Community Corner After Triple-Negative Breast Cancer, RivCo Rancher ‘Stronger & Braver’ She’s back to caring for her animals and appreciating life one year after being treated at Loma Linda University Medical Center, Murrieta. Reply
Menifee rancher Jessica Wanhoff survives triple-negative breast cancer in aggressive, rare treatment at Loma Linda University Medical Center- Murrieta. (Photo Credit: Courtesy Jessica Wanhoff)
MURRIETA, CA — Triple-negative breast cancer. It’s not a diagnosis anyone wants to hear, let alone a 36-year-old local ranch owner, Jessica Wanhoff.
She is on the other side of surgery and treatment and well into her recovery—with no reoccurrence or evidence of cancer since Aug. 2022. This week, Wanhoff shared her story to urge others to pay attention to their body and thank the oncologists at Loma Linda University Medical Center Murrieta for helping her beat the aggressive stage three breast cancer. “I came out knowing I am a lot stronger and braver than I thought,” Wanhoff said, reflecting on her journey with Lisa Aubry in a recent report for LLMC.
It was 2021 when she received the news that her unexplained pain that surpassed negative mammograms was cancer. Based on family history, Wanhoff knew she was predisposed to breast cancer, but hearing the news was devastating. “First, everything went quiet,” Wanhoff said. Then came the tears. At last came the plan for fighting her cancer with groundbreaking treatments. “Once I received the news, I cried my eyes out for a minute, and then an oncologist broke it down,” Wanhoff described in a video interview. “You pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and you just keep going.”
Dr. Sharon Lum, the Loma Linda University Health Department of Surgery chair, discussed the diagnosis. “In triple-negative breast cancer, the cancer cells don’t have receptors for estrogen, progesterone, and a protein called HER2. While the triple-negative makes the cancer unresponsive to specific therapies, it also opens the door to different treatment approaches,” Lum said.
During treatment, simple things became hard at Wanhoff’s Menifee ranch, where she is responsible for three horses, three cats, and two dogs.” Just watering horses and feeding the farm animals became a struggle,” she said. “You will have good days, you will have bad days, you will have moments of sheer terror, but you have to keep going.” Wanhoff received a type of antibody therapy and radiation, according to Lum. They used “all the tools in the toolkit” for Wanhoff’s care.
