Checking For Breast Cancer

>> good evening and welcome to a special edition of "black nouveau." i'm joanne williams. october is breast cancer awareness month. this week, we'll focus on breast cancer in african-american women from a variety of perspectives.

we'll look at the importance of mammograms, and show you how to do a self-exam. we'll highlight support groups for women with breast cancer and we'll talk with a caregiver. here's the reality. african-american women are less likely to be diagnosed with

breast cancer and more likely to die from the disease because of late detection. the susan g. komen foundation and kohl's conversations for the cure are trying to change that. shandra cooper tells us how. >> you have to really know your body.

>> breast cancer survivor khasema johnson finds healing while educating and sharing her cancer story to women. >> we don't know what causes it, but some things we can do. >> johnson is part of the kohl's conversation cure for the program.

the susan g. komen and kohl's collaboration. the program is a grassroots, breast education initiative for women in southeast wisconsin. >> i don't have any insurance. i can't afford a mammogram. i'm afraid of what i might find out.

>> there are all kinds of reasons. all kinds of justifications. and all kinds of fears. it's ok. let's talk. >> it's really built off volunteers. these volunteers are community

health workers, women who go into their own communities. they talk with like-minded individuals. family members, friends, really anyone who will listen. breast cancer is not the death sentence it used to be. women can get breast cancer,

they can live, they can go on and survive and live a long life. >> johnson says one day she was lying in bed and did a self-breast exam and her life changed forever. >> one month i did it, and i happened to be laying in the bed

and i felt a lump. so i knew something was wrong. >> right after johnson's 40th 40th birthday, she had her very first mammogram and was diagnosed with cancer. >> right here, it was a lump, about that big that i found the first one and the doctor said

that i had two. then i had to go through an mri, they found something else, in my lymph nodes. i was thinking, ok, how are they going to get it out of me, and i lost a cousin to breast cancer, another type of cancer. >> johnson's daughter remembers

the day she got the call from her mother saying she had cancer. >> i'm like hello and she's like it's cancer, and i knew she was waiting on the call, so i knew once she said that, what she was talking about, and first thing she said was, it's cancer, and i

just immediately started crying, because i know a lot of people who had cancer and they passed away, so when she said cancer, i think of death. i do not think it -- do not think it can't happen to you. it doesn't matter your age, your race, it can definitely happen

to you. >> johnson says she's blessed doctors found the cancer and it was removed. after chemotherapy treatment, her cancer went into remission. >> this one was very bad. i was in the bathroom, with my grandson and i didn't have any

hair on my head and he was just looking and smiling, so i just started having a photo shoot in the bathroom. >> johnson now knows that early detection is the key and she's determined to spread that message to other women. >> i hope they leave with the

understanding of how important it is to get to the doctor. i can't stress that enough. get there and get yourself tested. >> certificate nurse roberta johnson shows statistics show when a black woman gets breast cancer, they tend to die at a

higher rate than other race. >> if you think i don't have a family of breast cancer, i don't need a mammogram or need to check my breast, but it's important for women to start at age 40 to get mammograms every year to screen for breast the earlier we detect something,

the better we can help you out. >> jordan says black women have to remove the fear factor around going in and getting a mammogram. >> women are saying, oh, i think mammograms are going to hurt, or you know, they're just afraid that the doctor is going to find

something. mammograms don't hurt, first and foremost. >> i want to talk to you about the importance of going out and getting your breast exam. >> as johnson embraces her journey as a breast cancer survivor, her mission in life

now is to reach women who look like her, and teach them about breast cancer education. >> i'm amped, i'm pumped, i'm excited about getting out here, getting the word out to women, having them go and get their mammograms or clinical breast exams, by these women showing

up-and-coming and having this conversation with me and going right away to take care of it, it makes me feel awesome. >> women who took part in this intimate conversation say they were inspired by johnson's cancer story. they're encouraged to continue

checking themselves out on a monthly basis and telling others to do the same. >> i always try to encourage women, let them know that it is important, it's better to know than not to know, because if it can be cured, why not do it. >> khasema says cancer stripped

her life of many things, but she still has her womanhood and is a survivor to share her story to save another woman's life. >> even i worry about the possibility of breast cancer. it's not in my family as far as i know, but it has been two years since my last mammogram

and it was time for me to get one. >> hello. >> how are you? >> i'm fine. how are you? >> i'm good. >> your last name. >> williams.

