Head of Hoag’s Women’s Health Institute shares her battle with triple-negative breast cancer

By Dr. Allyson Brooks, Ginny Ueberroth Executive Medical Director Endowed Chair, Women’s Health Institute at Hoag

I've spent 30 years building things at Hoag. Programs. Institutes. Policies. A vision for what women's cancer care could look like if we were bold enough to reimagine it from the ground up. I thought I understood this world completely.

Then I got on the ride.

Anyone who has been through cancer knows what I mean. It's not a journey—that word is too gentle, too linear. It's Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: exhilarating, terrifying, disorienting, and utterly out of your control. One moment you're at the wheel of something you've spent a lifetime building. The next, you're strapped in, hands off, hurtling forward. That's what a diagnosis of triple-negative breast cancer felt like for me. And I am someone who thought she knew exactly what to expect.

I did not.

"A zebra among horses."

More than a decade ago, when I championed Hoag's then-revolutionary shift to site-specific cancer programs, I used that phrase to explain why the approach mattered. Cancer treatment can make a person feel like a zebra among horses—walking into an infusion center looks and feels entirely different depending on whether you have breast cancer, lung cancer, or pancreatic cancer. Each person's experience is its own, and care should reflect that.

Radical at the time, disease-site cancer care is now the standard nationwide. So, when I walked into the Hoag Family Cancer Institute for the first time as a patient, I expected to feel like I belonged. A horse among horses. What I discovered is that my diagnosis had turned me into a zebra after all—something different than I used to be, still learning my own new markings. But through the programs and policies we built here, I have found a place where showing those stripes feels safe.

From architect to patient

In November 2025, I felt a lump in my breast.

Despite everything I knew—30 years of clinical knowledge, every conversation I'd ever had with patients about acting quickly—I second-guessed myself. The thoughts will sound familiar to any woman who has been in this moment: It can't be cancer. I just had my mammogram 10 months ago. I don't want to worry anyone. It's probably nothing.

I waited two weeks before calling my doctor. Let that land: the woman who helped design Hoag's "No Sleepless Nights" program—the one that guarantees women imaging and a biopsy within 24 hours of calling—waited two weeks. That is what fear does. That is what denial does. It doesn't spare the people who know better. If anything, it finds us and sits down next to us like an old friend.

When I did call, my team saw me within 24 hours. Ten days after that, I was sitting in a chair in the infusion center, beginning neoadjuvant chemotherapy for triple-negative breast cancer—the most aggressive subtype, one that doesn't respond to hormone therapy and requires a longer, more aggressive treatment path.

I knew the science. I knew the care was the best available anywhere in the world. And somehow, none of that knowledge fully prepared me for what it felt like to be the patient.

The agony and the ecstasy

Here is what no one tells you about going through cancer when you are used to being in charge: the hardest part isn't the diagnosis. It isn't even the treatment. It's the loss of the version of yourself who always had a plan.

I would not accept help. When people offered to sit with me in the infusion center, I said, "Oh no, I've got this—I’ll just bring my laptop and write emails." Meals, errands, company—all declined. I had spent decades telling women that cancer is hard but that women can do hard things. What I had somehow omitted from that equation is that doing hard things doesn't mean doing them alone.

A friend finally said it plainly: it's okay to let people in. It sounds simple. It wasn't.

There is agony in this ride that I will not minimize. I was devastated when I learned I would lose my hair. Some days in the infusion chair are long and hard and lonely in a way that windows overlooking eucalyptus trees can only partially soften. There are people in those rooms at every stage of illness, with different prognoses and different stories. I am humbled by them in a way I could not have anticipated before I sat among them.

And there is ecstasy, too—or at least something that rhymes with it. Silver linings that surprise you. The stylist who transforms losing your hair into a kind of Rodeo Drive reinvention, all wigs and scarves and unexpected excitement about a new look. The five-minute foot massage in the chemo chair that sounds small and is not small at all. The neighbor I ran into in the cancer center who, when she asked if I was giving a tour and I told her I was a patient, revealed that she is one, too. Two women who didn't know they were on the same ride, finding each other in the place that has my fingerprints on it—and the fingerprints of so many others who believed in what it could be.

Cancer has forced me to slow down in ways I would never have chosen. My professional ambitions, the Sun Family Campus in Irvine, the future I was still designing—all of it receded for a season. What I found in that slower, harder, more open version of my life surprised me. My heart opened. My relationships deepened. I became, for perhaps the first time, genuinely fluent in receiving care rather than only giving it.

From knowledge to gratitude

In health care, we talk constantly about quality and excellence. What I have learned in these first months of my cancer journey is that the intangibles matter just as much—maybe more. The familiarity of faces. The light coming through full-length windows at the right time of day. The feeling, when you are most vulnerable, that the place around you was built for exactly this moment.

Maya Angelou said that people will forget what you said and forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel. I understand that differently now. I feel cared for and cared about. I feel safe. And because of that, I trust. What I have learned, as both the architect and the patient, is that strength and healing require all three. You cannot shortcut your way to any of them. You must build them, one interaction, one moment, one fingerprint at a time.

We built something wonderful here at Hoag. I always knew that. Now I know it differently—the way you know something when it has held you up.

Cancer is hard. Women can do hard things. And we don't have to do them alone.

That's still true. It just took becoming a patient to understand what it really means.

Learn more about the Women’s Health Institute.