Because Kellum “lost all conception of time” during the turbulent weeks, Sanders offered that the smear of days began in late May or early June when her mother went in for her mammogram.
Kellum, who jokes that at 63, “I don’t look a day over 62,” began her annual appointments at age 40 and has been meticulous about them since nine years ago, when a shadow showed up in her right breast.
A biopsy determined it was non-cancerous, but she remained on guard. And this year, when a shadow showed up again in same spot, she knew what to expect.
On biopsy day, Kellum took Sanders along, both for support and to ensure her daughter would get a mammogram.
“Two years ago, when I turned 40, I had a mammogram done,” Sanders said.
It had showed a spot on the right breast almost the same location as her mother’s. And although that biopsy, too, revealed there was no cancer, Sanders avoided her annual mammogram a year ago out of fear for what she might find.
Their joint 2 p.m. appointment at the Springfield Regional Medical Center’s imaging center stretched on into the evening, largely because the technician doing Kellum’s biopsy wasn’t confident he’d gotten a full sample of the tissue.
Apologizing for the length of the appointment, he said the staff were willing to stay if she didn’t mind staying so he could get one more sample.
Said Kellum, “that was the part that was malignant.”
Kellum learned the results from her doctor’s office in a phone call at work, and at her family physician Dr. Marvin Narcelles’ suggestion showed up at surgeon Dr. Pamela Bucklew’s office with daughters Sanders and Tesie McDaniel in tow.
Sanders recalled that Bucklew “explained what was going on, the options there were and cried a little bit with us. Then Mom basically decided she needed the mastectomy.”
With the breast removed, Kellum reasoned, there would be no place for the as yet localized cancer to spread.
In the meantime, Sanders had been making her own plans. Having learned of her own spot — in the same place as the previous one — “I was scared to death of the biopsy,” she said
Wanting to avoid a biopsy, then a second procedure if the tissue turned out to be malignant, “I decided to have the lumpectomy” to take the suspect spot and tissue around it, she said.
Given her mother’s experience, it seemed the safer route.
Then came a mother-daughter moment.
“Mom wanted me to have the lumpectomy the same day she had her mastectomy,” Sanders recalled.
Practicality intervened.
“I told her, ‘Mom, who’s going to take care of us?’”
So the mastectomy, a same-day surgery, came first.
Daughter McDaniel did the yeoman’s work with her mother in the first week after surgery, then Sanders pitched in.
At the end of those two weeks, Kellum, who works at Bill Marine Honda, was out selling 50-50 tickets at a golf cancer benefit held in the memory of two Bill Marine employees who had died of cancer.
And soon she was back to work.
She also went to Bucklew’s office along with Sanders and Sanders’ husband, Bill, to learn the results of the lumpectomy.
“We have a traveling circus here,” Kellum said.
With humor and sympathy, Bucklew broke the news to Sanders: “What is it, do you have to do what your mother does?”
The malignancy had spread beyond the bounds of the lumpectomy. It did not take Sanders long to decide to do what her mother did and her right breast removed.
Seeing what her mother had gone through “I think it made it easier for me,” Sanders said, particularly in that first visit to the shower when she saw the results of the surgery.
“My husband was right there in the shower with me,” she said. And she’d know what to expect from helping care for her mother.
Asked what it was like to have her daughter go through the surgery after she did, Kellum found herself unable to speak, and the expanding silence of the room to express the depth of her feeling.
“It wasn’t horrible, because here we are,” Kellum said when she found her voice. “I’ve told her all her life, if it doesn’t kill you, it will make you stronger.”
It also made the traveling family circus a regular visitor to Springfield Regional Medical Center.
“We were all up there for her mastectomy, and we were all up there for my lumpectomy and we were all up there for my mastectomy,” Sanders said.
To determine whether others in the family, including those yet to be born, would be at higher risk for cancer, Bucklew ordered genetic testing.
By the time the results came back negative, mother and daughter had resolved to be positive.
“You can crawl in a hole and bury yourself,” said Sanders, “but we decided the better thing is to go out and let people know it can happen to anybody. Just go get your mammogram.”
“There’s a slew of women that’s got their mammogram because of me and Melissa,” Kellum said. That includes a woman for whom they made an appointment.
As much as they might grieve for having to go through the experience together, mother and daughter are thankful to have had one another to lean on.
“There are people out there who don’t have anyone,” Kellum said.
And, from now on, the two, who are closer than ever, are going to all their appointments together.
Thankful to the doctors, nurses and staff that helped them through the experience — and the outpouring of a moving flood of food, flowers and friends — this mother and daughter with matching mastectomies are expressing thanks by preaching the gospel of early detection.
“Get a mammogram, even if you’re not 50,” said Kellum.
“Scary as they are, in the long run it’s worth it,” said Sanders.
Or was it the other way around?
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