>> first name. >> joanne. >> you're here for a mammogram today. >> yes, ma'am. >> what i'm going to do is take you back to change for your exam. i'm going to take you back to

change. >> ok. >> going to change my clothes. i have to lock up everything in a locker. no deodorant, they will probably have sent you all a reminder letter with instructs about deodorant.

you can wear your jewelry, but you might want to lock that up too. i always get the gown and the robe confused. see the chart. >> we're going to go this way. all right. >> take you for your test today.

have you been here before? >> i have. excellent. so then you know the routine. >> yes, i do. >> come on in, make yourself at home. >> ok, joanne. i just need to verify all your

information to keep us safe. i have joanne l. williams. >> yes. >> they keep checking to make sure they get the right pictures with the right woman. there are dozens of joanne williams in the milwaukee phone book, you know.

thank you. >> joanne, ok if i use these stickers to mark your nipples. >> when we're all done, you can just peel these off and throw them away. all right, we're going to adjust the machine to your height, joanne.

and for these i'm just going to open your gown. i'll have you lean in straight, make sure i get everything and if you can, just relax your arms down by your side. it's going to start to get tight from the back by your chest wall and then forward.

let me know what it feels like for you. >> that's enough. >> now i'm ready to take the x-ray. so i'm going to, joanne, i just want you to stop breathing and not move. just stop breathing.

>> yeah, it's uncomfortable, but it only lasts about seven or eight seconds. you can stand it. so we're going to do the left side now. i'm going to just flip it the other way. >> then i turned around so that

rhonda could take pictures on the other side. if you will, we're going to lift the gown or robe. perfect. and then if you'll bring your left arm across. and then turn your body a little bit.

good. arms out. that's great. give a little hug here. come towards me, a little side step. it will get tight again from the back and then forward. ok?

yeah. and then if you would, joanne, just stop breathing, don't breathe or move. you can breathe. let me just see how that's coming up. that looks good. oh, that's perfect.

that's just what we need. >> great. we're all done. >> the positions aren't all that uncomfortable and the machine is not as cold as the old ones used to be. they're going to take four pictures.

>> all right. so we'll be sending you a letter in the mail and we'll send a report to your doctor. >> is there anything else i can do for you today? >> i don't think so. that's it. see you next year.

>> to help us better understand mammograms, dr. mary beth gonyo is here, the breast imaging section chief and radiologist at froedtert hospital and the medical college of wisconsin. welcome. >> thank you. >> first of all, i want to say

that my mammogram was clear and i'm happy about that, but many women who are probably wondering what you see when you look at those images, what do you see? >> we look at a number of things when we look at a mammogram. we're looking at the pattern of the breast tisch -- tissue and

every woman has a different pattern and that's the areas of white and gray you see on the some of the pattern or density has to do with our breast size, some of it has to do with our age, some of it has to do with the amount of body fat we have. but a lot of it is just sort of

how you're wired and how you were made and everyone has their own pattern. >> with all those variables, how can you tell what's normal and what's not? >> it's really helpful, the first mammogram that a woman has, their baseline exam can be

really difficult to look at sometimes, because you're just sort of getting to know what's the normal pattern for that woman, and that it really is helpful when we have a series of mammograms to look at. so when a woman comes in every year, we'll bring up her older

studies, we'll compare it to those exams, and what's a big help is looking to see has there been any change in the pattern of that breast tissue. then we look for things like masses, which are you can think of it as like a little ball or a little marble that we can see on

both views. and then finally, we also look for calcifications in the breast, which can be a sign of a very early form of breast cancer, called ductal carcinoma. >> how often do the changes occur, do they happen within the year since you had your

mammogram? >> it can. sometimes there can be very subtle changes that occur from one year to the next and that's why me as a radiologist, my colleagues, breast surgeons, and obstetricians and gynecologists really recommend that we do

mammography every year, because there can be changes within that 12 months. >> every year starting at what age? >> 40. there are some women who it may be a good idea that they start their mammography screening

earlier and those are women who may have a little stronger family history of breast cancer, or some other syndromes or conditions. >> you know, when you get it done, it's the woman and her results, but what about the rest of the family, should they know

you're having a mammogram, should they know what the results are, should you shire the information? >> i think it's a good idea, i think information and passing that information along is helpful. when you go in and have an exam

done or you have a biopsy done, say, if it would come to that, it's great to share that information with your daughters, an even your sons, to let them know, this is what's going on in my life, this is what my history is, this is what the biopsy showed, if it's benign,

wonderful, if it's not, then they need to have that piece of information, so that -- history is passed down. >> how early can you detect something in a mammogram, how small can it be that you know there's something that you should check?

