Brownsville woman shares ongoing battle with breast cancer
Submitted photo
Babette Medlock, center, in yellow, celebrated a recent birthday with friends and family spelling out “Happy Birthday Babette” on their masks. She is currently fighting stage four breast cancer and said one of the reasons she fights is because of her friends and family.
Submitted photo
Babette Medlock stands outside of her tap-dancing class at Cheryl Frost Dance Studio. While she’s currently fighting stage four breast cancer, Medlock finds joy in tap dancing.
A Fayette County woman is continuing her fight against breast cancer and has been a proponent of self-examinations and reaching out to others with similar experiences.
Babette Medlock of Brownsville was originally diagnosed with stage-one breast cancer in 2010, but her lump was missed on a previous mammogram, and she discovered it herself.
“I found my lump four months later with a self exam,” Medlock said. “I had to do an ultrasound and a biopsy, and it’s a whole process after that.”
Following the diagnosis, Medlock endured a lumpectomy, which is a partial mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation from February 2019, to the end of that year.
“For me, the fear of the first treatment was worse than the actual treatment,” Medlock said, adding that she took a couple of weeks off from her job as a hairdresser after her surgery, but was still able to work through chemotherapy, but without wearing a wig, as it became too hot. “All treatments are different.”
Following treatment, Medlock was placed on an estrogen modulator to regulate her hormones because her type of breast cancer was hormone-driven.
Medlock continued taking the estrogen modulator medication for eight years until she had a recurrence of breast cancer diagnosed in 2019.
She said it started when she was having extreme fatigue and severe pain in her left shoulder and just happened to have had a mammogram the same day as she was seeing an orthopedic doctor about her shoulder pain.
“He (the orthopedic doctor) saw something suspicious,” Medlock said. “I should have recognized the signs, but I missed them.”
Her diagnosis was stage-four breast cancer that has spread to multiple places in her body, and she also underwent radiation for tumors in her brain.
Medlock said she’s currently on her fourth line of defense in her fight, as each line of defense requires different kind of chemotherapy pills that are introduced when the cancer outsmarts the previous defense.
“They keep changing it to stop the progression of the cancer,” Medlock said. “You want the cancer to be stable or shrinking.”
As a fighter, Medlock’s advice to someone just receiving a diagnosis is to take a deep breath and take time to do research, avoid rushing into any treatment and make contact with people in communities, such as those attending Relay For Life events or groups online.
“Reach out to other breast cancer communities because that’s where you get your knowledge, from the people who have been through it,” Medlock said, adding that the groups she connected with in 2010 and 2019 were different from one another, as the two different diagnoses brought two different perspectives.
Through her second diagnosis, Medlock said she is working with a certified holistic cancer coach and nutritionist to help her focus on how to also mentally fight her cancer and how eating habits can help.
Even though she found it tough as an independent person to ask for help, her husband, Joseph, and her family have helped her and gave her support, and she always looks for help from above.
“My thoughts from the beginning of this from 2019 is to look for the joy in every day, because you never know what life is going to bring you,” she said. “And I mostly pray, ‘Lord, have mercy every day,’ and ‘Jesus, I trust in you.'”
She also found joy in tap dancing.
“One of the joys in my life in my older age is that I picked up tap dancing,” Medlock said. “There’s nothing like the sounds of that tapping. It brings me joy.”
Medlock said even though she had cancer in her hip and went through hip surgery to stabilize it, she still tap dances at the Cheryl Frost Dance Studio in Fairbank, as she and Frost graduated from high school together.
Because of her experience, Medlock said she is more of a proponent of self-examination, adding that it can be learned through literature online, speaking to breast cancer fighters and survivors or consulting a doctor.
“Anything is better than nothing,” she said. “As long as you do it.”