Cheryl Reed's morning routine starts like that of millions of other mothers around the country. She makes breakfast for her 8-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter, piles them into a minivan and drops them off at school.

It's the next stop that sets Reed apart from other women. Three weeks a month, she heads to the infusion center at the Emory Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta, Georgia, for chemotherapy treatments.

Reed, 40, has breast cancer; not just any form of the disease, but a rare, aggressive and difficult to treat version called triple negative.

Of the estimated 180,000 women who learn they have invasive breast cancer this year in the United States, about 15 percent will have triple negative. [read more]