Ginny Clement is lucky, and she has known it for 42 years.
She is a cancer survivor, which is saying a lot considering when she got the diagnosis, medicine was not leaning into fighting cancer in any way approaching what goes on today.
Clement was the keynote speaker at the annual Breast Cancer Awareness Month’s Pretty in Pink luncheon, which is a celebration of those who have overcome cancer and fighting the disease and an acknowledgement that the road to defeating cancer is still long and uncertain.
Clement said she found a lump in her breast way back when and was told to be patient as the abnormal tissue would dissolve on its own in time. Another doctor said the same thing. It’s where doctoring was at the time, Clement said, adding that she held no one to blame. Today, of course, a lump in the breast would get a quick analysis.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Time went by and the lump remained, so a biopsy was done. By then, it was too late, well it would have been too late for 96 out of a 100 patients, as she was told. One of the reasons was that her lymph nodes — those rest stops on the highway to everywhere else in the body — were largely implicated.
As one doctor said: “The tiger is out.”
And yet, there she was this week, at the podium, telling how she had always pictured herself as happy and enjoying life and how it almost came crumbling down. Her faith and her supportive family and friends kept her afloat, she said. Even people she didn’t know — people who had her on their prayer list — would come to her house, encircle her bed and ask for God’s intervention.
In those days, Pine Bluff had no oncologist. Now it is the home to two cancer centers — one at CARTI and one at Jefferson Regional Medical Center.
And if cost is a concern, as one JRMC executive said, there’s a grant for that, meaning there shouldn’t be any barriers between a woman and her getting a mammogram.
As a nod to those who have survived and who are still fighting, Clement rang a bell to remind people to take advantage of the advanced care that is now available.
“You have the best,” she said. “Please use them. Don’t wait.”
Good advice — and from someone who knows whereof she speaks.