Austin resident Ann Caple, 62, was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer in 2009. She’d scheduled a routine mammogram and waited for a letter in the mail to tell her the results were negative for breast cancer, as they had been since she started having mammograms at age 40. Instead, she received a phone call.
“They told me they’d seen something in my breast like rings of sugar,” Caple said. That March, her doctor scheduled her for an ultrasound and MRI, then a biopsy of her left breast. That April, she got another call from the doctor, who told her she had early-stage breast cancer.
“I screamed in the phone. I was nervous, I was scared, I was home alone,” Caple said. “Standing in my dining room, I will never forget, I said, ‘God, if it’s meant for me to be here, you will let me be here. If it’s meant for me to go, then I’ll go. But I know you got me.’”
The American Cancer Society projects that more than 2 million new cancer cases will be diagnosed this year, an estimated 78,200 of which will be in Illinois. In 2024, 310,720 females are expected to get breast cancer, and 42,250 of them are predicted to die from it.
Breast cancer is the most diagnosed cancer among Black women, according to the American Cancer Society. Black people are statistically more likely to die from cancer, and to live shorter after a cancer diagnosis, than any other race or ethnic group because of structural inequities and systemic racism.
Lori Terry, an ultrasound technologist in Chicago’s western suburbs for 26 years, attributes this to a scarcity of cancer awareness among Black communities.
“We are really at the bottom of the totem pole, as far as being equipped with knowing, or even searching out, how to take care of ourselves,” Terry said.
After patients get mammograms, Terry marks abnormalities and, under an ultrasound, analyzes which determine a closer look by the doctor. She’s also helped with biopsies at West Suburban, Loyola University Medical Center, and River Forest’s breast imaging center. Over the last two-and-a-half decades, Terry has seen hundreds of cancer patients.
At Caple’s first appointment in 2009 at Oak Park’s West Suburban Hospital Medical Center, she told her doctor she didn’t want radiation or chemo. After discussing her options of a silicone replacement or an implant using her own skin grafts, Caple chose to remove her left breast and get a silicone replacement.
But before meeting with a plastic surgeon to talk through her surgery, Caple spoke on the phone with the mother of her daughter’s friend. She also had breast cancer and told Caple she had reconstruction surgery – a procedure that rebuilds the breast using her own tissue rather than an implant – an option that was never presented to Caple.
“I never was offered that,” Caple said. When she met with the plastic surgeon, she brought up reconstruction surgery. He responded, “‘Oh, that costs a lot of money.’ My heart dropped in my stomach,” Caple added.
Part of the reason Black Americans die at higher rates from cancer than other people is because they often have less access to high-quality facilities and medical professionals that detect and treat cancer, largely because of inadequate health insurance.
Terry often hears from Black patients, “‘This is all about money. They just want my insurance,’” Terry said. “And I always say ‘No, we are here to take care of you.’”
“They don’t always tell us, Black African Americans, everything that other people, Caucasian women, get because they feel like we can’t afford it,” Caple said of some medical professionals. “But that’s their own judgment. Find out what I can afford by still presenting it to me. Let it be my option.”
At the time of her diagnosis, Caple worked in career services for the Chicago Public School system, which she said provided her with quality medical insurance. Though the cost of her breast reconstruction surgery was $98,000, she only paid $150.
After the surgery, Caple did decide to take a form of chemotherapy. Now, after an intensive 27-week healing process, and chemotherapy pills for 10 years, Caple goes to the doctor every three months and gets a yearly MRI to ensure she remains breast cancer free. She attends a cancer support group at West Suburban Medical Center to share her experience with women experiencing cancer.
“We have to talk to these women about going to get their mammograms and giving confidence to the doctor because a lot of them don’t trust the doctors,” Caple said.
“I actually do the same thing, especially when they come in for their mammograms and they get called back,” Terry said about increasing discussion around cancer so that patients feel more comfortable and safer in accessing healthcare.
“First and foremost, I treat every patient with care and compassion,” Terry said. In addition to making sure they have a support system and giving themselves grace, “I try to talk about things that they’re interested in, that makes them happy, that makes them feel fulfilled, and just to take their mind off of what we’re doing at that present time.”
“Just having a mammogram is frightful for a lot of women,” Terry added. “They don’t get mammograms until it’s almost too late for some of them because they ‘heard that it hurt.’”
Caple speaks at churches and shares her experience with people in her day-to-day life to open up the conversation around cancer. Although she acknowledges it took her a minute to trust her physicians, she added, “I think it’s all in how you approach the doctor. I’m an advocate for myself.”
“We don’t get a lot of stuff that we need to get because it’s not discussed,” Caple said. Although several of her family members have died from cancer, she didn’t know they had it until after they’d died.
“My grandmother, my mother, they never discussed cancer.” But now, her aunt-in-law and cousin-in-law, who both have breast cancer, are also sharing their stories with people “because they watched me,” Caple said.
While Terry said she encourages people to get yearly mammograms, “no matter how much you talk, no matter how much you inform, it’s still a personal decision,” Terry said. “There needs to be more education upon what we eat, our environment, all of those things because they play a big factor in cancer in African Americans as well.”