According to the Center for Disease Control, breast cancer is the second leading cause of mortality among women in America. While breast cancer deaths are declining among white women, black women are more likely than all other women to die from the disease.
Often our cancers are faster growing and harder to treat, and statistics show that we are less likely to get prompt, quality follow-up care when our mammogram results show irregularities. Add to that the normal fear of disease and our tendencies to keep things quiet and soldier on, and serious situations become even more dire.
That is why it is important for women to share their stories about breast cancer. They help us gain strength to take action. Actress Angelina Jolie’s New York Times op-ed regarding her decision to undergo a double mastectomy in light of her genetic predisposition to breast cancer opened the door for more dialogue about this illness.
Vanessa Bell Calloway opens up about her battle
Actress Vanessa Bell Calloway recently followed suit with her article on The Daily Beast detailing her battle against breast cancer.
The versatile stage, screen, and television actress has a range of work that has taken her from being one of the original Broadway cast members of Dreamgirls, to roles in What’s Love Got to Do with It, Coming to America, Lakeview Terrace, and Showtime’s current hit Shameless.
Now following in Jolie’s footsteps by continuing to tell her survivor story, Calloway is broadening her public presence to include breast cancer awareness advocacy. Calloway spoke to theGrio about her decision to share her experiences with the disease, her upcoming projects, and having a mastectomy and breast reconstruction in the course of her treatment.
Calloway’s journey through illness, and back to health
Calloway has always been a stickler for good health. As a former dancer, she exercised and followed a healthy diet. She was also diligent about her annual mammograms and pap smears, and was doing all of the right things. Yet, about four years ago, she knew something in her body was off. She just felt it.
“I thought they were going to tell me that I had some incurable blood disease – I’m very dramatic! I had missed my mammogram because the place I usually went to closed,” the actress told theGrio. “I had to find a new place, but life happened, and I got busy.
“However, breast cancer — that was the last thing on my mind because since the age of 40, my mammograms came back clear.” Still, Calloway just didn’t feel she was in full health.
“I went to the doctor and had him do everything, blood work and all kinds of tests. He asked if I had pain. I didn’t. He finally asked about my mammogram, and then sent me to get one immediately.” They called her back because they saw calcifications in her right breast, and a biopsy was scheduled.
Finding comfort during uncertainty through art
The actress went back to work, but waiting a week for the results was an extreme stressor. Yet, Calloway, who was in a theater performance at the time, was able to find comfort in a unique source — the gospel hymn her fellow actor performed each night, “His Eye is on the Sparrow. ”
“If God is watching a little sparrow, surely he’s watching me,” Calloway said. “That song soothed me and got me through that period.”
It was determined that the actress needed a lumpectomy, which was performed, but the doctor called her back because he wasn’t happy with the success margins of the results and wanted to do another one.
“I was fine with that because I didn’t think anything was wrong. I just thought, ‘let’s knock this puppy out the park!’ At this point I had told no one but my husband; not my kids, not my parents, because I just thought it would be a one-two punch,” Calloway continued.
“And I am planner. I plan everything in life; everything has a schedule, so once it was determined that I wasn’t going to die, I made a schedule. I thought, I’ll have this lumpectomy, then I’ll have radiology twice a day for five days, and be done before one of my daughter’s birthdays in September, and no one would know the difference. So when he asked me to come back that Monday, I wasn’t thinking a thing.”
Dealing with the difficult news: A mastectomy
The actress went back for her second lumpectomy on a Monday and was scheduled for radiation treatments that Wednesday. “So I decided I’d get my hair done beforehand. No sense in looking crazy!” Calloway took things in stride.
Her phone rang while she was at the salon, and she moved to a quiet corner off the main area to take the call in private, but the reception was terrible. That is when she got the difficult news.
