Lourdes and her husband, Miguel, on the back porch of their New Jersey home.
Lourdes Mosquera and her family emigrated from Lima, Peru, in 1980 in search of specialized medical care for her young daughter, who’d been badly burned in an accident back home. Despite intending to return to Peru, Mosquera and her family stayed in the United States and put down roots in New Jersey, and she and her husband became a hard-working housekeeping team.
“We worked nonstop. It was always work, work, work,” Mosquera says. “But I always went for my yearly physical and mammogram.”
It was during one of those routine mammograms that her local doctors in New Jersey noticed an area of dense tissue, which was biopsied a year later and determined to be cancerous.
“They immediately offered me surgery, but I didn’t feel close to those doctors,” she says. “The appointment was so fast. I didn’t understand much. Something inside me said to look for someone else.”
A friend recommended her to Roshni Rao, MD, Chief of the Breast Surgery Program at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center. And “since day one,” says Mosquera, “it was like my mother was talking to me.”
Mosquera “came to us with a very early diagnosis of breast cancer,” says Dr. Rao, “and she was scared and was concerned that she wouldn’t get through the surgery.”
Indeed, Mosquera gets emotional remembering her experience with Dr. Rao ahead of her lumpectomy.
“I didn’t want to get the surgery. I didn’t know if I would be OK after the surgery, but she went through all the explanations again,” Mosquera says with tears in her eyes. “She explained that now, early, is the time to get the surgery. I trusted Dr. Rao 100 percent. And everything she said would happen did, and I went home at the end of the day.”
Dr. Rao says that Mosquera “did fantastic” and benefited from being able to receive intraoperative radiation at the time of her surgery—something she could only get at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia.
Five years later, Mosquera is cancer-free. “Dr. Rao really changed my life,” she says. “For any woman that I meet, I say, ‘Continue doing your mammograms, but if you need it, get care immediately and go to Dr. Rao.’”