelle said before, let's not Google things. And in fact, we're going to say no more, no artificial intelligence because no, please, no, AI is not a doctor. Doctors think, doctors think in an expanded way that AI doesn't because they're dealing with humans. So anyway, we were told by this wonderful oncologist, he said, look, there is nothing that is going to 100% take care of you. He said, so he says, take it, don't take it. We said, what about the substitute? He said, it's up to you. And so I made the decision because what was the, what would be the substitution for what I was taking was well known for causing brain fog. And I did that with MS. Yes. And I was taking the last course that I needed before I would work on my dissertation for my doctorate. And I'm like, I can't afford, I should tell you these two episodes happened during that course. I had to ask for an extension. Fortunately, the professor was somebody who I knew very well and understood was going on because I couldn't read. That was the other fun, very strange thing. I could, I could read the words. I would understand the words. I would get halfway through the page. I wouldn't know what I saw. I'm already read at the top of the page. I had to go back three, four, five times. And I'm like, even if I was taking notes, so I knew something was already happening with my cognition. So that's the other thing is, you know, with, with all of these chronic illnesses, one of the things you're noticing, you can't do that you usually can do. So anyway, we got past that and I was great. 12 until 12 years later, going for my regular mammogram again. Yeah. Said for biopsy because of something suspicious again. Okay. And here I was with a cancer in the same breast again. Oh, no. And the only answer at that point is a mastectomy. There is no second lumpectomy. Wow. And it's funny because it happened that my husband had, is a retired dentist and had taught radiology. And he looked at the surgeon who was giving us the bad news and said, this is a result of the radiation treatment. Now, I don't want to frighten everybody right now because you have to realize 20 years ago, radiation treatment for breast cancer is a whole lot different than it is. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like it went literally through you as opposed to how radiation works today. I mean, now, I mean, I'm sure people see television ads when they talk about radiation treatments, largely for prostate cancer, but the fact of the matter, that's it for everything. It doesn't matter what type of cancer you have. They're using stereotactic radiation. So just think of like a laser beam tiny thing that goes to where it needs to go, which is, you know, important. So at that point, my husband said, he really believed, and this has been proven true, and I'm explaining that a couple of minutes, that the overexposure to radiation does, in fact, in some instances cause additional cancer. Is that wild? It's so wild. Well, it was even stranger, though. I mean, I underwent the mastectomy. Not a fun thing to do, but I got through it okay. And remember, here I am again, very early stage of diagnosis. So no necessity for chemo. No necessity for anything other than having my wounds healed. And in the midst of all of this, my college surgeon said to me, I'd like you to continue having CAT scans. There's a teeny, teeny spot on your lung, and I have no idea what it is, but we got to watch that. And boy, was she right because in fact, I have lung cancer. So yes. So we went from when three years later, I was in a pulmonary surgeon's office, learning that this bottom of my lung had gone from like size of a half a poppy seed to a full poppy seed. Okay. And all the tests were done with fabulous surgeons, somebody who is just in the wonderful human being in every way, saw me through that illness. And so I wound up in 2020 in the midst of COVID, having the top levels of my right lung removed. Unbelievable. And so you talk about, now we're now we're into different kind of chronic. In other words, the first incidence of a disease sometimes will come back. In fact, we know 30% of women who have breast cancer will have a That's not to scare you. It's just we're giving you information and information is power, right? Loretta? Information is powerful. So we want people to understand is that when someone says we want you to continue going for mammograms, or this is the time we'd like you to have XYZ tests, or it's time for another biopsy. Yes, it's kind of a nuisance. Yes, it's unpleasant sometimes. But the fact of the matter is, that is your key to wellness. That is the way you're going to go from having an issue that's undisturbed or not properly treated to being in the best possible place where you have control. And this is what a patient was, you want information, which is what you get from the tests and what you get from your doctors. And then you're able to say to yourself, it's time for me to be able to then make an informed decision about what I would like to do next. And it's not identical to what your friends or neighbors or relatives are doing, because medicine is individual. Absolutely. Yeah. So now we're talking what you're taking may not be what this person is taking, what this person is doing may not be what that person is doing. And that's important. And with MS, it's the same. I'm on a certain