>> yeah. sometimes it can be very, very subtle, and we may see just an area that looks just a little bit whiter or denser as compared to the year before. sometimes what we're looking at are fine, fine little grains of calcifications.

they're really the size of a grain of salt and we're looking for little groupings of those in the breast. we have special monitors that we use, we magnify those pictures. that gives us help in finding those. >> now, if you see something and

it's not benign, and you want to find out more, what's the next step? >> really, i know, looking at an abnormality on a mammogram, many times we can say what it is. we can say, you know, this really concerns me and this could be a breast cancer, but

you never know that for certain until you take a biopsy of it, and that's really the next step. it's something that's seen well by mammogram, we'll use mammography to guide our way to do that biopsy. if it's seen well in, say, a mass, we can also do ultrasound

to find that and guide our way to find it. >> thank you so much. >> thank you for having me. >> another line of defense is breast self-exam, it's something we should all learn. the women who came out on a cold saturday morning in eastabrook

park for sister strut for breast cancer awareness, learned valuable lessons on how to save their lives. bonnie anderson helped teach breast self-exams, she believed had she not known how to do her own 23 years ago, she would not be here today.

>> i was very, very fortunate. i found my own lump. there are organization ins -- organizations, united cancer task force and said women shouldn't do their own breast exams. yes, they should. i if i had not checked myself, i

would not have found it. the first time you do it, you're getting to know your body. but you're always looking for differences. you're never really looking for a lump. you're not digging for cancer, you know, you actually are

looking to see the changes in your body and i would recommend women do it every month. if you have a period, ten days after your period,. if you don't have a period, then pick the first of the month, the middle of the month, social security check comes, whatever.

do it consistently once a month. you want to think of your breasts in quarters, all the way from the middle of your neck, by your clavicle, all the way down, mid breast, and then all the way underneath all of this breast tissue. when you're checking your

breast, you want to check them with the pads of your three fingers and as you're checking them, you can go up and down, you can go around, you can go whatever is comfortable to you, so what you want to do, you can get started in the middle and breast, you don't want to jump

around. you want to stay pretty solid in you make a gentle circle, a little bit deeper circle, and then you go a little bit deeper and it's not uncomfortable. it does not hurt, but you go deep enough so that if there is something there, you want to

find it. the reason you're checking your breast is not to look for lumps. you're checking for changes in your breast. what happens sometimes, most women have lumpy breasts, but with you're checking your breast, and if you stay around,

you get to know if you're doing this once a month, you get to foe what your breast tissue feels like. >> joining us now is phyllis holder from sisters 4 cure. you used to be called the sisters network and now it's sister4cure, but you have

sister4cure before. what's the history? >> thank you for having me here. as a breast cancer survivor, when i was diagnosed in 2005, it became very important to me to reach out to the community. i found out things that have become a personal mission of

mine, and so i, along with a group of friends, would go to different functions in the communities and harass women about having their screenings done and you know, and provide information on breast cancer and just talk to whoever would listen to us, and we were

sisters4cure and a friend of mine had started a web site for me and we've really, really thought that we were making a difference as sisters4cure, which we were, because we were part of the community and involved in the community, in the tavern or in the church or

wherever we were, and i went to a conference and i saw some sisters who belonged to the sisters network, a national organization, and i was just infatuated and i had to belong to that too. i can see you going in to a church or a community group, but

in a tavern, what did you do? we would go after they finished their line dance exercising and talk to the women or get on the bar stool next to them and talk to them as well and we sold t-shirts to sustain our effort, and that's where we would find the most vulnerable and those

who maybe had other priorities that we needed to speak to them about. >> since you started doing this, have you changed the focus, have you changed the direction you want to take? >> right. while this core group of ladies,

also breast cancer survivors and those who love us, we were sisters network, we were focused on our community, what milwaukee needed. when we joined the sisters network, we had a national mission statement that we had to follow.

and so it became evident that we needed to come back to our heart and serve our community with the specific needs that we knew we were missing out on. we were missing out on the opportunity to address women and children as part of our mission. >> children, dealing with breast

cancer? what we do is offer evidence, as sisters 4 cure, we offer evidence-based strategies to improve lifestyles and mind sets. and so this is against breast cancer and other diseases, be it physical or mental.

