Oct 4, 2007 7:56 PM
Making Strides Against Breast Cancer is the American Cancer Society’s premier event to raise awareness and funds to fight breast cancer. In 2006 alone, 450,000 walkers across the country collected more than $40 million to help fight breast cancer. The Strides walk will take place in our area this year on Oct. 21 at six locations. Go to www.uft.org and click on the link to register. Making Strides is your opportunity to honor survivors, educate women about prevention and early detection, and raise funds and awareness to help achieve a day when no one will have to hear the words “You have breast cancer.” Here are the stories of four brave UFTers who heard those words and lived to tell about it, and why they’ll walk on the 21st.
When paraprofessional Linda DeGraffe got the news in 2002 about her cancer, she didn’t hear one thing her doctor said. “He was talking to me about my options and all I could hear was gibberish,” DeGraffe recalled. “I am sure he was talking intelligently, but my mind had closed down. Tears were streaming down my face.”
The only word she remembers hearing was “malignant.”
DeGraffe suspected a week before her diagnosis that something was wrong.
“My breasts were leaking and hurting,” she said. She had postponed going to her regular doctor’s appointments because she was caring for her mother, who had Alzheimer’s.
As soon as she arrived home, she called her eight siblings, two sons and nieces for a family meeting. “We do that when there is a family misunderstanding,” she said.
As the family members devoured the potluck food and watched television, DeGraffe was uncertain about how to interfere with the laughter. Finally, she broke the news and her niece asked if she was going to die. “Everyone started crying,” she said.
DeGraffe went for chemotherapy and radiation — every Friday for six months so she wouldn’t miss work — and is using Tomixifen to keep her estrogen levels high.
Today, she feels “emotionally and physically strong” thanks to her family, friends and colleagues at CS 214, where she also raises money for the Strides walk.
She is walking because she wants to tell women to “hold your head up high and don’t allow negative thoughts to slow down your recovery.”
She wants to spread the message about how survivors can keep doing what they always did. “I am proud to be alive,” she said. “If it hadn’t been for that doctor’s appointment, I would be dead.”
Amy Silverstein celebrated her fifth year of being cancer-free in May with a barbecue blast at Point Lookout on Long Island.
More than 100 friends and relatives partied all day and then watched as Amy and her husband renewed their wedding vows to the rejuvenating sound of waves splashing on the sand.
“It was our reaffirmation of life,” Silverstein said.
Now working as a peer intervener with the UFT, Silverstein feels strongly about women being their own advocates and taking control of their lives. She visited three surgeons when she was 35 and each of them told her not to worry, that she was too young to have breast cancer. Exasperated, she told the third doctor she was not leaving his office until he performed a needle biopsy, which found the malignancy.
“My husband and I cried the day of my diagnosis and again the first time I had chemo,” Silverstein said. “It was poison going into my body. I was afraid of dying.”
Silverstein was teaching at PS 80 in Queens when she got the bad news. “I went back to work as a staff developer from September 2002 to June 2003 and never missed work while I was getting chemo and radiation,” she said. “I wanted to be normal and I refused to let this overtake me.”
She’ll walk this month to tell women — and men — to get regular checkups. “Too many people are afraid of what the tests will show,” she said.
Silverstein is also a team leader raising funds for the walk. Last June, she gave a Survivor’s Day speech at North Shore University Hospital. “I told them I was going to live to be a ripe, old age,” she said triumphantly.
Patricia Blackwell said she was so traumatized about her breast cancer diagnosis in May 2005 that she couldn’t even ask questions of her doctor.
“I had to call my daughter,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it had gone that far.”
The “it” was the news that Blackwell had ductal carcinoma. Her doctor said she didn’t need the ducts and they would be taken out. She had a scare in 1999 when calcifications of her breast were discovered and she underwent an operation.
Her tests showed an early stage of cancer in one breast; when her doctor recommended a mastectomy in that breast, Blackwell insisted that it be done to both breasts. “I am not coming back here ever again,” she recalled thinking.
She was operated on for 10 hours. “I was in very good hands and I decided to have breast reconstruction at the same time; they used my own tissue,” she said. She spent a pain-free five days in the hospital.
Blackwell, a former UFT chapter leader, started teaching in 1972 and retired in 2006.
She’ll walk on Oct. 21 to remind others how important early detection is — “get those mammograms,” she said — and to show others how she has rebounded.
She is busy taking cruises, bowling, being active in the American Legion and baby-sitting for her granddaughter. “I still get dressed up and go dancing,” she said, “and I am the team leader at PS 45 [in Brooklyn] for the walk.”
Loretta Prisco is busy doing grass-roots political work, traveling, staying close to her family and friends, and packing as much activity as she can into each day. Prisco retired in 2001 and now works for PACE University mentoring teaching fellows.
She’ll walk on Oct. 21 to show other UFT members that women can survive, even though she thought she would die after being diagnosed on April Fool’s Day, 1997.
Trying to decide whether or not to retire, a friend asked how she wanted to spend the last year of life. Prisco had an uncomplicated answer: She wanted to teach.
Prisco didn’t miss a day’s work during 13 months of chemo, radiation and surgery. She required 35 radiation treatments to kill any rogue cells. The treatments were at 8 a.m. and Prisco was in her classroom at PS 18 on Staten Island every day at 8:40. While her colleagues were supportive and offered to cover her classes and even give up their prep periods, her principal, Carol Ildebrando, refused to let her change her schedule, saying there would be no special treatment, cancer or no cancer.
The worst thing about the diagnosis, she said, was telling her two daughters and parents, and the effect it had on her family. Fighting back tears as she recounted the story, Prisco remembered how aware she was that she would be causing others pain. “My mother started screaming and said, ‘You are my rock.’”
Prisco walks to remind people about a line from a poem she once read: “Don’t tell me about your Great-aunt Girdy who died — tell me about a survivor.”
And she walks to tell people how her gregarious and outspoken husband, Gene, also a retired teacher, knew instinctively when to say something and when to stay quiet. “I don’t know how he knew, but he did.”