medication, somebody else can be on another one. Exactly. Now, in the midst of all of this, and this is what complicates the story. Before I was diagnosed the second time, yes, one of my daughters was diagnosed also with breast cancer, not the same kind that I had, I had as positive, she had her too positive. Okay. And so what are we dealing with here? And in terms of what situation we're talking about, a younger mother with two little kids and a situation that was out of control. Now, this is another book on a red flag that I want people to watch for. If you are of childbearing age and you possibly may be breastfeeding, do not avoid going for mammogram no matter what anybody else says, because my daughter had been told, you don't need to take care of that now. And guess what? You were dealing with stage 3B breast cancer. Unbelievable. And so as we were going through all of this, I was getting great advice. I was being treated early. I was adapting my lifestyle. I mean, I was never one to drink a lot, but I almost reduced my consumption of alcohol to zero. Okay. I never smoked. I continued not to smoke. I never ate a lot of fatty foods. I avoided all kinds of things that aren't healthy, processed foods, things like that. They weren't in my diet and they certainly weren't going to be in it after I had been treated for cancer. So I was managing a chronic illness as well as I could. What my daughter had was not going to be a chronic illness, unfortunately. What you're dealing with is an acute illness because at that point she was in very, very serious shape. And she was in a block in the United States with an excellent hospital, with great cancer research centers, and everything that they were able to do for her kept her alive for a longer time. From the day she was diagnosed until when she passed away was more than six and a half years. Which is really, she can be with her husband and her two sons. Two boys. Yeah. And so when we look at that, to some degree, somebody might call it chronic, but in fact, the progression of the disease was almost in the wrong direction throughout that entire six and a half years. From time to time you'd see a little blip of something happening positive. They did a lot back to me after she had chemo and they found that there were no positive lymph nodes. You say, "Well, how could that be? How could she die?" Well, she had metastasis to the brain. So once that happens, there really isn't a lot you can do. They were able to do some heroic things to keep her active, but the last year of her life she was quite ill. So I want to move forward because I want to talk about the other things that really help us to be able to deal with chronic illness. And one of them is maintaining a positive mindset in spite of all of this. Everybody knows about the stories about Victor Frankel and how he survived concentration camp. A man who basically was able to look at the smallest kindness and say, "There's goodness in the world." You have to do that when we're faced with illness and the loss of somebody in our own family who has not survived a very serious sickness. And throughout the time that my daughter was ill, she insisted on getting involved with advocacy for breast cancer. There you go. That was her approach. In other words, if this is what I have to deal with, we're going to make sure that our insurance companies, our hospital systems, our legislators, researchers, anybody who's involved in the field of cancer is going to be doing the best, not just for me as a person, but all of our sisters, as we call them, who are stuck in the same place. And so she lived in Seattle and she got involved in the state of Washington, even to the point of becoming one of the three sponsors for the Right to Try bill. This was quite a while ago. Thank God. Thank God she did this. Yeah. At that point, about half the states in the country had passed the bill. I live in Connecticut and it had been passed. The Right to Try basically says that there are off-label uses of many drugs and cancer treatments. You can actually use them in novel ways to be able to see if you can spare someone from further suffering or death. So we're not talking about people going to third world countries and eating the dirt. This is not one of those. I want to be able to do something that only a million dollars will take care of and nobody ever heard of before. We're talking about good medicine, but being adaptive. So it is unique for you. So it happens that since she worked on that, which would have been 2016-17, we actually have had that bill passed by the United States Congress. So the Right to Try is available to everybody throughout the United States now. That's important for people to know. But as she was doing that, she was introducing me to various organizations and the work that they were doing to be able to fight breast cancer and to increase the opportunities for funding for researchers and making sure that everybody was doing well. So after she passed, we all started raising money for a fund in her name with Mediviver. That's M-E-T-A-D-I-D-O-R. Mediviver is a national organization started by some women who in fact were breast cancer patients, but they had a triple negative breast cancer or other kinds of breast cancer, which they were not going to survive. It was metastatic. That's where the meta comes from. Metastatic breast cancer