“This tiny ice cream chomping whippersnapper turns 24 today,” she wrote for the post. “When/how did this happen? Happy birthday darling @charlie_hall and thanks for kinda sharing your cone with me. Love you infinitely.”

Louis-Dreyfus was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer in September 2017. She underwent six rounds of chemotherapy and a double mastectomy to treat her disease, and now she looks at life a bit differently. In a previous interview with Variety, Louis-Dreyfus reflected on her experience with cancer and how that has affected her view of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I had no sense of arrogance whatsoever about [the pandemic],”  Louis-Dreyfus told Variety. “When you're face-to-face with your mortality in the way that cancer takes you there the pandemic I found to be strangely the same.”

So Many Ways to Celebrate Life

Other breast-cancer-surviving mothers can probably relate to Louis-Dreyfus’s outlook on life after cancer. Actress and singer Olivia Newton-John, for example, knows how to make the most of life in spite of a cancer battle. The Grease star, 72, is living with advanced breast cancer, but she’s determined to keep making memories with her 34-year-old daughter, Chloe Rose Lattanzi.

In fact, the mother-daughter duo released a song earlier this year. Their duet, "Window in the Wall," is about coming together in hard times: Looking for a window in the wall / Maybe we can see the other side / And find we're not so different after all / Looking for a window in the wall.

"My mom and I, we've worked together, God, since I was like 8, " Lattanzi said on the Tamron Hall show. "We're both creative people, so getting to sing together and write together and create and spread a message of love.”

For Newton-John, the song served as a reminder for people to be more loving. She said she was grateful to be able to record with her daughter, and sing again a passion she wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep enjoying.

Progress for Breast Cancer

Although it’s not enough until everyone with breast cancer survives, it is encouraging to know that 90 percent of women who get breast cancer now survive 5 years after diagnosis.

Despite the huge trauma of the disease, it's an amazingly hopeful and exciting field, says SurvivorNet Medical Advisor, Dr. Elizabeth Comen. It's not just about the stage of your breast cancer. Hormones, biology, and genetics should all play a role in determining your treatment.

An Overview of Breast Cancer Treatment

“There are so many different ways that we can target and think about treating breast cancer patients, no matter what stage of disease that they’ve been diagnosed with.”

PARP inhibitors are a relatively new form of targeted therapy that can stop cancer cells from spreading by preventing them from repairing their damaged DNA, causing them to die. The FDA approved them for the treatment of BRCA-mutation-related metastatic breast cancer in 2018. Those kinds of cancers are more likely to be triple negative breast cancer, which can be more aggressive. Data has shown that women who received PARP inhibitors did better overall than patients who received chemotherapy.

"This broadens our arsenal for the treatment of triple negative breast cancer beyond conventional chemotherapy," says Dr. Heather McArthur, medical director of breast oncology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Patients can be born with BRCA mutations or acquire them over time.

"BRCA is responsible for DNA repair. So for people who have a mutation in the BRCA region, they're not able to successfully repair DNA damage, which is necessary for cell survival," explains Dr. McArthur. "So PARP inhibitors also interfere with DNA repair. So in people who already have a DNA repair defect (such as BRCA), to further impair those redundant repair mechanisms  has been a successful strategy in women with BRCA mutation carrier-related breast cancers."

PARP Inhibitors also have a future in early breast cancer treatment. A major new study published in The New England Journal of Medicine has found that olaparib (brand name: Lynparza) significantly extends life for women with early stage breast cancer classified as HER2 negative. Importantly, these women also have a genetic mutation known as BRCA.

Dr. Heather McArthur talks PARP inhibitors for metastatic breast cancer

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