In 2007, Lea Del Pietro Doherty sat close to her sister, Angela Del Pietro, trying to send her courage as Angela told her daughters she had breast cancer. Lea watched the girls’ young, softly formed faces. Their grandmother, Mary Rose Del Pietro, had survived breast cancer four years earlier. That time, Lea had gone with her mother to Tony’s for dinner, “and we had some wine and some tears and chatted about it as women.” Angela’s daughters, though, were younger, and so was Angela, which made this conversation even harder.
Almost as hard as the conversation Lea had a few months ago with her own three girls, ages 7, 8, and 12.
Lea had been tested for the BRAC gene and didn’t have it, which was a relief. She had a mammogram every six months, just to be safe. Unlike many women, she did the monthly self exams.
And when she did one in late September, she felt something.
The doctor said it was probably nothing; her April mammogram had been perfect. But she had another, as well as an ultrasound. In three different areas, there were changes.
On her 12-year-old daughter’s birthday, November 22, Lea had three biopsies.
She was scared.
“But I’m always scared,” she adds. “I’m always worried. Because I never wanted to have that talk with my daughters.
“I always kind of knew it was going to happen—until I was sitting in the doctor’s office with my husband, and they said, ‘Your test results. Come on in, so we can talk about your test results.’ When the doctor said the words out loud, it was like a freight train. I wasn’t shocked—but it’s still shocking.”
She gentled the stark announcement as best she could for her daughters, then instructed them to “stay off the internet. Ask me.” Her oldest went silent. “You need to ask me five questions,” Lea insisted.
Once Ava managed one question, more poured out.
Lea showed the girls what double mastectomy scars would look like—not with graphic photos, but using sketches she found online. “The girls are always with us in the restaurant”—Lea and her husband, chef Brian Doherty, are partners with her brother Marc Del Pietro and his wife in the Block restaurants—“so they know how to talk to adults, and we treat them with the respect we want them to show adults. I know they’ll look on the internet, but I wanted to tell them things first.”
Lea had the surgery a week before Christmas. By then, Ava was asking really well thought out questions, ready to support her mother through whatever came next.
Which turned out to be chemo and radiation, because the cancer had spread to two lymph nodes.
The threat of breast cancer had terrified Lea for years. Now she’d confronted it. “My other scariest thing was, I didn’t want to have to have treatment afterward,” she adds ruefully. “But you just have to keep going forward.”
“The hardest part has been people treating me a little bit differently, saying, ‘Oh, let me pick this up for you.’ I don’t feel sick,” Lea tells me in January. She’s home healing, getting her strength back before starting the post-surgery treatment. “But you realize people really are kind, which is such a lovely thing to find out.”
Brian’s been “amazing,” she says. “He comes home and does things for me that I need done and won’t ask anyone else to do.”
So now, all she had to worry about was getting through the treatment. She’d been at her sister’s side during her chemo: “You see those strong women,” bravely cracking jokes as they receive the drugs. “But then you go home, and the real fight begins. Just recovering from all that toxicity—that you need, even though it’s breaking you down—” She trails off.
Then she brightens.
“Brian’s a chef, and we have access to such great farms. He’ll make sure there’s vegetable broth and leafy greens and help get sugar out of the house. They say sugar feeds cancer.”
For the girls’ sake, though, she’s not going to banish sugar altogether: “They’re still living their lives.” As for Lea, although she’ll miss the occasional glass of wine—“They say alcohol is not great, either”— eating well is getting a lot easier. “You just see it differently. That glazed donut? Not worth it. Now it’s about more than my jeans size.”
Losing her long black hair, though—that’ll hurt. “I always hated it until now! It’s big, and thick, and I have to straighten it. But I’m going to miss that very much. I went wig shopping with my best girlfriend before lunch, and I didn’t think it would be as emotional as it was.” She sighs. “I still haven’t found a wig I’d wear. But there’s always the Hermes scarf.”
Why be so open about all this, when the scars are still raw?
“My mom’s was very—you didn’t talk about it,” Lea says quietly. “I wear this as a badge of honor. I’m not afraid for my girls to say their mom has it.” She pauses, then says with intensity: “I just want women to know their bodies. I’ve had girlfriends say, ‘I’ve never had a mammogram.’ Are you kidding me? I’m only 44, not the age where you’d expect this, and I found something that easily could’ve just been scar tissue from a previous biopsy. Trust your instincts. And if your doctor says, ‘I don’t think you need a mammogram,’ say you want one.
“It’s totally treatable. It’s totally survivable.”
