PHOTOS

• Making Strides Against Breast Cancer 2006 Gallery 1
• Making Strides Against Breast Cancer 2006 Gallery 2

Editor's note: Thousands of NYSUT members participated in fund-raisers this month to fight breast cancer. The first round of the Making Strides walks — in Binghamton, Buffalo, Syracuse and Rochester — was a great success on Oct. 1. Everyone has a reason to walk. "I walk in honor of the survivors and in memory of those who have fallen," says Linda Trippany of the Syracuse Teachers Association. Next up, lacing on her walking shoes, is Ellen McTigue ...

McTigue puts in a lot of miles along hospital corridors as an oncology nurse-practitioner at Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. The oncology service has operating rooms for surgery and treatment areas for chemotherapy and radiation.

Five years ago, McTigue started racking up miles in a neighborhood park as well. That's Prospect Park, where every year the American Cancer Society holds a 31¼2-mile fund-raising walk. Among the thousands of participants are several dozen from SUNY's Downstate Medical Center. They practice what they preach every day with so much spirit that they're like a gospel choir in sneakers.

Last year, they raised $10,000 for the American Cancer Society. For raising breast cancer awareness, they also won an award from Positive Promotions, a company that creates breast cancer awareness products and donates to the ACS.

At work and in the fund-raising effort, they walk the walk.

"All across the state, NYSUT members are making tremendous 'strides' in the research and treatment of breast cancer," said NYSUT Vice President Maria Neira, who leads the union's initiative as a flagship sponsor of the fund-raising walks in New York.

"It's really nice to do something upbeat," said McTigue, a member of the Health Care Professionals Council for NYSUT. "It's very balancing for us. All these people getting together have energy and more power than individual, sick patients."

The extra hours spent past the end of McTigue's shifts are motivated by personal as well as professional grit: her mom had breast cancer and later died from another form of cancer.

McTigue walks and talks in the name of generating more money for the educational aspects relating to cancer, true to her calling as an gynecological oncology nurse in a university research hospital. As a member of United University Professions, representing SUNY academics and professionals, she is schooled in activism.

"She is one of our leaders on campus," said Rowena Blackman-Stroud, UUP chapter president for State University of New York Downstate Medical Center. McTigue is on the statewide ad hoc negotiations committee representing academic professionals and a membership officer for part-timers in the local chapter.

Prevention

Swinging that activism over to health care issues, McTigue believes prevention needs more attention.

"I see so many poor people who don't get preventive care," she said. "We have a lot of African-Americans and Caribbean-Americans. People are not having mammograms. It's not pushed enough within these communities either because of poverty or because they think it's a white women's issue."

Hospital staff decided to put together an awareness campaign during October, breast cancer month.

"We get a lot more referrals; people calling up for mammograms during that month," McTigue said. Downstate Medical Center offered some free mammograms through its x-ray department, but those limited appointments were quickly snapped up.

Once again, this crew of hospital professionals got serious. They applied for and were selected as a provider for a project through the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Breast and Cervical Cancer Prevention Project now allows them to provide low-income, uninsured and underserved women access to timely screening and diagnostic services to detect breast and cervical cancer. Downstate Medical can now provide women in these categories with free Pap smears and free mammograms to women over 40 (see www.CDC.gov/cancer/nbccedp).

Since 1991, the CDC program has served more than 2.7 million women, provided more than 6.5 million screening exams and diagnosed more than 26,000 breast cancers.

That's a lot of sisters, mothers, daughters, friends and aunts. Nurses like McTigue know their names, their faces and their fears.

The CDC Web site reports, "Deaths from these diseases occur disproportionately among women who are uninsured or underinsured. Mammography and Pap tests are underused by women who have no source, or no regular source, of health care; women without health insurance; and women who immigrated to the United States within the past 10 years."

Resources

McTigue knows the story well. "We also see a lot of uninsured or under-insured women. Their access to screening is limited. Late identification is also a big issue among African-Americans. Women in our community don't necessarily identify with this illness. So getting that mammogram every year can seem like a back burner or remote issue. It needs to be pushed more as a priority."

Providing that screening is a boon to the community, as are services the hospital now receives from the American Cancer Society since it stepped up its participation. With a program called Navigator, for example, survivors come to the hospital to talk with cancer patients about programs available to them through the ACS, such as wigs, transportation and support groups.

Additionally, each October the nursing grand rounds now feature professional updates on breast cancer. The sessions are geared toward nurses as caregivers and as potential victims.

"This all came out of the Breast Cancer Awareness Committee," McTigue said. The committee partnered with the ACS to get a separate walk for Brooklyn instead of one massive Manhattan walk.

"The community was really pleased to see people walking in Brooklyn," she said. And her son is pleased with the Making Strides shirts — each year he takes her and wears it proudly. His friend lost his mom to breast cancer.

— Liza Frenette

PHOTOS: Making Strides Against Breast Cancer 2006