means it is more from the initial site to another part of the body. And once it starts to spread, the news isn't good. So I've met some of the founders of the organization. It's quite exciting. And it's basically volunteer run. I mean, they have fewer than five people who are on their payroll. They're people who are some of whom aren't even full time. And this organization has chapters at the United States. So we started working on a fund in my daughter's name. And we didn't have a confidence for the state of Connecticut. And so I was asked to fulfill that role. So I have been doing that now for five years. I love that. So along the way, as I've been involved with Medivivor, one of the things that they did was reach out to those of us across the country and say, you know, the Department of Defense. Yes, our cancer research panels, isn't that wild? As two citizens on it. Oh, the patients or relatives of patients, okay, not only read the research proposals that they would find, they would speak to the life experience of the patient and their family and how the potential treatment would affect them. So in some cases, you can go in to have that treatment, but you're going to have to drive 50 miles each direction, three times a week. You go, I'm not so sure about that. Or you're going to have to get up in the middle of the night and take an extra pill. Or you're going to, you're going to have to stay in a hotel near the site and do that for three weeks. When you start to take a look at lifestyle, one of the things that I did get involved with, about the New York City, is an organization that deals with women's employment and the time that they are dealing with breast cancer. But think of this in terms of any chronic illness. If you were employed and you need to go for regular treatment, you need to know how to be able to speak to your resources department, you need to know what patient rights are, you need to know when you can ask for something that is an accommodation. All of those things are important. So as I was getting involved with Medivivor and ultimately with the Department of Defense funding, they wanted us to be able to say, this is a great treatment, but it's not going to work unless somebody lives in a big city. Or it's not going to work unless someone has a gut and isn't employed, or doesn't have children, or all of those kinds of things. If they're poor, if they're marginalized in there, and any other part of their life, even though the treatment might be free, it would be so intrusive to their lifestyle that it wouldn't be a good thing for them to do. And so I've done that now for four years. And I once told you, I spoke to a women's group last week, and one of the things I told them, if you think about cancer treatment, or in fact, many treatments, we used to deal with what we saw on the outside of the body. Because that was the first thing that doctors would have noticed centuries ago. And then we started to work with, well, let's go one layer deeper, and look at what's immediately under this scan. Okay? If you think now, now we have gone deeper and deeper and deeper, and for the last three years, basically all of the research that proposals I'm reading have to do with the cellular level. What is happening with our DNA? What is happening with immunotherapy? What can we do to be able to replace a part of your genetic code that will so that you are building a national natural immunity to the cancer cells that are trying to invade your body, or working just on the surface of a cell? I mean, I have a tiny sand science background, a degree in chemistry, which is decades old. I have the imagination to be able to see in my mind's eye what's going on. So what we're talking about does not take someone away from their regular work. It doesn't take them away from their family. In other words, samples of blood or tissue would definitely be necessary to be able to start the process of dreaming for someone. But basically, they haven't got anything else to do but wait for the scientists and researchers to be able to formulate the DNA or the immune system or whatever else they're working on, and then to be able to inject that. We're not talking about people who are going to be violently ill from chemotherapy. We're not talking about people who are going to lose their hair. I mean, I know people, when they think about cancer treatment, they always think that, right? Yes, they hear things about losing their sensation in their fingers and their toes and not being able to work. All of that starts to go. So we start to talk about chronic illness. All of these newer treatments are going to stop cancer to a degree. There probably is no thing that is going to remove it 100 percent because there are signals in our body that some of us, under certain circumstances, and I was a chemist, but I know I was in a toxic environment from time to time. Those are triggers. Stress, medication, alcohol, tobacco, chemicals in the air, water, and food, all of those things are triggers. So we talk about chronic illness. Mine is the same. It was kicked off by stress, and like you, my grade school was behind a golf course that they used Roundup on that was the public golf course. There are dozens of us from that neighborhood in suburb of Detroit that have neurological conditions. So that's why we start to talk about a different kind of a