Decoding Your Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Guest Bio: Karen Tedesco, MD & Allison Boyanovski

Karen Tedesco, MD, is a medical oncologist at New York Oncology Hematology. She leads the Hereditary Cancer Risk Assessment Program and serves as vice president of the NYOH Board of Directors. Dr. Tedesco is a member of the U.S. Oncology Breast Cancer Research Committee and the U.S. Oncology Genetic Risk Evaluation and Testing Steering Committee. She completed her medical degree at the SUNY Health Science Center at Syracuse and completed her internship and residency at the University of Michigan and her fellowship with Vanderbilt University. Dr. Tedesco is married to a gastroenterologist and has three children.


At age 34 and a new mother, Allison Boyanovski was shocked when she discovered a lump on her right breast.  As a healthcare professional herself (Allison works at Jersey City Medical Center), she knew to monitor the lump and made plans to visit her doctor as soon as she could. After receiving a diagnosis with HER2-positive* early breast cancer, Allison says her professional experience helped her to understand and chart a path forward. Allison started a regimen of HER2-targeted therapies prior to undergoing a surgery to remove the tumor and continued treatment through January of 2015. She is proud of her optimism and of “not wasting any time or giving up,” but at the same time, she says tells others facing the same situation that it’s okay “to be sad, mad and disappointed when you get the diagnosis.”