When Vanessa Rissetto was told she had breast cancer last year, she sat in her car for four hours.

The registered dietitian and frequent TODAY Show nutrition expert had just taken her kids to the mall and was heading into the garage when she got the call. “I sent them upstairs,” she recalled to TODAY.com. “And I just sat in my car and freaked out for like four hours.”

She called her husband to explain her absence. “I thought, ‘Well, I have breast cancer.’ Please leave me alone. Bye.'”

Eventually, her best friend and cousin came to join her in the car and they would stay by her side throughout her treatments.

When the four hours were up, Rissetto refocused. For next year, quickly and with careful organization, she would invest in getting better. She intended to exhaust all available resources within her network of fellow physicians. She intended to ask as many questions as possible to as many experts as she could get hold of to map out the most effective course.

She wasn’t going to waste a second that could have been spent getting better. And so her work began.

Itching was the first sign that something was wrong

In the year leading up to her diagnosis, Rissetto knew something was wrong. Her breasts were extremely itchy. “I know itching can be a sign of cancer,” says Rissetto, so she went to the doctor.

Her first mammogram was normal. And when the itching persisted, Rissetto went back and got another. Again, it was clear. A friend of a friend who worked at the facility examined her personally and recommended she see a dermatologist. “Maybe it’s eczema,” he said.

The dermatologist gave her a steroid, but it didn’t help. For months afterward, Rissetto continued to excuse herself from fundraising events and summits for her company to rush to the bathroom and scratch herself.

Eventually, she switched to a new primary care doctor who sent her in for a third mammogram. This time the radiologist spotted something.

A not so surprising diagnosis

Three days after her third mammogram, Rissetto was called back because the radiologist discovered calcifications that required a biopsy. “It could be something, or it could be nothing,” the radiologist said.

Because her biopsy took place on the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend, Rissetto didn’t expect to hear about her results until the following week. But she got the call the next day, May 26, 2023. Rissetto had stage 1A HER2 triple-positive breast cancer. She was shaken but not surprised.

“This is kind of like, woo-woo, but I’d wake up in the middle of the night and I’d go to the bathroom and I’d look at myself in the mirror and I’d be like, ‘I have cancer.’ And I felt crazy because everyone was like” you don’t,’ but I knew something was wrong,” Rissetto says.

Thanks to another friend, Rissetto’s appointment with a surgeon had already been scheduled for the following Friday at Mount Sinai.

“This is the most well-researched breast cancer, and the treatments are curative,” Rissetto recalls surgeon Dr. Christina Weltz telling her at her first visit. She walked Rissetto through her treatment options, explaining that since she only had calcification and no tumor, she would have surgery first, followed by chemotherapy and radiation.

A treatment plan that worked for her

Although she was not opposed to this treatment plan, Rissetto sought additional opinions in the three weeks between her diagnosis and her scheduled surgery. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust her doctors, “I have to get the whole picture,” Rissetto says.

She first went to another hospital where a doctor led her through aggressive and prolonged treatment. It was “pretty intense,” Rissetto says, so she kept researching.

She wanted a treatment plan that wouldn’t completely derail the life she knew. She had only told a handful of people and wanted to keep it that way for now.

Her next stop was the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in New Jersey where she spoke with an oncologist who spent two hours mapping out the treatment options that would be the most effective and least disruptive to Rissetto’s life — similar to the plan the first oncologist at Mount Sinai had, Dr. Amy Tiersten already on.

Certain that she would receive the best treatment for her needs, Rissetto went back to Mount Sinai.

On June 14, 2023, Rissetto performed his first operation. When she woke up, doctors told her that the margins appeared to be clear, meaning there were no residual cancer cells left and that her lymph nodes were also clear of cancer. “And then, maybe a week later, my surgeon said, the pathologist doesn’t like these margins, and I need you to go back in,” Rissetto says. So she went back for re-excision on July 5th.

Then, on July 13, Rissetto began her first round of Kadcyla, a potent chemotherapy Tiersten prescribed that targeted Rissetto’s cancer and spared her hair. She received infusions every three weeks followed by 16 rounds of radiation. After a mammogram on Dec. 1, Rissetto’s doctors found no signs of cancer, and she finished her treatment in April.

grappling with a new reality

Now cancer-free, Rissetto lives a life that looks very different from the one she had always known.

Her oncologist, Dr. Tiersten, continues to monitor her health. “We obviously make sure she stays up to date with her breast imaging and her screening for other cancers,” she tells TODAY.com.

But while her physical health is in good shape, Rissetto can’t seem to shake the anxiety.

For a year she put on a brave face. Featured on the TODAY Showtaking care of her family and running her business after a morning of infusions no one knew she had had. And now that it’s over, the weight of her illness remains. “I think there’s always this low level of anxiety that I had cancer, and my body made cancer, and maybe it will make cancer again. And it sucks,” Rissetto admits.

She doesn’t smoke, she doesn’t drink alcohol, she doesn’t do drugs, she exercises daily. “I feel guilty if I don’t eat a vegetable for lunch,” she says. And this still happened.

A life-changing diagnosis can sometimes give a person a new perspective. They start living each day as if it were their last, embracing time with loved ones, taking risks they might otherwise have put off. And Rissetto has done that to some extent. She says her diet has become more plant-based, she’s working on managing her stressors and saying no more often to prioritize her needs, but she’s constantly frustrated.

“Sometimes I’m at dinner with my friends and I think, ‘Wow, they have mental peace and freedom because they wake up in the morning and they just think about the fact that their kids didn’t clean their room, right?’ I mean, I know they have stressors, but they don’t have to think about mortality the way I do, and it’s just really hard. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it to be honest.”

Rissetto now grapples with the tension that cancer has left behind: the tension between her health, her family, her livelihood and her legacy. When she was diagnosed, she remembers thinking, “(Fewer) than 100 black women have ever raised over a million dollars in venture funding and I’m one of them. I’ve raised $25 million; I started a company. I’ve these people who don’t normally believe in people who look like me and I have a whole team of hundreds of employees, and what does that mean? It’s all going to sh-t?”

She still has these thoughts every day.

In it Instagram posts where Rissetto announced her diagnosis earlier this month, she wrote that cancer would never be in her rearview mirror, but she is hopeful about the future of medicine that will contribute to the rest of her life. Although she doesn’t yet know what it means to move on, she knows there is a lesson in her experience and keeping it quiet didn’t help anyone. “Press your doctors,” advises Rissetto. “Get answers about your body.”

She is where she is today because she trusted her instincts when she felt something wasn’t right. She listened to her body and early detection saved her life.