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Journalism professor celebrates 26 years cancer-free

“Life is short, eat dessert first,” read the sign greeting Nancy Matlack Williams, Utah State journalism professor, as she walked into Sizzler right after learning she had breast cancer.

“My husband and I immediately took ourselves to lunch to mull this over,” she said. The tragically ironic timing of the restaurant’s advertisement was not lost on Williams.

“I skipped the salad and I just went straight to dessert,” she said, laughing.

Williams was 42 years old when she found a lump in her breast.

“I remember I found my lump myself,” she said. “I was doing a regular, routine exam.”

Williams said she didn’t worry and assumed it was a harmless mass caused by extra fluid in the breast corresponding with menstruation.

“I thought, ‘This is probably a cyclic thing; I’ll see about it next month.’ I put it on the calendar to remember, and the next month I checked it and it seemed bigger to me,” she said.

That was when Williams visited her doctor, expecting a reassurance of nothing amiss. He did not give the response she hoped for.

“He just went white,” Williams said. “I knew immediately. His face lost all color and he said, ‘I can’t believe we haven’t had a mammogram for you but you get over to the hospital right now, I’ll call radiology and get one.’ So I did. And I mean, I knew from his face that it was going to be bad, and it was.”

She said she still remembers feeling like a “biology specimen” during that first hospital visit.

“My memories from that time, which it’s now been 26 years that I’ve survived, were me perched on an exam table in radiology with six male doctors standing in front of me while I’m naked from the waist up and holding my hands up in the air,” she said. “They’re all peering at me and going, ‘I can’t believe that we can’t see an outline of something this big.’ That’s a scary thing to hear.”

Williams’ tumor measured between six and seven centimeters or about two and a half inches. Diagnosed with stage three breast cancer, she entered the operating room at Logan Regional Hospital three days later.

“I didn’t know when I went in there what they were going to do,” she said. “I had to sign my life away. … I knew there was a chance that I would wake up without a breast, and that is what happened. It was just done so quickly.”

The tumor’s size and location required a complete mastectomy. Though her body was then cancer-free, Williams opted to undergo chemotherapy and radiation therapy. She found motivation in her youngest child, who had just turned five years old.

“I said, ‘I just want to live long enough that I can see her through school,'” Williams said. “I could’ve said, ‘I’m going to take my chances.’ But something told me at that point to just go for it, because I didn’t want to have it come back five years later and think that I could’ve done something that might have stopped it.”

For the next 11 months, Williams received seven months of chemotherapy followed by six weeks of radiation.

“There isn’t really any way to describe the fatigue that comes with chemo,” she said. “You hear everybody talk about it, but even if you’ve just been bone tired sometime else in your life, there isn’t anything like it. You’re like bone tired times ten, to the tenth power.”

The overwhelming exhaustion from therapy affected Williams’ family.

“It was hardest on our son,” she said. “When I got cancer, he was 12, and it was an awful, awful time for me to get cancer. When you’re 12, you’re supposed to be working on your independence from your parents. … It’s really unfair for your parent to be threatening to die on you when you’re supposed to be wanting them to go because then you don’t want them to go. It’s difficult; we all got through it but it was really a hard time for reasons I didn’t anticipate.”

Holly Purcell, a senior in communication disorders, was 8 years old when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in her 30s.

“She never really talked about it, and I didn’t even realize that she had had breast cancer until I was probably like 15 or 16,” Purcell said. “She kept it from us I think because she didn’t want to scare us.”

Like Williams, Purcell’s mother found the pea-sized lump in her breast through a self-exam.

“It was small enough and they found it early enough that they could just cut it out,” Purcell said. “She had surgery two or three months later, and when they got to it in surgery it had metastasized to the size of a golf ball. … She caught it right in time before it could cause serious problems. She got lucky and just went to the doctor when she was having symptoms.”

Williams also considers herself lucky.

“I didn’t do anything that should’ve predisposed me to getting breast cancer,” she said. “I loved vegetables, I ate my broccoli, I was jogging. … I was really lucky to survive, and that’s the thing. People think that if they do everything right, it isn’t going to come back and hit them.”

While recovering, Williams volunteered for Reach to Recovery, an American Cancer Society program for breast cancer patients and survivors. Since then, Reach to Recovery grew to a nationwide network of support, said Shannon Hinckley, ACS mission delivery specialist for Utah and western Wyoming.

“When it first started, we had local volunteers in every community,” Hinckley said. “Now the program is nationwide. We are better able to match the patient with somebody who’s had the same treatment or the same care or the same surgery and sometimes they will actually talk to two or three individuals.”

Hinckley began working with the society 12 years ago and has seen the effects of cancer firsthand through several family members and friends.

“Anyone, and it doesn’t matter who they are, is going to be touched by cancer,” she said.

Cancer is a game of roulette, Williams said, and awareness, not paranoia, is key.

“If you get too afraid of it, if you really get yourself in a dither about ‘will I or will I not get breast cancer,’ you could ruin your life that way,” she said. “I told my doctors, ‘Don’t tell me what my chances are, I don’t want to know my percentage.’ For me, either I live or I die, and that’s 100 percent. I have to be 100 percent. Furthermore, even if you give me the odds and say, ’85 percent of people with your stage of cancer in five years will be dead,’ I don’t need to know that because I intend to be in the 15 percent.” And she still is, 26 years later.

For more information on Reach to Recovery and other resources, contact the ACS at 1-800-227-2345 or www.cancer.org. Breast cancer survivors interested in volunteering with Reach to Recovery can contact Hinckley at sharon.hinckley@cancer.org.

noelle.johansen@aggiemail.usu.edu
Twitter: @broelle