Every1Counts™: Media Transcript

CNN

Women Share Stories of Coping with Breast Cancer
Aired February 24, 2005 - 20:00 ET

ZAHN: About 40,000 Americans will die from breast cancer this year. Progress in fighting the disease comes in small steps. And this week, a study by Yale researchers gives doctors some clues on how to treat one form of the disease that often never moves beyond the milk ducts, except sometimes it does spread and turns very deadly.

Tens of thousands of families watch closely for developments like this, including the family you're about to meet, five sisters who are fighting to conquer breast cancer together. Here's medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They're a tight-knit family, five sisters, five very different personalities. The oldest, Wendy, the protector. Cindy, well, let's just say she's the free spirit. Kristi, the tomboy. Tammy, the shy one. And Jennifer, the baby. Held together by their parents, Don and Shelby (ph) Kimball. A large family about to be tested.

Cindy would be the first.

CINDY KIMBALL: The biopsy came back and, sure enough, it was cancer. I remember being hysterical, and thinking, I just turned 31, and not so much why me, but I'm so young.

COHEN (on camera): Do you remember calling your parents?

C. KIMBALL: I said I was diagnosed with cancer, and I don't think I was able to talk after that.

COHEN: Cindy had been married only six months. Her husband was a U.S. Army staff sergeant stationed in Okinawa, Japan, nearly 8,000 miles from home. For the first time in her life, Cindy felt alone.

She says shortly after she was diagnosed, her husband left her.

But she would have to put that pain behind her to fight the toughest battle of her life. She flew home from Japan to seek treatment and be with her family.

Her sister Kristi remembers.

KRISTI KIMBALL: I wanted to do anything possible and the whole family, just to support her and get her through it, and get her the best care possible.

And then when she was done, that was it. I thought, OK, well, we're done with this.

C. KIMBALL: We're done.

K. KIMBALL: It's not going to affect anybody else.

COHEN: Kristi was wrong.

K. KIMBALL: I felt a little lump. The mammogram didn't show anything. We did an ultrasound. It did show, and actually my -- the best specialist in New York felt another. She said, let's do a surgical biopsy, just because of your history. So a week later she sat me down and said it was cancerous. And I just started to cry.

COHEN: With two sisters, two cases of breast cancer, the Kimballs began to look for some kind of connection, for a link.

C. KIMBALL: Kristi left me a voicemail, and she said, "Cyn, we have something in common. Call me back." So, I'm thinking, OK, we like the same kind of candy bar, or this new kind of running shoes. We like the same kind of running shoes.

And I call her back and she tells me she has cancer.

COHEN: And the sisters had something else in common. Kristi's long-time boyfriend and the father of their 3-year-old son Christian says they were having problems even before she became ill, but then...

K. KIMBALL: Christian's father chose to turn around and walk away, and that hurt so badly, to go home and have all the doors, the locks changed to your house and your boxes and your personal items, you know, out on the porch.

COHEN: In the midst of so much pain, the family came together as it always had. That would help, because more adversity lay ahead.

This time, for Wendy.

WENDY KIMBALL: I knew the second I felt it, telling my parents and my sisters was the hardest. I was thinking of it from a mother's point of view, how would my parents, how would I feel if all my children had cancer, or, you know, one by one were getting cancer.

COHEN: Now the family had three sisters who were diagnosed with breast cancer in their 30s.

Why them? The Kimballs wanted answers, and they wanted them right away.

Kristi, the nurse in the family, knew where to turn. While at school, she studied under Dr. Eric Weiner, then the head of the breast cancer program at Duke University Medical Center. He advised, treated and consoled the sisters day and night. He became the family's angel.

Dr. Weiner knew these three cases were more than a coincidence. He advised genetic testing for all five sisters, including Tammy and Jennifer, who were cancer-free.

K. KIMBALL: I pretty much knew that I did have it.

COHEN: The testing showed all five sisters carried a mutation of the breast cancer gene called BRCA-1. It also showed they inherited it from their father.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They could blame us, especially me. Came from my side of the family, but they don't. I mean, they're strong. They almost -- probably doesn't sound right, but they almost make light of it. OK, we've got this. Let's deal with it.

K. KIMBALL: Towards the end of the treatments, I would get really sick. And I just remember him holding the basin as I am getting sick to my stomach, and he would wipe my mouth and he would just pat my back and tell me I would be OK, and it will be over in just a little bit. And he would sit there and hold my hand, and just go through it with me.

COHEN: And now Jennifer and Tammy, the sisters who didn't have cancer, had a tough decision to make. Having the defective gene meant they had between a 50 and 80 percent chance of getting breast cancer. Should they have their healthy breasts removed? And should they also have their ovaries removed, since having the gene increases the chance of ovarian cancer? Tammy decided yes.

(on camera): Was that a tough decision?

TAMMY KIMBALL: It was for me. And then again, it was in a way, because it takes part of your womanhood away. For me, it did. It is, making this decision. But then again, I have two kids, and I want to be here. So if I can do something to prevent it, shoot, let's do it.

COHEN (voice-over): The decision was more complicated for Jennifer. She's 34 and just got married last July. She and her new husband David plan to have children and then she, too, will have the surgery.

JENNIFER KIMBALL: We definitely want to have our family, but I've talked to Dr. Weiner, probably down the road, five years, I mean, my early 40s, so I'll have more aggressive measures taken, mastectomy, hysterectomy. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We are here to help you, so give us a call.

COHEN: The Kimballs have turned their pain into activism. They started a foundation to raise awareness of the importance of genetic testing.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Breast cancer is not a death sentence. I think it's very scary. Any cancer, any patient that hears the word cancer, you think, oh, my goodness. But there's so many treatments out there now, and there's so much research going on that it's not like it used to be.

COHEN: And finally, some good news. The five Kimball sisters are doing just fine.

Cindy remarried in 1998. She has a new family, with her husband and his two children. Kristi and her 9-year-old son Christian have moved back to Florida to live with her parents.

The Kimballs are a tight-knit family, and all this adversity has made them understand how important they all are to each other.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Our father, he would say family is all that you have.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Family takes care of family.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And I think that this has brought us closer. We always say, I love you.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Makes you more appreciative of what you have and not what you don't have.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAHN: What a beautiful and strong family. We saw what genetic testing did for the Kimball family. What would you tell women out there who have a history of breast cancer in the family, when it comes to genetic testing?

COHEN: You have to decide if genetic testing is really right for you. It was right for this family. They chose to do it. It's not right for everyone.

What you have to do is you have to go to your doctor. And you want to ask your doctor for a center where they don't just do the testing, but they do all the counseling around it, counseling to decide if you want to do it, counseling once you get the results, what the results really mean. Because it's not -- it's not always simple what they mean.

And so you don't want to go just anywhere. You want to go someplace that's going to give you all of that context.

ZAHN: They certainly gave us a very poignant idea of the very toughest choices they've had to make along the way. I'm not sure how most of us would do if we had to confront that reality.

COHEN: That's right. Other people might do other thing. Tammy, one of the five sisters who carries the gene but does not have breast cancer, next week will have her healthy breasts removed. Not everyone would make that choice. But for her, that's the right choice.

ZAHN: Elizabeth, thanks for joining us tonight.