To kick off Breast Cancer Awareness Month, rolling out‘s Porsha Monique sat down with Ricki Fairley and Valarie Worthy, the co-founders of TOUCH, The Black Breast Cancer Alliance, for another episode in our Health IQ series. These courageous fighters prefer to call it Breast Cancer Action Month and here are excerpts of rolling out‘s discussion with them.
Tell us about the journey that brought you here, 24 years after being diagnosed with breast cancer.
Valarie Worthy: OK, I’m just so happy to be here. I was diagnosed at 40. So, I probably had it in my body at 39. And even though I’m a nurse, I was not prepared to be a breast cancer survivor. So, everything that I learned in nursing school went out the window, and I was a scared 40-year-old African American woman with breast cancer, because I went through surgery, chemo, radiation, and I took hormone therapy for 10 years. … And so, I knew after that I needed to go out in the community and make a difference in the lives of African American women. Because when I was diagnosed, there was no one that even wanted to talk to me about breast cancer; it was such a stigma even in our community, and especially in our church.
Congratulations to you, Ricki, on being 12 years in remission. Explain why this is so urgent for you.
Ricki Fairley: To tell you why breast cancer is so bad for us, it’s really the worst disease a Black woman can get versus a White woman. So, we have a 41% higher mortality rate than White women. Crazy, right? That means for every 100 white women who die of breast cancer, 141 Black women die. We have a 39% higher recurrence rate; … [it] usually comes back within a year, which is what mine did. And now there’s this growing body of research that’s validating that a Black breast cancer cell looks different from a White one. So, all of the drugs that we have today in the market have never been tested on our bodies, on Black women, on our biology.
Now, Ricki, you say your peace was nonnegotiable during your fight. How did that committing to that peace contribute to your healing?
RF: Not only did I have to get the cancers out of my boobs, I had to get the cancers out of my life. And I did. So, I divorced my husband of 30 years. I quit my business partners. I started my own business. I sold my big house in Alpharetta, Georgia, and I moved to my little one-bedroom condo on the beach — all on chemo, which is a little crazy. I wouldn’t recommend it. But I totally changed everything about my life and I’m all about peace.
