Authors: Nancy G. Brinker
Between treatments, Suzy went home and took care of her family, continued her charity work, even did some modeling jobs, wearing a sassy little bobbed wig. I took Eric to Peoria to visit as often as I could, and Suzy
came up with any plausible excuse to make the occasion into a party for the cousins and neighbor kids. Watching them splash in a backyard pool or tear around playing cops and robbers, I was reminded how green and friendly Peoria is, what a gentle, generous oasis in the world. Suzy loved her life there, loved the people she met in the grocery store, Girl Scouts selling their cookies at the door, shade trees and picnic benches in the park. She was thrilled by the first snow flurries in winter and the first crocus in spring, the cricket-filled nights in summer, the blaze of color in autumn.
Suzy celebrated what would be her last birthday in October 1979.
The effects of treatment mounted with the effects of the steadily advancing cancer. Suzy continued to receive what I now recognize as palliative care—the kind of treatment that buys time with no real expectation of cure—and that time was precious. The whole family settled into a lifestyle that was contorted around all the big and small necessities of Suzy’s survival. It was laborious and stressful, but not entirely unhappy because every day that we had Suzy, we had reason to be glad. Suzy had plenty of reason to despair and feel sorry for herself, but she refused to be sucked into that swamp. She never talked about the possibility—the probability, in truth—that she was going to die. She made plans and spoke eagerly of everything she was going to do “when I get better.”
Suzy spent long hours in the pediatric cancer wards in Houston and Peoria. To this day, I hear from people who remember her reading to the children, talking to them about their treatment, listening to them when they needed to be heard, comforting them when they were afraid. She was deeply concerned for some of the other women receiving breast cancer treatment alongside her. Not all of them had the loving family and financial resources Suzy had. The more time she spent in waiting rooms, sitting on the floor when there weren’t enough chairs available, the more the assembly-line atmosphere rankled her; she found the dowdiness of the waiting rooms and chemo wards so depressing.
“Somebody needs to make this place a little more upbeat. It’s unbearably boring and sad, and that’s the last thing we need right now.” Suzy frowned at the framed dollar-store art. “There should be classical music and something beautiful and stimulating on the wall. Something to remind us how wonderful the world is outside all this.”
“Agreed,” I said, flipping through a seven-month-old magazine. “Some good books wouldn’t hurt.”
“Poetry, maybe. And a coat of paint on the walls. Maybe a cute little tea cart with ginger ale and shortbread and soda crackers to settle the stomach,” said Suzy. “It’s bad enough we have to come here. Maybe if it was a little more inviting, it would make people feel positive and hopeful. When I get better, I’m going to make some changes around here. We’ll do it together.”
I looked at her doubtfully. Frankly, I had no intention of setting foot in this place again.
“Oh, c’mon, Nanny. It’ll be fun,” said Suzy. “Promise me you’ll help.”
P
HUONG
-T
HAO
B
ARNES
is pretty in pink. She’s heard people say the color insults and sissifies the seriousness of breast cancer, but anyone wanting to say that to her face will have to catch up with her first.
“My dad met my mom in Vietnam on his second tour during the war,” says Thao. “He went back for a third tour just to get her and marry her. They’re both very strong people. I have the best parents in the world. I’ve always been proud that I’m half Vietnamese, and I love having a Vietnamese name.”
After graduating from Oklahoma State University with a degree in veterinary science, Thao joined the Stillwater, Oklahoma, Police Department. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans and left the NOPD with little more than a skeleton crew, Thao and five other officers used their leave time to go to Louisiana. They were deputized in a neighboring parish and sent into the city.
“The officers there needed a lot of help,” Thao says. “They were scattered and taking fire, having problems getting supplies. We split in half and went with a Special Forces-commanded guard group doing rescue missions afloat. It was pretty rough seeing all the bodies, the hopeless look about the people, all the pets left behind. We slogged around in that contaminated water for fifteen hours each day, trying to make sure no one was left behind.”
Thao received a Distinguished Service medal, and the experience changed her.
