The faces of breast cancer

The survivor

When she received the dreaded news, a scene from her childhood replayed in her mind.

Her mother hangs up the phone, runs to then-6-year-old Mia Chaveco and her brother and hugs them tight. Through tears, she tells them she is going to die.

When Chaveco turned 30, the age her mother had been when diagnosed with breast cancer, she hounded the doctor for a mammogram until he complied. In her mind, it was simply a baseline scan, but it showed a suspicious spot.

She thought of her daughter, 3 at the time, and began to understand what her mother went through.

“I cried for her and the pain she probably felt when she looked at her babies and knew she would be leaving them too soon,” Chaveco said. “Then I went into survival mode.”

She chose to have both breasts removed even though her doctors said she could keep one. Surgeons took out five lymph nodes and later her ovaries, and Chaveco, a nurse who lives in Mount Pleasant, endured eight rounds of chemo.

It’s been four years since her treatments ended. She sees her oncologist every three months.

She gets tired faster and her immune system is weaker, but she’s grateful. She knows not everyone gets this opportunity. Not her mother.

She no longer thinks about breast cancer every day, but the disease slithers back into her thoughts before each doctor’s appointment or when she feels any ache or pain.

Chaveco tested positive for BRCA2, the gene that made her likely to develop breast and ovarian cancer at a young age. She looks at her 6-year-old daughter and wonders if Autumn inherited it, too.

The ones left behind

Carolyn Kinloch and her four sisters used to gather up their children and meet at their father’s house on the weekends, just in time to pull out the big pot and steam the crabs he caught that week.

But on one of his frequent crabbing trips, Isaiah Kinloch, the Korean War veteran and breast cancer survivor, slipped overboard from his boat. He escaped drowning but learned at the hospital that day of a slower death.

His daughter, a 51-year-old school bus driver from Awendaw, remem-bers that for about six months before the boating incident, something seemed off about her father.

“His whole attitude, his appearance changed,” Carolyn said.

X-rays showed that inside his carved-up chest where the tumor once thrived, a cancer had blossomed anew. Five years earlier, treatment had beaten the disease, but here it was again, crawling with a renewed strength through his body and into his brain.

Two weeks after the diagnosis, he asked his ex-wife to take him to the hospital. Three days later, he slipped into a coma. And in two days more, his five grown girls together decided to let doctors pull his respirator.

Only Carolyn chose not to spend those final moments in her father’s hospital room in 2003. She said she wanted to remember him instead for their weekend talks over pots of steamed crabs.

The seeker

It’s just as likely that breast cancer patients at Roper St. Francis will sit nervously in plush green chairs and watch tropical fish dance in a waiting room tank as it is that they will look into Dr. David Ellison’s eyes to hear the plan of attack.

They usually come in on a surgeon’s referral, a mass already missing from their chests. Four of every five of them — and this might be what draws him to breast cancer — Ellison will help survive.

His desk is scattered with periodicals and a haphazardly tossed Hershey’s chocolate bar, his bookshelf lined with medical textbooks bound decades earlier when every breast cancer patient faced chemotherapy.

Ellison started treating the disease 20 years ago, so many patients past that he cannot remember the first for whom treatment was not enough.

His matter-of-fact voice grows quieter as he explains, “You have to go on to help the next one.”

When he steels himself to deliver bad news, the kind when a patient and her family learn the fragility of their time together, he speaks directly.

Incurable, he explains, does not mean unmanageable, sometimes for years.

“Tell them what it is. Tell them what it means,” he says. “And tell them what you’re going to try to do about it.”

The fighter

As the chemicals ooze into Leslie Moore's body, she glances down at the tattoo on her forearm.

The cursive black letters remind her to stay focused on what she has become: Warrior.

She knows that over the next six hours of chemotherapy, her mind will become foggy. Tomorrow, she will feel like a cement truck has poured its load on her. And the day after that will be the worst: kind of like the flu, kind of like early pregnancy. But worse than both.

She'll experience a nausea so intense that for a week she'll be able to eat only bananas and crackers.

The 37-year-old Hanahan resident found the lump four months ago. Since then, she's had both breasts removed and then reconstructed; she's had six lymph nodes taken out; and she's completed three of 16 rounds of chemo. Later, there will be radiation.

Her hair has gone from long, shiny auburn strands to reddish patches on a pale scalp.

She runs a manicured hand over her head. The dark polish prevents her from knowing if her fingernails have turned black. A makeup artist with her own business, Moore used to tell her clients how important inner beauty is. Now she's having to tell herself.

While she dreads the treatments, she shows up for them because of her 2-year-old daughter, her 5-year-old son and her husband who need her. She fights because she's not finished here. She feels like her life is just beginning.

Moore said she used to be too busy but has learned to be more present. She sinks into each moment and logs them in her mind.

"It's been a really sweet time for me and my family."