“All I can hear is static and the word ‘mastectomy,’” Calloway recalled about the aftermath of the second lumpectomy. “The radiologist is trying to tell me that the margins came back unclear, and I wouldn’t be able to start my treatment that week. Here I thought he was calling to tell me to come in for treatment that afternoon.”
At the age of 52, Calloway was diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), the presence of abnormal cells inside a milk duct in her right breast.
Her hairdresser comforted her when she learned her diagnosis until friends picked her up and brought her home.
Benefits of early breast cancer detection
Fortunately, DCIS is considered the earliest form of breast cancer; it is noninvasive, meaning it hasn’t spread to other parts of the breast. While Calloway had so hoped that the lumpectomies would let her keep her breast, that was not the case. She had to plan a full right breast mastectomy.
Once she finally got home from the salon, the actress was a wreck. “I was hurt, I was mad; I wanted to break something. I like my house, so I didn’t want to destroy it,” she can now laugh, “but I was so angry I wanted to shatter everything, like in the movies. I pounded on my floors instead.
“What snapped me out of it was my sister,” the multi-talented thespian continued. “She looked me in the eye and said, ‘Vanessa, it’s a bad breast. Let it go.’ And my husband, who doesn’t’ cry, had tears in his eyes and said, ‘I love you. We have our daughters’ graduations and future weddings to attend, I need you here, I don’t care about that breast!'”
Getting ready for reconstructive surgery
So Calloway pulled herself together. “The voice inside of me said, ‘Get it together woman, are you crazy?!’ And then I didn’t cry about it another moment. We had a family meeting and broke the news.”
Calloway was interested in getting reconstructive surgery. Her husband, Dr. Anthony Calloway, an anesthesiologist, helped her find a plastic surgeon to perform lap flap breast reconstruction, in which skin from the soft tissue of one’s waistline is used to make a breast.
“I took lemons and made lemonade!” Calloway said, whose sense of humor is surely one of the factors that got her through this ordeal. “The surgeon took fat from the ‘muffin top’ I got from having my two kids, and used that to re-build my breast. And while he was there, did some contouring around my waist! A new boob and lipo!” she laughed.
Calloway feels fortunate, because, through this procedure, she never had to experience her body without her breast.
Learning patience, faith and strength
Calloway’s surgery was successful. For the past four years she feels blessed to have remained cancer free.
“It was wonderful,” she can now say of the experience. Calloway values such challenges because through them, “we are forced to reflect on things — for me it was patience and faith, the faith to know that God is going to work everything out, and the patience to let him do it. We have to remind ourselves of that.”
During her ordeal, Calloway found out just how strong she really is. “After my initial cry and my little pity party, I tried to encourage and inspire myself through laughter. I refused to look at the bad side. I really found the upside. I felt blessed, because I see how many women die. I was just a few months off on my mammogram. How blessed am I?”
Becoming a breast cancer awareness advocate
At first, Calloway did not want to discuss what she had been through.
“In the beginning, I thought it was too personal. I needed time to digest it myself. I wasn’t ready for other people’s stories; I also didn’t want everyone bringing me soup and stuff!” she joked.
Eventually she wound up talking about it in through outlets targeting the black community. Calloway also spoke at conferences, and did some work with the Susan G. Komen organization to raise breast cancer awareness.
Calloway thought that what Jolie did was very brave. It moved her to share her story with a wider audience.
Despite genetic testing, mammograms are essential
“We get breast cancer earlier than our white counterparts, and we normally get more aggressive forms. That’s why I share,” she explained to theGrio. “Angelina is blessed in life, but most people don’t know that there is a trait that they should find out if they have.”
Calloway encourages all women to get tested for the BRCA1 gene that can predict breast and ovarian cancer. Yet, not even a genetic test can rule out the possibility of being struck by either malady completely.
“Eighty percent of women get it just because,” Calloway said. “I was one of the just because. Be vigilant in your checkups, even if you don’t have insurance. There are so many free clinics and mobile checkup vans. You can find a way, once a year, for free,” Calloway urges black women regarding mammograms.