“It was an eye-opener. I watched the Coast Guard and thought they were pretty squared away. I love the mission of the Coast Guard. Their motto is
Semper Paratus
, which means ‘Always Ready.’ These people are out there saving lives, working that mission 24/7.”
Leaving her amazingly understanding husband, David, to care for her horses on their ranch, Thao enlisted. At twenty-seven, she was the oldest graduate at boot camp, but she left the youngsters in the dust, taking the Honor Graduate Award and clocking one of the fastest qualifying times for boat crew. She started training for her first triathlon. It was spring. Life was good. Thao was stunned when she felt the lump in her breast.
Just six months earlier, she’d passed a thorough medical exam with flying colors. There was no history of breast cancer in her family. She’d never smoked or taken a drink. Genetic testing revealed no genetic markers. But suddenly, inexplicably, Thao was facing a grim prognosis; the aggressive metastatic disease had already invaded her lymph nodes. She was Stage III and in for the fight of her life.
“At first, it was like …
disbelief
,” she says. “And then I got angry.”
Her physician was told to process her for discharge from the Coast Guard, but Thao begged for a chance to resume active duty after treatment. She went home on medical leave. Throughout a punishing course of chemotherapy, Thao dug deep for the energy to work in the Oklahoma recruiting office and raise money for Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Chemo was followed by mastectomy and radiation. Thao participated in Saddle Up for the Cure, riding her horse, Scoutland, in the American Quarter Horses Association’s World Championship Show while she was still recovering from surgery. Her brother, a certified chef, catered dinners for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure and the American Cancer Society Relay for Life. Soon the whole family was involved.
“My family was there for me every step of the way,” says Thao. “My husband is like the strongest guy in the world. My parents, brothers, sisters—they’re awesome.”
When Thao was handed her randomly selected number at the Oklahoma City Race for the Cure, she showed her mom and said, “How cool is that?”
It was her old badge number from the Stillwater PD.
Thao took her last hit of radiation in January 2008 and joined her Coast Guard unit in Los Angeles on light duty, requesting full duty every day until they gave it to her. In October, practically floating in all the pink of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, she took the top spot in Coast Guard Gunner’s Mate “A” school (weapons training that involves everything
from pistols to 76-mm weapon systems), beating out her classmates, all of whom were male and at least five years younger.
On a recent Facebook posting, Thao quoted Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” This remarkable young woman lives the calling “to protect and serve” and has been
semper paratus
for a host of challenges no one could have anticipated. When the massive 2010 earthquake shook Haiti to rubble and ash, Thao knew immediately where she needed to be, but she was awaiting results from MRIs and other tests she goes through every six months as part of her ongoing breast cancer follow-up.
Thao Barnes is, in short, a superhero. In pink.
Over the years, as breast cancer pink gained more and more exposure, the movement began to experience a backlash. It’s a law of physics: To every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. I have no retort to the accusation that we’re “pinkwashing the world,” because that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. People used to complain about red, but now we have safe-sex awareness and antiretroviral drugs for the treatment of AIDS. Red activists plan to stay on task until they’ve rendered themselves obsolete. We plan to follow their fabulous example. The condescension and pink bashing do occasionally hurt my feelings, but far worse, it hurts my mother’s feelings, and I’m ready to put up my dukes when anyone messes with Mommy. Mommy, however, is the first to remind me that, not unlike the Coast Guard, our mission is to save lives. If we’re to remain
semper paratus
, we have to keep our eye on the ball.
What can I say? As long as women are dying of breast cancer, we’re going to keep talking about it, and this is our style. It was Suzy’s style, and this is my tribute to her. I applaud others who have their own style. Three cheers for chartreuse! Godspeed, indigo! With the survival of young women like Thao hanging in the balance, I’m not willing to divert attention to popularity contests, celebritized egos, or the so-called breast cancer wars between varying schools of thought. Tearing down the good done by others simply isn’t a productive use of anyone’s time and energy.
