Back to home » Archives » February / March 2009

Cancer Fighters

by Danette Wills

Despite dismal statistics for blacks diagnosed with this still terrifying disease, African Americans continue to survive—and thrive. Their weapons of choice? God, family and good medicine.

A 6-year-old from Florida, a thirty-something single mother of two from England and an 82-year-old retired U.S. Senator from Massachusetts shared a common and relentless foe—cancer. With little regard for status, age or intellect, and a penchant for taking the lives of African Americans, this disease has proved no match for these modern-day cancer fighters of color.

Million-Dollar Baby
Most of us can’t remember being 6, but Bria Brown distinctly remembers losing her hair and staying in the hospital for long periods. Her parents, Ed and Carol Brown, remember the devastating diagnosis—osteosarcoma, a progressive form of bone cancer so rare that only one baby in a million will develop the disease.

“In 2001, the doctor gave me the worst news of my life,” Bria’s mother recalls. “My 6-year-old daughter was being diagnosed with cancer. I worried about losing my job because I was the insurance carrier, and I worried about how I was going to keep my family together.”

The Browns spent the next nine months in Miami Children’s Hospital. They prayed often, didn’t cry in front of Bria and fought to hold their lives together. Each had busy careers that couldn’t be neglected, but loving grandparents, close friends and other family members offered time and support.

No one in the Brown’s extended family had ever had cancer, but among African-American children ages 1 to 14, cancer ranks third as the leading cause of death, surpassed only by accidents and homicides.

After Bria completed chemotherapy, the family learned that the cancer had spread to other areas in her leg. Several surgeons recommended amputation, but this wasn’t an option for the Browns. They were determined to spare Bria’s leg and save her life.

Bria’s physician referred the family to a University of Florida orthopedic surgeon who was helping patients avoid amputation thanks to a new rod implantation procedure. Developed by Wright Medical Technology, the surgery involved removing all of the cancer and the diseased thigh bone and then reconstructing Bria’s leg using a custom-made expandable implant that would grow with her. But there was a risk. The Repiphysis expandable implant, although considered revolutionary at the time, had not been approved by the FDA.

Nevertheless, the operation was a success.

Today, Bria is a typical 14-year-old high school freshman. She still experiences some discomfort, but she has passed the five-year mark of being cancer-free and the odds are very good that she will remain that way.

A Writer’s Story
When Nayaba Arinde, an award-winning journalist and editor of New York’s Amsterdam News and single mother of two, received her breast cancer diagnosis in January 2007, she began to question her faith. Shocked, scared and angry, she didn’t want to talk about it. After two decades as a journalist, the social activist and communicator chose not to share the news with anyone.

A petite, 120-pound writer, Arinde knew that deciding to fight cancer was only step one. “I knew that I wasn’t going to give into the condition because I still had work to do,” Arinde says.

Over the next year, Arinde would have eight surgeries, including a mastectomy and instant transverse rectus abdominis myocutaneous (TRAM) flap surgery. (TRAM flap surgery involves construction of a breast from lower abdominal skin and fatty tissue.) She also overruled her preference for holistic treatments and watched her natural locks fall to the floor after enduring four months of chemotherapy.

Like the Browns, Arinde had no history of cancer in her family, and the statistics she faced were equally daunting. African-American women are more likely to die from breast cancer at every age, and they have a lower long-term survival rate at each stage of the disease than white women. Of an estimated 19,010 newly diagnosed cases of breast cancer expected to occur in 2007 among African American women, 5,830 of them—about 31 percent—were expected to die from the disease.

A self-admitted workaholic, Arinde used her responsibilities at work and those related to her two daughters, a second- and a fifth-grader, to help her get through days of excruciating pain and debilitating fatigue.

“On days when my pain was immense and all-enveloping, I tried to refocus on the inner-city issues that I cared about,” Arinde says. “I never stopped working and tried to continue my routine, and, while I couldn’t hide the immense pain from the girls, I tried to foster a functional air of calm.”

These days, Arinde is beginning to feel better than her old self. She’s revitalized and reborn—not just as an activist, but as an advocate. She has even written about and shared her personal journey with her readers.

“We need to teach one another that cancer is more common than we think,” Arinde says. “Our documented historical experience has led us to have an underlying suspicion and fear of Western medicine. Global institutionalized racism is also a huge contributor to the fact that we, as a community, are under more stress than most. We are more susceptible to certain illnesses than others, and we are more likely to sacrifice our own health in order to take care of others.”

Not Just for Women
If you have breast tissue, you can get breast cancer. Just ask 89-year-old retired U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke. The Massachusetts lawmaker was diagnosed with breast cancer in September 2002 at age 82. Notoriously closemouthed about his personal and private life, Brooke made an exception when he decided to openly discuss his very personal battle with cancer.

“I know that my talking may be helpful to other men who are living their lives right now, unaware that they have this disease,” Brooke said in an interview published in The New York Times. (He also speaks of it in detail in his book, Bridging the Divide: My Life, published in 2007.)

To treat his cancer, Senator Brooke had a dual radical modified mastectomy. Since then, he has reportedly been in remission.

While breast cancer in men is rare, it does happen. The overall ratio of female to male breast cancer in the United States is 100 to 1. That means that roughly 1,990 men were diagnosed and 450 were estimated to die of the disease in 2008. A March 2007 study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology concluded that black men are three times more likely than white men to die of breast cancer. The study also urges more research into racial disparities in male breast cancer.

Pages: 1 | 2

Scroll down to comment on this story.

Previous Comments: