Battling Breast Cancer: Building Courage with a Community

Lisa Nakamura is fighting back with a community of friends, supporters and family on her side—refusing to let breast cancer define her life.

“I tell my friends, ‘I have cancer, but I am not cancer,’” she said. “This is what we are dealing with right now, but this is not who I am.”

Nakamura, 46, of  is co-owner of Steve DeMasco's  in Regent Square. Currently receiving chemotherapy treatment for stage two breast cancer, which she was diagnosed with in July, Nakamura is seeking all of the love and support people have to offer and is actively making sure she doesn’t try to go it alone.

“I was feeling great and there were no symptoms,” she said. “I was working out hard and we had just got back from vacation.”

That’s when she noticed the lumps in her armpit. Nakamura has regularly received mammograms in the past, but decided to visit her primary care physician, who told her the lumps could be cysts—but to get it checked now.

“That started everything very quickly,” Nakamura said. “At the ultrasound, they saw that there were the lymph nodes and two tumors in the left breast—it was very bewildering and very fast.”

Nakamura was alone at the time of her diagnosis. Her husband was in central China travelling, while her daughter, Lauren, a senior in high school, had just gotten on a plane that day to visit her aunt in New Hampshire.

“When Magee called, I was shocked,” Nakamura said. “I pretty much just fell apart because at that point, I had no information on how progressed it was, and everything went through my mind—am I going to see Lauren get married, am I going to meet my grandchildren some day, and everything comes to this little pinpoint of existence where you are just so scared all of a sudden.”

She called a friend and told her she needed someone to be with her.

“We just cried and cried and cried and I couldn’t get my head around what I do next,” she said. “That night, I went into the dojo and asked my friend Dave to teach the class. I said, 'I have to be here right now but I can’t teach the class,' and he knew what was going on and he said, 'I don’t think I can do this,' because he was really upset. Steve was gone but he did it and we had a great work out. I was really up front with the students and told them that night and it was very emotional.”

One of the biggest challenges within the first week of her breast cancer diagnosis was telling her daughter the news.

“I called my sister and Lauren had just gotten there an hour ago, and they turned around and flew back the next day,” Nakamura said. “Karen came down for a week and that was huge. Trying to tell Steve with a 12-hour time difference was hard—he was very upset and wanted to come home right away but I told him to stick with the itinerary because he would have gotten back just a day earlier.”

Her team at Magee Women’s Hospital kicked in right away, assembling a group of people to help her beat cancer with a surgeon, oncologist and others. After the medical treatment plan was in place, it was time for Nakamura to turn a corner from fear to facing breast cancer and beating it head on.

It was time for an “Empower Happy Hour” with some of her closest female friends.

“I decided what we needed to do was have all of my women friends over and get drunk,” she said with a laugh. “So we did. I put a Facebook invite out and had 14 or 15 women come over, told them to wear something fabulous and to bring a fabulous dish.”

After too many shots of tequila and giving cancer the middle finger, Nakamura said she was ready.

“I kind of needed to turn that corner to say, 'OK, there’s joy and there is energy and it’s going to be OK,'” she said. “I have gotten so much energy from my women friends.”

Now in the middle of chemo treatments, Nakamura is leaving killing cancer up to Magee, as she does everything she can to keep her spirit lifted, body strong, and her emotional strength up to par. She gains support from the Shaolin Studios community, where many people regularly help her family to cook dinner, a pilates instructor, her personal trainer, Diane Scanlon at Keystone Health Club, and regularly receives reiki treatment from the

“It takes time, it’s tiring—it’s hard to understand what chemo does to your body because it just takes you out,” she said. “I am a really high energy person and it just lays you out. So I thought OK, understanding that, what do I need to do to keep going?”

And through it all, Nakamura is recognizing the hidden blessings in her hardest year yet. While she has a consulting business that requires her to travel, her clients are helping her to hold on to the job by staying at home, which has allowed her to spend more time with her daughter.

“This is her senior year and she is doing all of the college applications and she wanted to go away to school and her immediate reaction was that she would stay close to home and I said no,” she said. “This will be over in a year and I have a year at home with her. You look for these little things to be grateful for.”

The most important thing she can focus on now is working to stay strong and actively seeking the support of others.

“People want to help—they want to be able to take the pain away,” she said. “Usually I say, ‘I got it,’—but now I say, ‘I would love for you to make a meal for me.’”

Nakamura wants all women to be aware of their family histories of cancer and to pay attention to their bodies.

“Be very proactive and when you find something that doesn’t feel right, don’t pass it off,” she said. “I had a month or two months where I thought I pulled a muscle—we found it at stage two. Breast cancer is so common and so prevalent—get it checked. I am so glad I didn’t wait any longer than I did.”