Breast Cancer Forum organizer shares personal journey

“When the teacher becomes the student,” is the phrase that comes to mind when Judy Crowley talks about her experience with breast cancer.

Crowley is the executive director of the Coffee County Family Services Center. She is one of the key organizers of the annual Coffee County Breast Cancer Forum, this year set for Oct. 30.

One thing she remembers about the event seven years ago is that is when she was herself diagnosed with breast cancer.

“About a week before that breast cancer forum I did my breast self examine and I found a lump,” she said recently. “I’m not a lumpy person so I thought that it was just a fluke that would go away.”

In the flurry of activity preceding the forum, Crowley said she decided to put the issue on the back burner. She knew better, she said. “I teach women about this for a living; I’ve been doing this for Family Services for a very long time so I’m very aware of what you are supposed to do to take care of yourself.”

Crowley smiled as she recalled former co-worker Lucille Latham’s passion for educating women about breast health. “She badgered us every month about doing self breast exams,” Crowley said. “She’d remind us every month— and you can’t lie to Lucille, so we did it every month.”

Crowley said she waited several weeks, thinking the lump might go away. “But finally I realized that this thing was getting bigger and it was painful,” she said. “It was throbbing, like a knife was cutting into my side.”

Crowley called her friend— and breast forum co-organizer— Enterprise surgeon Dr. Sam Sawyer. He referred her to Enterprise OB-GYN Dr. James Pollard, who sent her for diagnostic tests. Sawyer looked at the results and told her she had cancer. “My first reaction was that this isn’t fair. I teach women about this for a living —it has got to be a joke.”

One day after her 50th birthday, Crowley was in surgery to have the lump removed. “I felt confident,” she said. “It looked like something bad, something that didn’t need to stay.”

Crowley said that when the doctor was doing the pre-surgery ultra sound, he asked her where she thought the lump was located and how big she thought it was. “I showed him right where it was and I said its 25 millimeters.”

The doctor asked how she guessed the size and she told him that she’d made “literally thousands of Beads of Hope in my life and it’s the size of the largest bead.”

The Beads of Hope, based on a design created in North Carolina, are constructed by volunteers here and have been used as a teaching tool by Family Services since its inception in 1999. “The Avon Foundation for Women funds our grant so they pay for the supplies,” Crowley said. “We have found this project to be entirely worth the investment.”

The beads are distributed to women free of charge to be used as an educational tool for identifying the possible size of breast tumors, Crowley explained. Constructed into bracelets or necklaces, the beads range in size from a 3-millimeter average size lump to a 25-millimeter lump. There is also an oblong bead representing the fact that not all lumps found in a breast are round.

Crowley’s “big, aggressive tumor with another one right behind it,” was successfully removed. One of her first questions to the surgeon when she came out of surgery was how big the lump was. The answer was 25 millimeters. “So I realized the value of the Beads of Hope,” she said. “Not because it told me how big the lump was, but because those things reminded me over and over how important it is to have all the parts of early breast cancer detection correct—everything from the clinical exam to the self exam to the mammogram, all those parts have to work together.”

The importance of those three components together was further driven home to Crowley because just six months earlier she had had an “absolutely clean” mammogram. In fact, the doctor who had done that mammogram called her to tell her he was going to relook at her results. “I must have missed something,” he told her. But after a second review, his assessment was the same.

Crowley said she does not focus on the fact that she survived cancer. “But what I do think about is wanting other women to really take care of themselves, really be watchful.

“Yes, of course you’re afraid, you’re annoyed, you just don’t believe it— even though I had a history of early breast cancer in my family,” she said. “My grandmother had breast cancer, my aunt had breast cancer, my great grandmother had breast cancer and my father died of a brain tumor.”

Following the surgery, Crowley started chemotherapy treatments. “Chemo is rough, very rough,” she said shaking her head at the memory. “It’s hard to be strong with chemo—but you keep on going knowing that you’ve got everything to live for and that lots of people have done this before you.

“Chemo just takes the wind out of your sails, everything on your body hurts after a while because your blood count is low,” she said. “Your bones hurt, your head hurts.”

But through it all she kept her sense of humor. She smiled as she described how she lost her hair, a side effect of chemotherapy.

“We had started building a new house the week before I was diagnosed with cancer, so I was determined we were going to continue and do everything we needed to do,” she said. “About four weeks into chemo, I still had hair on my head.

“My daughters and I were in Montgomery looking at brick for the new house and it was a windy day in early spring,” she recalled. “The wind was blowing out in this brick yard and I see something fly by in front of my face.

“Then I realized it was my hair falling out, literally chunks of my hair was falling out,” she recalled with a smile. “We all got the giggles about it. It was pretty funny because obviously nobody else knew what was flying around in the air.

“But once your hair’s gone, it is kind of a relief,” she said. “I wore the wig for the most part because we (at Family Services) deal with children here and I didn’t want to scare them.”

Crowley described having no hair as “not really much of a big deal,” adding with a smile that her wig looked “way better than my real hair ever did.

“I didn’t care that much about how I looked: your skin gets bad, your mouth gets sore but here’s God’s grace,” she said. “You don’t remember— you’re so sick that you really don’t remember a lot of those days that you come home from treatment and you sleep and the second or third day when you get so sick.

“You don’t have a good memory of it and I’m just so glad about that,” she said. “I remember towards the end of chemo just dreading it so much and just wanting it to be over and my husband would be driving and I’d just cry on the way just because I just wanted it to be over.

“But every treatment that I took meant that I was that much closer to being rid of a disease that, heck, I never asked for.”

Crowley credits her husband and her daughters for their amazing strength through the whole ordeal. “My girls and my husband, they did everything,” she said. “Frankly, they suffered more than I did. We tried to keep our life as normal as we could. I worked most of the time. Everybody here pitched in,” she said. “My kids were amazing. It was rough on them really. I knew that I was going to live through this but I don’t know that they knew that.”

The type of cancer Crowley had was Triple Negative. “Five years is the magic number for that type of cancer so my odds of survival are quite good at this point.

“So far, so good,’ she said crossing her fingers. “You learn to be vigilant, but you know, I don’t think about it all the time.

“You just know you’ve been spared for some reason and then it’s time to just go on with it,” she said. “Some breast cancers are uglier than others— but if you get it taken care of now, it’s a problem that can be fixed more easily if you find it early.”

Crowley has high praise for the medical care available in Coffee County. “Frankly, some of the best medical care available can be found right here in our county and I had no reservations about staying right here for my treatment,” Crowley said. “I got world class treatment right here.

“And the thing that’s so good about our doctors is that they cooperate with each other, so in terms of having a team on your side, to plan your care, it’s a wonderful thing,” she added.

“I don’t think about cancer but what I do think about wanting other women to really take care of themselves, really be watchful,” she said, adding that the state of Alabama has a program called the Alabama Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program specifically for uninsured and underinsured women between the ages of 40 and 64 which provides free mammograms and subsequent care for women in that range.

“Maybe the title of the program is hard to say but if you call us —at (334) 393-8538—and say that you need to know about the free mammogram, that’s all you need to say.

“You owe it to yourself,” she said. “You owe it to your family.”