we're starting on the front end. we believe in screenings, we believe in preventive health, but we're looking at preventing what you can do. along with that once a year or whenever you think about it, self-breast exam or clinical breast exam, we need to change

our minds and our behavior, and that's what we work on. we are working at the root and it's a trifold approach. a trifold cord is not easily broken, so we have three prongs to our mission, that we put forth and we want to change hearts and minds about how we

view breast cancer and our personal responsibility. >> and your personal responsibility to the rest of your family too, i would think? >> absolutely. so, for example, intergenerational change, we currently have support groups

and we call them gatherings that occur at the daniel murdock boys and girls club on 35th and hampton, and with that partnership, we have in-road to young folks, and we want to teach our young folks what they might -- life lessons, so they are welcome and have joined us

over time in the support groups to learn about diet, exercise, and mindset changes. >> so if people want to get in touch with you and find out more, what do they do? >> they can go on line to sisters4cure.org. on facebook, twitter, we have a

presence on both, and they can seek me out personally. i'm out and about and so my phone number isn't private. i can be reached by phone. well, thank you very much. i'm glad you came here to join us today. >> oh, thank you.

>> many of the people we've seen on the forefront of the breast cancer battle are survivors. they're supported by their family members and caregivers and that includes the men in former green bay packers linebacker george koonce was a caregiver to his first wife

tanesha. what was your first thought when you found out that she had breast cancer? >> i was devastated, you know, to know that you're 35 years old, you're six months pregnant and you have breast cancer. stage 4.

i was totally devastated. no family history, i don't have any history of cancer in my family, she didn't have any history of cancer in her family, so i was totally taken off guard by the whole diagnosis. >> what did you do first? first of all, you said -- what

did you do first? >> well, i called my mom, because tanesha went for a routine doctor visit with her mom, and they were told that she had stage 4 breast cancer and when she called me and gave me the news, all i could do -- basically, i dropped the phone.

i was just devastated, called my mom, i was sobbing, crying, trying to hold myself together because i wanted to be strong for tanesha and our daughter, who was probably six, seven years old at the time. >> then you became a caregiver. >> what did that entail, what

did you have to do? >> it was a big time commitment. you know, we lived about 1200 miles from our hometown, so we didn't really have a family to lean on, but i was very, very fortunate to be here in milwaukee, with some great individuals, i know misser ma

daniels, her husband, john daniels was very very instrumental in helping me to keep the family together. i was at marquette university, they were very, very understanding of my situation, i was able to -- they allowed me to take tanesha to sloan

kettering, a cancer center in manhattan, trying to find a cure for my late wife. >> give me an example of what a day was like, when you and she were dealing with this. i had a lot on my plate. i was trying to raise money for marquette university, so i would

take my daughter to school, you know, so we would leave the house around 6:00 a.m., take my daughter, drop my little boy off at day care, come check on tanesha around noon, sometimes she had doctors appointments, marquette was gracious enough to let me take her to her

appointments to get her chemo, her radiation and when she came home after those treatments, she would be completely wiped out, so i would go pick up my daughter from school, so it was very, very tough on me. then at the time i was in school trying to receive a ph.d. from

marquette university, so i was in class from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. and i was able to do that for three years, and it was tough. >> there are other people who are doing this too, and other men who are doing this too. what advice can you give them?

>> they have to seek out resources. they need to maybe -- i know, i went through some grief counseling before tanesha actually passed away. maybe might want to do it, you know, if you had a loved one to eventually pass away, you may do

it a different way, but i felt like it was best for me, because i have so much coming towards me, a lot for me at the time, so they have family members in town, please lean on them to help them because you really have to take care of yourself, because it's a huge time

commitment, taking care of a loved one. >> what did the -- your men friends say, what did your former packer teammates say when they knew you were doing this, what did they say to you? >> they would ask me, like a gilbert brown or san tan dotson

or derek mays would constantly ask me how was i doing, because they knew i was going through a lot of pain. there's a lot of pain watching someone go through a situation like that. you take tanesha, 35 years old, being diagnosed with stage 4

breast cancer, seeing her, you know, deteriorate right before your eyes was very, very devastating for me. >> but you didn't walk away? >> no, i didn't walk away. it was the most gratifying thing i've ever done in my life, to be there with tanesha.

throughout a very, very tough ordeal and she lost her fight of cancer back in 2009. probably a couple days ago, october 7, five years, but it still stings. it still hurts, but each day has gotten a little bit better, so i would tell any other men out

there, just stay strong, find those resources, get some counseling if you need to and lean on your family. thank you very much. early detection, early treatment and support from those around us can make sure we celebrate as many birthdays as we can.

and that's our program for this week. for "black nouveau," i'm joanne williams. thanks for watching.