FORT SMITH, Ark. (AP) - Inside the “coffee coaching corner” of a Fort Smith boutique, a cancer survivor sat drinking coffee, Razorback earrings dangling from her ears.
“I come here sometimes just to sit and talk and drink coffee with them - and aggravate them,” said Sue Forbis, 73, laughing.
Forbis came to the Pink Ribbon Boutique for the first time a few years ago when she had her breasts removed (a double mastectomy) because of breast cancer. The most important thing is to stay positive, she said.
The Southwest Times Record (https://bit.ly/2deWGf1 ) reports that the boutique sells what women going through breast cancer - or any cancer - might need, namely bras and prosthetic breasts, both off the shelf and custom made. But items such as lymphedema products, headscarves and personal lubricant are also on its shelves because cancer treatment affects everything, owner Bev Ramsey said.
The mastectomy bras look similar to standard bras, except that they have pockets for prosthetic breasts.
Having had breast cancer and a double mastectomy herself, Ramsey said fitting survivors for bras and mentoring them was never where she expected to be. She said everyone deals with having cancer in their own way, and she was never one to sport pink ribbons or participate in breast cancer awareness events.
She was devastated when she was diagnosed in 2003 at 39 years old, she said. It came as a shock to Ramsey, who ate healthy, worked out daily, played tennis and had no known family history of cancer. Of the many thoughts that ate at her, the possibility of not being there for her then 6-year-old son, Devon, as he grew up was one of the worst. The cancer came back in 2006, and that’s when it was time for a mastectomy. But in the midst of the horror were supportive family and friends, some of whom helped guide her on what to do post-surgery.
“That’s what I thought everybody had,” Ramsey said.
But when she went to the Pink Ribbon Boutique in 2013, then in Russellville and owned by another cancer survivor, she said she learned that she was an exception. Some women didn’t know that prosthetic breasts existed. She’s met some since she began fitting who were stuffing their bras with birdseed, socks and pantyhose. Not everyone has a friend who is a cancer survivor to guide them or a husband to shave her head and clean up her vomit. She learned that some spouses leave after a mastectomy - or a diagnosis.
“Unfortunately, the sexual aspect is a lot of it and that’s a sad thing because that shouldn’t be how we’re identified,” Ramsey said.
Ramsey decided she wanted to buy the boutique and open it in Fort Smith. After more than five months of working under the former owner and taking classes to become a certified mastectomy fitter and going through the process for the boutique to be an orthotics, prosthetics and pedorthics facility, she opened the store at the beginning of 2014.
She wanted to keep it as more than a place where women could buy what they needed, but where they could also come for emotional support, she said.
“The first thing you think is, ’I’m dead,’” she said. “You need to have somebody to sit down with you and help you through each step of this.
That explains the coffee coaching corner, a room inside the boutique that Ramsey said is set up like a living room so people will talk to each other.
“If it weren’t for Bev, I’m afraid I’d be in a really, really bad state of depression,” Forbis said.
Forbis had been to other places that sell prosthetic breasts, but she described the experience as similar to going into a hardware store and getting a part instead of a place where someone takes the time to get to know her.
Connie Walters works for an area hospital and refers patients to the Pink Ribbon Boutique. She explained that breasts are not just any body part. They are associated with femininity and patients who have mastectomies often feel as if they’re losing their womanhood, she said.
“They’re faced with disfiguring their body,” she said, on top of a life-threatening, expensive illness.
When Forbis was faced with having to have a mastectomy, she said she thought, “What am I going to do? How are people going to look at me?”
“I’m a widow,” she said. “So would that have an effect on me if I wanted to date? It was devastating.”
To that end, Ramsey said, “You just have to talk to your spouse about it or whoever and see what they say and work it out together because it’s tough. It’s very tough. That’s something that nobody likes to talk about, but that’s the reason we’re so freaked out about it.”
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Information from: Southwest Times Record, https://www.swtimes.com/
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