Breast cancer is an equal-opportunity disease. Youth, perfect health, even pregnancy—no matter how happy the home, it will knock on the door and invite itself in. Three Susquehanna Valley women learned that cancer doesn’t discriminate. All were young. None had a family history of breast cancer. Still, each found strength to battle the intruder. Family and friends came to their aid. They made new friends. They strove for normalcy. In the process, each learned to appreciate the important things in life. Cancer was never invited in, but it left behind a gift—the gift of cherishing every moment.
Bonny Stump
Dover
Bonny Stump was six months pregnant when she found a lump in her breast. She went to the OB-GYN. Could be clogged milk ducts, they said, but a biopsy revealed cancer.
“You’re supposed to be so happy with being pregnant, and having to go through that was definitely a setback,” she says now. “But then you get this baby, and that was good.”
Not that the road to delivery was smooth. A lumpectomy sent her into contractions, which were halted with medications. Her husband was by her side the whole time.
Then came the difficult decision. Should she have chemotherapy during pregnancy? Her surgeon and oncologist disagreed, but Bonny knew her preference.
“I wanted to wait because I didn’t want it to affect the baby,” she says. Later, when all was well, she would learn that her husband, thinking of her well-being, supported chemo. But at the time, he never pressured her. The decision was hers.
For the next few weeks, doctors monitored the baby’s lungs, waiting for the right moment to deliver. Zayne was born a month early but healthy and big. Bonny was a patient at Wellspan Health (www.wellspan.org), and she soon started chemo. She was the mother of a newborn and a three-year-old, Zach. She would wake up with achy bones, but her kids helped her manage.
“I focused my attention on them and didn’t think about the cancer,” she says.
She lost her sense of taste. She lost her hair. “That was the worst part,” Bonny admits. A friend joined her for wig shopping, making a serious mission silly. “She told me I would not look good as a blonde.”
Her husband, Doug, “kept his cool,” Bonny recalls. “I thank God for him, because sometimes spouses can’t handle it. It’s awesome that he stood by me. He always told me I was beautiful, even though I had peach fuzz growing out of my head.”
Sisters and a sister-in-law helped in any ways they could. Her parents and in-laws took the boys for a couple of days when she ran fevers. “Family’s good,” she says. “We can count on them.”
It’s now nine years later, and annual mammograms have been clear. Cancer was “definitely part of my life,” Bonny says, but she doesn’t dwell on it. She advises young women to “be aware of your entire body and make sure that if something doesn’t seem right, you get checked out. I know it is a pain and an inconvenience, but early detection is always the best.”
Her boys are active in sports, wrestling and playing soccer. Her cancer, she says, “definitely made me a stronger person and helped me believe in God a little bit stronger. You just know that you can be strong and you have your family, and He’s looking out for us. We can handle, even though sometimes you don’t think you can.”
Her message to the world? “Live life and be happy, because you never know.”
Beth Scott
Dillsburg
After her breast cancer diagnosis, Beth Scott was soldiering through. She chose lumpectomy instead of mastectomy. She scheduled chemo for Fridays so she’d have the weekend to recover before returning to work. Then, her doctor asked if she’d consider a different chemo delivery and move her weekly appointment to Thursdays.
And that, says Scott, was “my breaking point. I lost it.” In the middle of her meltdown, her husband provided the best advice he’d ever given.
“Beth,” he said. “Make a decision, and then don’t look back.”
With those simple words, Beth told herself that she could do it. She chose to stick with her plan, and she found that no matter what she decided at each step, she had no regrets.
Diagnosis came in July 2014. Before that, Beth admitted to feeling “smug” about her health because she had avoided the litany of conditions plaguing her family. She was fifty-three, the administrative assistant to a school district superintendent. She was capable and resilient on the job, but when her oncologist, Dr. Theresa Lee of PinnacleHealth (www.pinnaclehealth.org), suggested that the strongest possible chemo gave the chance of a 100 percent cure, Beth thought, “Doesn’t she know what a big chicken I am?”
Before long, the chicken transformed into a fearless hawk. After Dr. Lee told her that chemo causes its dreaded side effects by attacking healthy cells along with the cancer, Beth would sit in the chemotherapy chair and imagine her normal cells armed with shields and swords, fighting off the chemo. Told that radiation could fry her sunburn-prone skin, she stood before the mirror every morning and said, “My skin is not going to break down. I’m not getting sunburns. I’m not getting blisters.”
