Eileen Z. Fuentes
Breast Cancer Survivor
Wellness, Lifestyle and Integrative Cancer Coach

Eileen Z. Fuentes has been in healthcare administration for over 14 years. In 2008, at just 34 years old, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent aggressive treatment, which led to many unpleasant complications including a life threatening blood clot in her heart. While she came across skilled and compassionate healthcare workers, she was awakened to how deficient the medical establishment’s treatment model is but realized that she could overcome these challenges by augmenting the traditional treatment with complementary approaches, diet and lifestyle modifications. After successfully completing her treatment, she hit the ground running and took the appropriate action to turn her newfound passion into something more. She was awarded a scholarship by The Palette Fund, which allowed her to obtain her certification as an Integrative Cancer Care Educator at the Smith Farm Center for the Healing and the Arts, in Washington, D.C. She attended The Institute for Integrative Nutrition and became a board certified Holistic Health Coach. She completed The Harold P. Freeman Patient Navigation Program via a scholarship from the Livestrong Foundation. And most recently she completed the Summer Intensive Cooking Course at The Natural Gourmet Institute for Food and Health. Eileen is a member of The Association for Drugless Practitioners and is the wellness contributor for UptownCollective.com.
After two years of training, Eileen founded and led the first ever Womens Wellness Series for the Clinical Breast Cancer Program at Columbia University Medical Center, specifically aimed at targeting the underserved community of Washington Heights (New York City). This program became quite successful and was featured in the Manhattan Times. Soon after, journalist Linda Abi Assi turned her story into a short documentary entitled, From Illness to Wellness. Eileen was an invited speaker at the annual breast cancer awareness symposium, Bridging the Gap: Promoting Breast Cancer Prevention, Screening and Wellness. She served as the keynote speaker at the National Cancer Survivor Day celebration at New York Presbyterian Hospital and the 8th Annual Breast Cancer Survivor’s Holiday Celebration hosted by The Hudson Perinatal Consortium. She has even started her own company, The SPEACH, Inc., which stands for The Self Promotion, Empowerment, Advocacy, and Care Haven whose aim is to enhance hospital services, educate women facing health challenges and the public in general to self advocate and to take ownership of their health and wellbeing.

In September 2008, I was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer at 34, underwent a bilateral mastectomy with reconstruction. I had 4.5 months of chemotherapy which included a clinical trial drug Avastin. The port and Avastin ultimately caused a blood clot in my heart. In April of 2009, I completed both chemotherapy and the blood clot had disappeared. I completed reconstruction in May of 2009.