Calloway to black women: Get regular breast cancer screenings!
What irks Calloway most is what she hears from some women in our community in response to her advice.
“They’ll say, ‘I’m not going to the doctor, I don’t want any bad news,’ and I say, ‘So you just want to die, or what?’”
Calloway is compelled to get the word out through her story, counter all women’s resistance to getting checked for breast cancer — particularly black women — and help remove this fear.
On the 20th anniversary of What’s Love Got to Do with It
As I remind Calloway that the 20th anniversary of the film What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993) is here, she laughs. “I must have lost track, you are telling me news. Thank you!”
What was it like to work on that seminal film?
“When you do a project, you never know what the outcome will be. I heard that my friend Angela Bassett was up for it, but I had actually turned down the audition for Tina, because it didn’t connect with me,” Calloway remembered. “Then I got a call to play the best friend. It was a small part, but they wound up expanding it. It was a fun movie to do.
“I had no idea that to this day that people would come up to me and say, ‘You ain’t gotta hit me but once!’ and more of their favorite lines or favorite scenes,” Calloway continued, “like the one where we imitated Ike Turner. They love those scenes. That was one of my favorite jobs, working with Angela, Laurence Fishburne, and Jennifer Lewis — they are all so talented, so it was great to be a part of it. I have wonderful memories.”
Today, Calloway loves being a little Shameless
Naturally, I had to ask her about her current spicy role in Showtime’s Shameless, a show lauded for taking an honest, yet humorous look at poverty. Her character Carol attempts to conceive and carry a child for her daughter in a highly unconventional way. I laughed when I brought up a particularly scandalous scene.
“Was I getting in with my daughter’s husband?” Calloway chuckled. “It’s shameful, and I love every wicked moment! It’s one of those parts we all want, where we get to do something out of the box, something that you don’t have to apologize for, because it’s your character, not you, but you still get to delve into it and go full throttle. It’s so wickedly delicious — a complex, sensitive role that pushes the envelope. I enjoy it thoroughly. I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I do hope I get to give birth on camera!”
Her publicist has launched a campaign to get her an Emmy nomination for her role.
Currently taking control of her career
While Calloway is a working actress, she has also found ways not to rely on the powers that be in order to express herself creatively.
“What we are learning now is that we don’t have to wait around for these Hollywood studios to make us feel valued,” Calloway affirmed. “I have my own Blog Talk Radio show called That’s So Very Vanessa on Sundays, and it’s really fun. I am also launching a web series at the end of the summer, ‘The Company of Friends,’ which I created and executive produce. Initially, the show was on TV One several years ago, but I redid it for the web. I’m very excited because I’m doing me and taking things into my own hands.”
Soon, Calloway intends to have her own web channel to be in full control of what she produces.
“I can’t sit around and wait for people to elect what I should and shouldn’t do. I get sick of hearing no. For every one thing you see me in, there are twenty that I didn’t get, trust me.”
Staying busy, and looking to the future
Calloway is also maintaining her ties to live theater, forged during her days as part of the inaugural Dreamgirls cast.
She is thrilled about her upcoming stage project, Letters from Zora: In Her Own Words, a one-woman show that will play a limited engagement at the Pasadena Playhouse from August 15-18.
“I like keeping myself busy!” Calloway mused about her various projects. But it’s her self-care regarding being vigilant about her health that allows her to continue to contribute so much to society. Through getting regular breast cancer screenings, Calloway was able to survive and thrive despite the disease. She wants all black women — really all women everywhere — to follow her lead.
According to the World Health Organization, breast cancer kills 458,000 people each year. Calloway hopes to encourage women to share their survivor stories, perform monthly breast exams, and move heaven and earth to get screened annually.
Then like Calloway, you, too, can continue to stay busy.
Suzanne Rust is a writer, lifestyle expert, on-air talent, and a native New Yorker. Follow her on Twitter at @SuzanneRust.