Searching for inspiring quotes, Beth found this: “I’m thankful for my struggle because without it, I wouldn’t have stumbled upon my strength.”
“That’s the truth,” she says. “I don’t think I would have ever known how strong I can be.” She told her husband, Charles Scott, “If I can do chemo, I can do almost anything.”
These are lessons Beth shares with others facing chemo. Chemo might not be as bad as they fear, she tells them. Things will be okay, and “even if you do have a lot of side effects, it’s eight to twelve weeks out of your life. It’s not going to be forever.”
She sees life through new eyes. “The colors become more intense. Nature becomes more intense. Watching your dog catching a Frisbee—I cried the first time I could play Frisbee with him again. I was just so thankful.”
The cancer journey is “bittersweet,” Beth says. She had to endure its bitterness and horrors to discover the sweetness—finding new friends in her cancer support group, experiencing the overwhelming support of doctors and staff at PinnacleHealth's Ortenzio Cancer Center (www.pinnaclehealth.org), learning not to sweat the small stuff, and living in the moment, because “you can’t control the future, and worrying about it isn’t going to do anything.”
“I honestly felt during that time that I really was living in the moment,” she says now. “It came easily to be grateful. It still comes easily to be grateful for this moment.”
Meagan Funk
Conestoga
Meagan Funk and her fiancé live in a sweet home on a wind-swept hilltop. Across the street are a restored one-room schoolhouse and sloping hills. From the bright kitchen and roomy deck, the view offers a picture-perfect scene of Lancaster County farms and fields.
It is a place for healing and writing poems. On the refrigerator, a magnet says, “If you’re all wrapped up in yourself, you’re overdressed.” This is the new Meagan Funk, the post-cancer Meg who is reordering her old priorities.
“I used to be into playing the victim,” she says. “I would overanalyze myself. If cancer hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be who I am now. I like this person so much better.”
It was September 2011. Meagan was twenty-five years old. During a camping trip, she noticed a lump in her breast about the size of a quarter. At surgery three weeks later, it was golf-ball sized. Treatment was intense—double mastectomy, removal of twenty-seven lymph nodes, and a year of chemotherapy so strong she started to lose her hearing.
“They gave me a huge dose because I’m so young,” she says. “They said I could handle it.”
Pre-cancer, Meagan was on a self-destructive path of addiction, but with her diagnosis and treatment, she found support from her father, Larry Funk of Lebanon, who let her come live with him. Meagan had tried just about every brand of religion out there, but she felt the urge for “church shopping” when she and her fiancé, David Wright, rented their home in 2013. Landlady Wina Huber, who became a good friend, introduced Meagan to her church, and Meagan and Dave found their relationship with God.
“I can’t believe I never had a relationship before,” she says now.
Meagan continues to feel cancer’s effects, including the arm pain and numbness of lymphedema. She continues treatments at Lancaster General Health’s Ann B. Barshinger Cancer Institute (www.lancastergeneralhealth.org). She looks forward to reconstructive surgery someday so she can wear tank tops again. Pre-cancer, she says, “I had really nice boobs. I was not full of myself, but I really got away with a lot. Then when you don’t have your boobs and you don’t have your hair, all of a sudden you have to work on your personality.”
She writes poetry in longhand, storing her work in a vintage apothecary bag. Through CaRE, the Canter Rehabilitation Exercise partnership of the Lancaster Family YMCA and Lancaster General Health (www.lancastergeneralhealth.org), she met women of all ages who support each other. One CaRE friend, seventy-six years old, is a published poet who encourages her writing.
Meagan reads “Maritime Lover,” a love poem full of brooding imagery, of “murky salty water” and “crumbling cliffs.” Then she finds a happy one. “Look how short it is compared to the other one,” she says with a laugh. Then she reads. “Carry your wisdom in your vivacious heart/Thumping and pounding in ecstasy/Soar because you’re NEW.”
Meagan has a pointed message for young women: “It doesn’t matter if you’re fifteen or twenty-five. You can get breast cancer.”
Mapping out her future is scary, but Meagan believes her post-cancer self is “definitely more caring about other people and other people’s feelings. I’m more attentive. What can I do to make my life better? I know that I feel a lot more grown up now than I did before.”
By M. Diane McCormick / Photography by Donovan Roberts Witmer