Sexism is a troubling component in the breast cancer equation. For a lot of reasons. Ironically, pink prejudice cuts most cruelly against men diagnosed with this “female” disease. About ten years ago, we set out to change this with the help of Richard Roundtree. When the ultramacho
star of the blaxploitation blockbuster
Shaft
walked out in front of a press junket with a pink ribbon on his lapel, it was like Iconoclasts-R-Us. People were astonished to learn he’d been diagnosed with breast cancer and had kept it a secret for eight years.
In 1993, Roundtree mentioned to his physician he’d felt a lump in his “pec muscle.” The last thing he suspected was breast cancer. Like Thao Barnes, his initial reaction was disbelief. And anger.
“I thought,
No way,
” he says. “Men don’t get breast cancer.”
But that year, approximately 1,500 men did, and almost a third of them didn’t survive. When people compared that number with the 40,000 or so women who died of breast cancer that year, some questioned the wisdom of devoting significant money to men’s breast cancer, but we chose to fund both research and awareness—and not just because it’s impossible for us to look someone in the face and tell her the death of her husband, father, or son doesn’t merit attention.
The low number of men affected slows research, since studies only move forward when new patients provide new data, but we’ve learned that men and women differ dramatically in their response to anti-estrogen therapies. Understanding that difference may help us map the molecular minefield and improve hormone therapy for women with breast cancer.
On the surface of some breast cells—both normal and abnormal—are hormone receptors that attract estrogen and/or progesterone. When the hormones talk, those cells listen. And the hormones are saying,
Grow
. If you’re a fourteen-year-old girl trying to fill out a cashmere sweater, that’s great. If you’re a woman—or a man—with breast cancer, it can be lethal. We’ve learned that we can slow or even stop the growth of breast cancer with drugs that inhibit the reception of estrogen, progesterone, and a protein known as human epidermal growth factor receptor (HER2). In triple negative breast cancer, none of the three receptors is present, so the cancer doesn’t respond to hormone therapies like tamoxifen. (HER2 responds to drugs like Herceptin.)
Additionally, we felt certain we could impact the higher mortality rate for men simply by raising awareness, because it’s partly the macho factor that works against men with breast cancer. Dr. William Wood, chairman of the Ethics Committee and professor in the Surgical Oncology Division at Emory University, a regular at a major annual breast
cancer symposium in San Antonio, spoke at one of our press junkets. “Women see a doctor if they feel something the size of an M&M in their chest,” he said. “Most men won’t even think about it until the lump is the size of a golf ball, which means the cancer has advanced and probably spread.”
It was incredibly courageous of Richard Roundtree to come forward. As he underwent mastectomy, chemo, and radiation back in the 1990s, he was forced to keep his diagnosis carefully hidden. Along with his life—and his bigger-than-life image—his livelihood was at stake. To work in a major film or television production, actors have to be insured. Had the truth been known, his career would have been destroyed. It’s ironic and a bit heartbreaking that for all the strides we’d made toward breaking the silence, all our efforts to eradicate the term
women’s cancer
from the lexicon, for far too long, men with breast cancer were left behind.
Over the following decade, men’s mortality rates dropped a whopping 25 percent. Dr. Wood says men’s breast cancer is being detected earlier and treated more effectively.
Apparently, the guys just needed a little pinking. Fortunately, we had Shaft on our side.
Ten years after he joined our awareness effort, Richard Roundtree is still speaking out about breast cancer and appearing, appropriately enough, on the show
Heroes
.
As for Thao Barnes, Thursday, January 14, 2010, she updated her Facebook status:
“All breast cancer tests and MRIs for this six-month period were clear! May 16 will be two years in remission. Life is AWESOME. Going for a five-mile run to celebrate.”
The Coast Guard was already on the ground in Haiti with additional troops being mobilized. Friday, Thao’s unit was deployed.
“Hey, friends,” she posted. “Won’t be back for a while. Going out to save the world.”
I
lay in bed at night, passing my hands over my breasts, intensely aware of every anomaly.
Has this bump grown slightly since last week? Is this one a little firmer than the others?
I alternately chided myself for being a coward and castigated myself for falling into that false sense of security Suzy and I had embraced over the years.