Receiving a breast cancer diagnosis is devastating no matter what your situation in life. For those with kids, one emotion that can rise to the forefront is the fear that you won’t be around to raise your kids and watch them grow up.
Jeanelle Adams and Tami Eagle Bowling both experienced that fear at its most visceral. The two women, both moms, were diagnosed with different stages of breast cancer and have had different experiences with it — but both have used their journeys and their voices to become powerful advocates for change.
Jeanelle Adams: Biomarker Testing and Showing Up for “People That Look Like Me”
Jeanelle Adams
In 2020, Adams had just left her teaching job to become a full-time stay-at-home mom when she noticed a rash on her breast. The pandemic made it difficult for her to get doctor’s appointments in a timely manner, and they were all virtual, so Adams didn’t feel she was getting top-line care. On top of that, she was dealing with bias from the medical system.
“I don’t look like I have breast cancer,” Adams told She Media CEO Samantha Skey on the Finding Flow podcast. “I’m Black. I’m young from urban area. I dress a certain way. I talk a certain way. So when I go to the doctor’s, they just think I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
For two years, doctors told Adams she had eczema, and it wasn’t until she pushed for a referral to another doctor that she was finally diagnosed. At that point, she said, shock wasn’t the foremost emotion. “I felt like I knew, I just wanted the confirmation,” she explained. Instead of surprise, “it was fear,” Adams said, “because of my daughter. That’s my biggest thing. Being able to see her grow and take her to school and do everything with her… I wasn’t really feel fearful of anything else but [losing] that time with her.”
Adams never planned on becoming a breast cancer advocate, but says she did so for representation and for her daughter, who was around 8 years old when Adams’ first symptoms came up. “I wanted to actively share my journey… because I didn’t see people like me, that looked like me, going through it,” she explained. “I also really didn’t think I was going to make it. So I wanted my daughter to see that if she has to go through that, she can know what to say and she can have a community behind her.”
So far, Adams has taken that advocacy all the way to the New Jersey State Legislature, where she testified twice as part of the successful effort to mandate insurance coverage of biomarker testing. This type of testing saved Adams’ life, she explains. “It’s the reason why I was diagnosed with triple negative [breast cancer,]” she says. “Triple negative is an aggressive form of breast cancer and there’s no standardized care without biomarker testing. I would have not gotten the right care.”
Tami Eagle Bowling: Creating a Legacy For Her Children
Tami Eagle Bowling
Tami Eagle Bowling went in for a mammogram after moving from New York City to New Jersey, after her new doctor told her she was overdue. At 41, Bowling had a clean bill of health and no family history of breast cancer, but she dutifully went in — and was told she had Stage 2 breast cancer. At first, the mom of two wasn’t too worried. “From what I knew, I thought it was survivable. I thought, ‘well, I’m just going to have surgery and I’ll be fine,’” she says on the podcast. It wasn’t until she had a date set for the surgery that her surgeon encouraged her to do a full-body scan, to check that the cancer hadn’t spread anywhere else. Turns out, it had spread not only to her lymph notes (which denotes Stage 2) but also to her liver — and Bowling was re-diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer.
“It was obviously devastating,” Bowling recalled. “The first thing that I thought of was my children. They were two and four years old. So the first thing that came to mind was just, ‘They need a mom. I want to be the one to raise my kids and teach them values and braid their hair and teach them to read. Will I be able to do all of that?’”
For months, Bowling would burst into tears after dropping her kids off at nursery school, after just trying to “hold it together” for the time of their drive together. Finally, she woke up one day with a mental shift. “There was this change, this strength that came upon me, that there’s a lot of things that… you can’t control about the cancer,” she explained. “But I can control my perspective. I can control my mindset.”
Bowling recalled a quote her father told her after her diagnosis: life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you choose to react to it. “I decided to own that perspective… and I was going to create a legacy for my girls, and hopefully for future generations so that nobody has to die from breast cancer,” she said.
It’s been ten years since Bowling’s diagnosis of stage 4 breast cancer, meaning she’s blown right past the average survival expectancy of two to three years. In that time, she’s leveraged her 20 years of corporate marketing and sales experience to raise money for Metavivor, a nonprofit that funds metastatic breast cancer research. “I felt that if I could fundraise, I could give some purpose to the diagnosis,” Bowling says. “There’s this whole notion of healing through advocacy that I think benefited not only me, but so many other people.”
What It Takes To Be a Breast Cancer Advocate
Both Adams and Bowling are powerful examples of how to advocate for yourself and others in a way that can change people’s lives. And while both have made a huge impact since they started, Adams maintains that it can start small. “Advocating to me is just speaking your mind and always standing up for what you believe is right,” she says. You could do that through creating content online or taking the legislative route, like Adams did — but it starts with simply speaking up.
Bowling believes in using your talents, whatever they may be, to make change. “It’s taking the skills that you have and perhaps that you’ve used in your career and then taking them to another level to help society and contribute in a bigger way,” Bowling explains.
For more on Adams’ and Bowling’s advocacy journeys and how their families supported and inspired them through it all, watch the full episode of the Finding Flow podcast, out now.
Before you go, shop these products and gifts for the breast cancer patients in your life:
