It started when three of their friends, all from the Woburn High Class of 1987, were diagnosed with breast cancer within a short period of time – all under the age of 40.
By Kathie Ragsdale
http://woburn.wickedlocal.com/x1423336405/These-Woburn-women-are-more-than-survivors
It started when three of their friends, all from the Woburn High Class of 1987, were diagnosed with breast cancer within a short period of time – all under the age of 40.
Close friends Erin Ficociello and Michelle Amari attended a family fundraiser for one of the three, Jill McManus, an outgoing, red-headed hockey mom with two kids. Then they decided they needed to do something to honor their other two classmates, Carla Oddo and Christine Doherty.
They joined the Avon Breast Cancer Walk in 2007, Ficociello participating in the name of Doherty, the petite, religious mother of a son and daughter, and Amari walking in honor of Oddo, a woman known for her close family ties, including those to her nieces and nephews. As they walked, they also gave thanks for the lives of Amari’s mother and Ficociello’s grandmother, both cancer survivors and both from Woburn.
Neither woman could anticipate then how their litany of survivors – and victims – would grow.
Soon afterward, Amari, a nurse, started working with a new patient, Suzanne Beauchamp Clurman, who had graduated just the year before her and who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer.
“Then someone else heard of someone else, and it just kept growing,” remembers Ficociello. “By the 2008 (Avon) Walk, there were seven or eight girls on the list. Then, in December of 2008, I was diagnosed. We now have a list of 30. Ninety percent of us graduated from the high school (in Woburn).”
Four on the list have died from the disease.
Something seemed wrong. Roughly one in eight women in the United States can expect to get cancer in her lifetime, but the majority of cases are among older women. The chances of a woman under 40 getting breast cancer is only one in 233, according to the National Cancer Institute – and all of the women Ficociello and Amari were seeing fell into that lower-risk age group.
A foundation is born
They decided to do something to find out why – and to provide support and comfort to the women, many of them mothers of young children, who seemed to be joining their ranks by the day.
Thus was born the Tanner Ta Ta Foundation, whose focus is on helping Woburn women under 40 – and their families – cope with breast cancer, and on raising money and awareness to fight the disease. The name comes from the Woburn High football team moniker, The Tanners, and a tongue-in-cheek reference to a line in the comedy “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”
Ficociello’s aunt, Lynne Welch – a daughter, sister and aunt of survivors — is the group’s vice president. Chief statistician is Jamie Kelley, the sister of one of the Class of 1987 survivors.
The group held a ceremony on Woburn Common last Friday in observance of national Breast Cancer Awareness Month and on Saturday raised $7,700 for their cause at “toll booths” throughout the city.
Their work is both scientific and personal — because they’ve been there.
Local advocates
When Ficociello first found a lump and went to see her primary care doctor, a nurse in the office asked whether she was just at a point in her menstrual cycle that might explain the mass.
“That day was the day I became my own advocate,” says Ficociello, now 41, who went on to have a double mastectomy and reconstruction, removal of her ovaries, removal of 18 lymph nodes and 16 rounds of chemotherapy after discovery of four estrogen-driven tumors in her left breast.
She and her husband Todd, a Burlington firefighter, also faced the task of telling their two daughters, Samantha and Kelsey, then 9 and 5, that their mother had cancer – shortly after the girls had watched their 6-year-old cousin go through treatments for lymphoma. It is the only time Ficociello gets tears in her eyes when she recounts what she has endured. “Kelsey took it really hard,” she says, “and my nephew was afraid he had given me cancer.”
Such experiences are the foundation for the Ta Ta support network.
“The access we have to each other’s e-mails is good – to ask questions about medications or treatment facilities,” Ficociello says. “The foundation itself, we do all these little things that insurance doesn’t cover, like flowers. We sent a chemo basket to a girl who started chemo last week, full of products tried-and-true for us, like a robe, tea, lotion, peanut butter and crackers, gift certificates for ordering out or for coffee, with a little note from the giver on each item.”
“Having to ask for help all the time can bring a strong girl down,” she adds.
Ta Tas have also given rides to doctor or chemotherapy appointments, offered gas cards to those who needed them, provided babysitting services to families of breast cancer patients and dropped off pre-surgical baskets, chemo baskets and “pick-me-up” baskets to women in treatment.
For their first several years of existence, the Ta Tas held fundraisers at the Woburn Country Club and donated all of the proceeds to the Avon Walk. Since they started the foundation – announced on the last day of Ficociello’s treatment in May of this year – they have branched out to provide more local services.
“We still support the bigger-picture stuff, like Avon,” Ficociello says, “But we’re also able to have the cash available for hot fudge, which is equally important.”
The numbers
Ficociello is circumspect about whether she thinks there is a disproportionate number of breast cancer cases in Woburn, a city that drew national attention in the 1980s with a water contamination lawsuit initiated by parents concerned over the high incidence of childhood leukemia in the city.
“I love this city,” she says. “I was born at the old Choate Hospital. We’re not on a witch hunt to blame anybody or find anything. If there’s a commonality among us, I’d like to know what it is. The land? The water? Not to blame anyone, just to know what it is. Nobody knows what causes it in the first place.”
“To me, it’s the age thing,” she adds. “If the average age of diagnosis is 68, why do I know so many people with it?”