chronic illness. We're not talking about something like diabetes, which is most often an inherited trait that you will have throughout your life and you will treat it every day. We're talking about a disease that could have come and reared its ugly head because there was a little quirk in your genetic makeup. And once a trigger set it off, what it does is starts a sequence of things. So, you know, you very often people have cancer cells that are dormant in their bloodstream or their tissues that you won't see them. Once that trigger is there, then you're going to see that things will emerge. And so the treatments we're going to see are going to help us to be able to take care of that bodily. The last thing I want to mention is mindset, because I think the most important thing is that this can run the whole gamut. From people who are atheist to people who are highly religious, there is a way for people to be able to use mindfulness or prayer or reflection or quietness of quietness to be able to say, I am going to take all the stress out of my mind that doesn't need to be there. I'm going to place myself in a position where I'm going to be more relaxed. So those are other things that we can do so that we are creating within ourselves a sense of wholeness, of well-being, so that it almost prevents the additional burden of illness to have to be born in any unusual way. Yeah. And that's what we're talking about. Mindset, mindfulness, changing your lifestyle, making shifts, because it affects things. Why did she take out processed foods? You guys know you're reading all of this. Processed foods are not real, and they are not good for our bodies. Instant packages of things that you pick up. No. Going back to whole foods is really important. Eating less red meat is more important. Looking to legumes and looking at vegetables differently and looking at it for protein and all of these things, that's what helps people who are living with a chronic condition, cancer, MS, RA, anything, even diabetes, they have to shift and change. We want you to understand that you have the power, like we did, to make those changes, to shift yourself. We want you to take advantage of that because it's so important to own yourself, to live your life. That's why I have such wonderful people on. To have cancer happen to yourself, breast cancer, and then to have your daughter have it, and to pass away. Loretta keeps going. It's 20 years because there's a mission. Thank goodness she's as smart as she is and she keeps going like an energizer bunny. She is part of reading those studies as someone in the military. I love that we have people who want to give back to society to make a difference. I will tell you, somebody who's come almost into my life, last week I was told by one of the women who attended the talk that I gave, she got someone and started talking about what I had said. It turns out this woman also is one of the reviewers for the Department of Defense. They're going to be getting together. There are more people out there who can believe actually when they do an orientation, there's almost 300 women who were involved, a couple of men with breast cancer too. There are a lot of people who are very generously giving back for all of us. That's important. It can extend. Now Loretta is, she's great. She's on a lot of boards and does a lot of things and leads things. One of the things that I love is she's working on autism now and looking at autism in 2025 because we know we've learned what autism is. We've talked about spectrum, all of these words that are shifting, changing again. But you know what? My husband's older brother has autism and we used to talk about like, oh, the people who are really far along, that's we have to treat. What about the people who have it mildly, are functioning? We have to look at that and that she's involved with autism in that way. I am grateful. I am very grateful and we all try to take our position and some of us love to pay it forward and even paying it forward with explaining and living your lifestyle in a way that is as healthy as you can be with a chronic condition. That is helpful because other people are hopeful seeing you. Right Loretta? Absolutely. We need to share the hope. We need to share the positive things that we can. Because people are beyond my diagnosis. I am not my diagnosis. I have a diagnosis, but beyond my diagnosis is my life. Thank you Loretta. I really appreciate your time. What a pleasure and have a great day and everyone will see you next week. Loretta Donovan, we'll have you back to talk about some other things since you're involved with so many health things. Take care. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Beyond the Diagnosis. If something we talked about today resonated with you, if you're craving deeper understanding, better support, we just want to know you're not alone on this journey. Make sure to subscribe to my free substack at michelleweston.substack.com. That's where I share personal insights, expert takeaways, and extra resources to help you stay informed, empowered, and one step closer to the clarity you deserve. And if you found this episode helpful, leave a review or share it with someone who needs to hear it. Your voice helps this message go further. Until next time, keep asking questions, keep trusting yourself, and keep going beyond the diagnosis.