‘Passion with a focus:’ After breast cancer, Yolanda Murphy builds a bridge to young survivors
‘Passion with a focus:’ After breast cancer, Yolanda Murphy builds a bridge to young survivors
At the age of 35, Yolanda Murphy’s life was finally starting to fall into place. She had a good job in a downtown skyscraper, was about to pay off her car, and had just moved into her first home without a roommate. She had ordered new furniture. And she was trying to decide where her dreams would take her next.
One night in January 2016, she was lying down, watching television, when she felt it: a lump in her left breast.
It gave her a reason to pause, but she told herself not to panic. It could be hormones, she thought; she’d just finished her period. But later that month, she brought it up to her gynecologist at a previously scheduled appointment. The doctor felt it too, so Yolanda went for a mammogram.
“I’m going to be honest: this looks like cancer,” the technician told her.
Yolanda, who is herself a straightforward person, appreciated the candor. A more detailed mammogram, ultrasound, and biopsy proved the technician was right: the diagnosis was 2B invasive ductal carcinoma.
Because she is adopted, Yolanda did not know whether she inherited risks for breast cancer. The only other person she knew who’d had breast cancer was an aunt who was diagnosed her 60s; certainly, she didn’t know anyone her own age. With little frame of reference to guide her, she simply went back to work, keeping appointments and telling nobody. She waited a few days and researched the terms she’d been given. Then she told her parents, her brother, and a few close friends, giving them permission to disclose the news to others, with a warning.
“I don’t play with health,” she told them, adding, “You can cry, but not in front of me, because I’m trying to stay in a very positive mental space.”
“I have yet to cry about it,” she says, four years later. “I trust God that He is going to heal me, that this is a step in my journey.”
In March 2016, Yolanda underwent a lumpectomy. A biopsy showed all her lymph nodes were clear, meaning the cancer had not spread. Four weeks later, she began four rounds of chemotherapy. In August 2016, she began six weeks of radiation. And on Friday, Oct. 5, 2016, “my journey with cancer was complete,” she said.
She enjoyed cake with her treatment team, who had become like a second family to her. And then for the next six months, she began thinking about how her experiences could make a difference for young women and especially for African American women.
“When I was going through the process, I didn’t see anyone who looked like me, and I didn’t see anyone who was my age,” she noted.
And so she decided to change that picture.
Yolanda first attended an advocacy conference for young people in early 2017, then underwent training through a young women’s initiative, “Living Beyond Breast Cancer,” a national nonprofit that offers information and support to those impacted by the disease. Two years ago, she participated in the National Breast Cancer Coalition’s Project Lead. Those experiences led her to commit to Young Adult Survivors United, a western Pennsylvania-based group on whose board she now serves.
She also changed careers. Today, she serves as a research specialist, recruiting women from UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital to participate in research, and she is a UPMC clinical trial ambassador with a focus on showing underserved and minority communities the importance of their participation in clinical trials.
“My breast cancer journey has brought me to this place, and I’m grateful to be making a difference,” she says.
The statistics are chilling: African American women are 40 percent more likely to die from breast cancer than white women. Research can help explain the reasons behind those differences and help clinicians find ways to bridge that gap. In fact, Yolanda is currently recruiting Magee patients for a University of Pittsburgh study that examines possible differences in the way Black and white women respond to chemotherapy: if side effects are too severe, some women may stop treatment too early, for example.
“In the African American community, there is mistrust with the medical system and the health care system,” says Yolanda. “To counter the stigma and taboos, we just have to talk about it.”
She started with her own family, showing her younger cousins how to perform a self-examination like the one that led to her own diagnosis. Her generation could be the example, she believes; now those cousins are talking to their mothers and aunts, asking them: “When was the last time you did this?”
In addition to her role in clinical trials, Yolanda hosts a podcast, blog, and YouTube channel through which she interviews other young and African American survivors, making sure their voices are heard.
She recalls her father saying, “I feel like breast cancer is the best thing that ever happened to you — not that I would ever want you to be in pain, but I feel like the passion you had before now has a focus.”
Yolanda agrees: “My breast cancer journey has brought me to this place, and I’m grateful. I’m grateful to be making a difference.”