THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 16, 1994 TAG: 9410140777
SECTION: HAMPTON ROADS WOMAN PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: DEBRA GORDON
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines
You read about it, you hear about it, but I don't think you really become aware of it until it hits home.
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Yeah, she knows she messed up. She missed her mammogram two years in a row. Had enough other things wrong with her body that the thought of cancer never even entered Rheta Whitehurst's mind. Until July 1990, when she went in for a whole-body checkup, including mammogram.
Come back in six months, the doctor said. We think we see something there that we want to watch. A year later, they decided it was cancer.
Even today, four years after the diagnosis, Whitehurst remembers the dates like she remembers the birthdays of her five children.
June 7, 1991. Lumpectomy.
July 11, 1991. Mastectomy.
And then, the unthinkable. In December 1993, another lump - in the flat space of her missing breast. Impossible, said the doctors. But it was malignant.
Dec. 7, 1993. Another lumpectomy. Followed by 36 radiation treatments.
Throughout it all, Whitehurst, now 59, of Virginia Beach, missed exactly one day of school at Rena B. Wright Elementary in Chesapeake, where she's a teacher's aide. Never gave in to self-pity. Never worried about dying.
A strong faith, good friends, a loving husband and the effort to keep her children from falling apart got her through it.
``When you say cancer, for most people the first thing comes to their mind is death. They don't zone in on survival, and I did. My number one thought was that no one said I'd die, and even if they did, God was the one who numbered my days; not doctors. That's my strength and motto.''
Today, Whitehurst is obsessed with breast cancer. She reads everything she can find about it; watches every television program on the topic. Tells every woman she sees about it. With the same message - get a mammogram. Get checked. Feel your breasts.
Especially if you're African American.
Because she knows the statistics: Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer death for black women, compared to the second leading cause for white women. Black women are less likely to get regular mammogram screenings than white women. And black women who get breast cancer are more than twice as likely to die from it as white women.
When the mobile mammography unit showed up at her school last year, a co-worker told Whitehurst that her daughter, who works there, wasn't going to get a mammogram. ``She says she doesn't have the money,'' the woman said.
``Yes she does,'' Whitehurst said. ``I'll pay for it.'' But she knew the real reason: Her daughter was scared. Petrified that the disease her mother had fought twice would show up in her own body.
But fear, says Whitehurst, is no reason to ignore the reality.
``Women think you gotta look bad or feel bad to have cancer. That's not so. You can look the picture of health and still have it in your body.'' ILLUSTRATION: GARY C. KNAPP COLOR PHOTO
RHETA WHITEHURST
KEYWORDS: BREAST CANCER by CNB