Breast Friends

I am so blessed to have spent over 12 years with 9 great girlfriends that I got to work on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis – my Breast Friends. I really believe that if we keep an open mind and an open heart, great opportunities come into our lives when the time is right. These opportunities teach us and give our lives dimension and purpose. We don’t always listen and sometimes these opportunities slip by. I am glad that this time we listened.

Like it was yesterday I remember my daughter, Heather, telling me that Linda, her mother-in-law and my good friend, had decided to fundraise and ride with Prairie Women on Snowmobiles in memory of her Aunt Hazel and Avra. Avra was Jacquie’s sister and Jac was a close friend of both Linda and myself. We had both been thinking a lot about Jac dealing with the loss of a very close sister. I was so proud that Linda was going to do something positive, I called her and asked if I could help with her fundraising campaign. She was, in true Linda style, enthusiastic and welcoming. We met and talked about hosting a banquet. We both called on our closest friends and put together a team of ten. We met for tea and were excited to be working together on a fun-filled Lady’s Night that had meaning. We worked like troopers for that banquet. The hall was decorated with candles and white linens. Our local high school girls waited tables and the ten of us cooked a five-course meal, featuring crab rolls, mandarin salad, and champagne chicken with rice pilaf. We ended the meal with a miniature pavlova and Irish coffee. We worked to make every detail perfect – right down to shaping the butter into little flowers and having gifts at every place-setting.

We had placed a notice in the paper asking for women who had dealt with breast cancer to call us and we invited them to be our guests at the banquet. We wanted to dedicate the evening to women from our community that were living with breast cancer and those we had lost to the disease. We set up an ‘angel among us’ display for people to light memory candles.

We called every woman that we knew had suffered the disease. We sadly had women reply, “Oh no, I couldn’t publicly talk about my cancer. I don’t want the community to know.” Over the past twenty years we have come so far in being able to talk about cancer, suffering and women’s issues.

The banquet was a success, our wonderful community jumped on board, like they always do, and tickets sold out in hours.

As the banquet ended and women came to the kitchen to thank us – many asked if they could have the recipes for the dishes served. We smiled and said “Wait for the cookbook!” Initially it was a joke, but the more we thought about the idea, the more we liked it. We met the next week and decided to work together and put our banquet and other family favorite recipes into a small community cookbook. We called it “For the Breasts of Friends” – we would donate all proceeds to breast cancer initiatives. We thought if we worked hard, we could net around three thousand dollars.

That is how the Breast Friends, a group of 10 menopausal women from rural Saskatchewan, came to be.

 The kids had left home, the dogs had died and we had time on our hands for the first time in decades. The energy that we had expended driving to basketball games, sewing dance costumes, helping with homework and arguing with teenagers was still there but not needed. We had time to spend with girlfriends. 
Margaret Meade once said ‘There is no more creative force in the world than menopausal women with zest.” What we lacked in experience we made up in zest.

What was supposed to be small community cookbook exploded.  We cooked and ate, and took pictures and ate, and laughed and typed and retyped and ate. In the end, we had not only compiled a cookbook –we had done our own photo shoots, amassed tons of information about breast cancer, obtained permission from the dozens of sources to reprint it, gathered humour and quotes about women and hired a printer, a shipper, a graphic artist, a photographer, formed our own publishing company, put together the book and gained many pounds. We got out our check books and it took us ages to muster the confidence to order 2500 books. At that point, most of us believed that we would have books in our basements for the next 20 years.

The story after that is still a little unbelievable. We often said “the book seemed to take on a life of its own.” The first shipment was gone in a month, so we thought we would try one more time and we ordered again.  We waited a long six weeks for those books to arrive and they lasted exactly three days.  We were named a National Best Seller in August and worked hard to keep up with the demand for orders all fall and winter. We registered and formed a non-profit incorporation and learned by trial and error how to keep up with the demands of the group. We all bought computers and became pretty computer literate. We started a website. We started doing some speaking engagements and were even invited to Vancouver to be on the Vicky Gabreau Show. Good Morning Canada travelled to Foam Lake to do a taping.  Those shows helped sales skyrocket and orders kept pouring in.

