Jackie Wesley

It’s Never Too Late to Know, and Knowing is Half the Battle

Jackie Wesley was in a well-lit room, surrounded by fellow worshipers in her Christian women’s ministry meeting, when all of a sudden the room went dark and she was alone, just her and the doctor who had come to talk about the importance of regular mammograms. The Holy Spirit, she says, had a message for her; she had breast cancer. “Don’t nobody want to hear about that!” she fired back in her head. She had already been down that road several times before. Jackie had found her first breast lump when she was still a teenager. That one had been benign, as had the three lumps and biopsies that came over the next several years. There was no reason to think this would be different, except for the messenger, that is.

The following week, doctors told Jackie and her husband that she had Stage 3B breast cancer, an advanced type of cancer where the tumor has grown into the chest wall. Today, that diagnosis has a 5-year survival rate of 86%. Twenty-three years ago, when Jackie got her diagnosis, the prospects were nowhere near as good. They sat their boys down and told them the news: Jackie had a huge medical fight ahead of her, and it was going to eat up most of the savings they had worked so hard to stash away for college. The boys, Brandon and Damon, didn’t hesitate to give their full support; they would sacrifice for their mother just as she had always done for them.

Motherhood had come into Jackie’s life early. One of nine children in a tight-knit family in Gary, Indiana, Jackie grew up in a world where early pregnancy was not uncommon. She got her period at the tender age of ten, and when she wound up pregnant at the age of fifteen, her mother insisted she drop out of school to raise the baby. A few years later, a brief reunion with her son’s father resulted in a second pregnancy and a move to Denver, where Jackie stayed and built a life for herself and her boys.

Determined to remain independent, Jackie worked one full-time job and two part-time ones to make ends meet, bringing her young sons with her whenever she could. It was at her office supply company job that she met the charismatic man she would later marry. “I just want to be your friend,” he would tell her, plopping down in the chair beside her desk. “I don’t need friends; I got kids,” she’d insisted. Undeterred, he courted her with picnic baskets and trips out to the old airport to watch the planes coming in, and in time, Jackie decided she had room for him in her life after all. A few years later, when she got the opportunity to pursue a career with IBM, one that required near constant travel, her husband made that possible for her, tending to the boys and their home so that she could have a bit of the adventure and autonomy teen pregnancy had put out of reach.

Her husband had her back then, and he was equally unwavering when Jackie got her diagnosis. As she moved through a six-year journey to recovery, including a radical mastectomy, 8 series of chemotherapy, 45 rounds of radiation, and 28 surgeries, Jackie knew how lucky she was to have the support of her husband and sons. (So supportive, in fact, that her older son refused to let her sit in a wheelchair; he carried her where she needed to go instead.) Jackie also knew that many women in her community were not so fortunate. Many lacked not only the emotional but the financial infrastructure to get through the long battle that comes with a cancer diagnosis. For those without health insurance, even access to a mammogram was off-limits.

Jackie felt called to share her story to help other women, and so, with no formal training, she wrote and produced a play on the subject of the financial toll a cancer diagnosis takes on a woman and her family. She went on to found Fighting Together to Save Lives, a non-profit organization that provides advocacy and support to women in the BIPOC community with breast cancer and spreads the message that early detection saves lives. The mortality rate from breast cancer for women in the BIPOC community is 28.1% higher than in the overall population, a number Jackie wants to bring down through increased access to preventative care. To that end, she and the organization she founded are raising $5000 this month to provide 500 free mammograms to women in the community without health insurance.

Last spring, the baby granddaughter who was born in the same year as her diagnosis, that tiny girl Jackie desperately wanted to live long enough to see grow up, became a college graduate. Being able to watch that beautiful grandchild, along with her other seven grandchildren – her two queens and six kings, she calls them – grow up has been one of the biggest blessings of Jackie’s life, and it is her mission to give as many women in her community as she can that same opportunity through increased awareness and access to care. “I want everybody to have hope,” she says. “If you know, that’s half the battle.” It’s never too late to know.

It’s never too late to know.