 Then life stopped us in our tracks. Darlene our youngest member, lost her husband to advanced melanoma. Kevin was a good friend to us all. We lost him in five months. The book took a back seat for a while and we weren’t sure where we were going to go. After a few months we thought it might be therapeutic for Darlene if we started meeting again.  That next year we wrote and published book two, dedicated to Kevin and other family members lost to all cancers. We entitled it “For the Breasts and the Rest of Friends”, which would open the door for us to address any cancer cause or patient need.  The story of the second book was very similar to the first and we had another best seller within a month. 

During those years of cook booking, travelling and speaking at ladies nights and cancer fundraising functions, we had the pleasure of meeting hundreds of healthy cancer survivors who were thriving and living full lives in spite of this dreaded disease. They gave us the motivation to write a third cookbook, this time themed on survival and hope, and dedicated to these special cancer warriors. With the addition of “Breast Wishes” to our collection – our donations from sales hit the one-million-dollar mark. Nine hundred and ninety-seven thousand dollars over our original goal of three thousand dollars!  That gave us the drive to keep going. 

Next, we decided to do a smaller book – a Christmas collection of holiday recipes and stories about families dealing with cancer at Christmas. Just before this book was published one of our family members called to tell us Dragon’s Den (a Canadian CBC show in which successful millionaire entrepreneurs listen to the business stories of budding businesses and decide whether or not they want to invest in them) was holding auditions in Regina for the upcoming season. We read the criteria and we really didn’t fit but we knew we had a great story and hoped they would consider us.  We went to the audition, told our story and were invited to Toronto for a taping of the show.  What a great opportunity and what a fun experience. We were so nervous but so excited and we had a ball.  We toured Toronto, had dinner at the top of the CN Tower, and best of all we slayed the Dragons.  Actually, we didn’t see any Dragons – we saw 5 warm, enthusiastic champions that supported us totally once they understood our odd request.   We really didn’t go to the Dragons wanting financial support.  Our cookbooks were doing very well financially, and we were able to make some wonderful donations from their sales.  What we wanted was to be on the show so that we would be able to tell our story to a broader audience across Canada.  Because we had to ask for funds, we asked them for a $25,000 donation and we, in turn, would give a $50,000 donation to a cancer charity of their choice. It was where our money went anyway, so for them to direct the funds to a new and researched cancer charity was just fine with us.  They got it.  In fact, they doubled our ask and they ended up pledging $50,000 dollars in donations and gave us their endorsement. We were blown away. I’m not sure those Dragons know that the impact on our books was incredible.   The sales went through the roof.  In fact, we set up an order centre at one of the local churches the next day and wrapped and sent out orders by the half-ton truckload.  Our husbands answered phones, friends came and wrapped, and the post office staff couldn’t handle the volume and had to bring in extra employees just to keep up.  It was an experience that still brings tears to our eyes when we watch the video and reminisce. Three of the Dragons, Arlene Dickenson, Jim Treliving and Brett Wilson continued to support us after the event.  Jim had an event at his first Pizza Hut restaurant in Kelowna and donated the proceeds, Arlene invited us as guests to a later event, and Bret went above and beyond by inviting us to his annual Garden Parties in Calgary to showcase our books. He also wrote the Foreword to our prostate cancer book. Dragons Den will always hold a special place in our hearts.

Our bank account grew, and we were able to donate $100,000 to our provincial Children’s Hospital cancer ward – a donation we were very proud of. We were actually very proud of all of our donations.   We chose, right from the beginning to go grassroots. We visited hospitals and talked to doctors and nurses, patients and families and tried to make donations that would make a difference. We donated to the Breast Assessment Centres for diagnostics and treatment.   We provided funding to action groups and Hope Centres that support and educate newly diagnosed women and their families. We financially supported shuttle services that took women to the treatment centres from the hospices. We purchased chemotherapy infusion pumps enabling women to receive treatment closer to home.  We purchased education kits that circulated to schools and health districts teaching young girls how to do breast self-exams. We supplied all new beds for the Cancer Lodge in Saskatoon. We contributed toward a mobile mammogram machine that serves women in far northern communities and we donated a lot of money toward moving to digital mammography in our province. Often we arranged to leave the profits of the books right with the agencies selling them. They would assess and spend the money where they knew it was needed.  Every week there would be a new request.  It was the best part of this story.

We talked about it being time to retire but retiring didn’t seem right quite yet.  We were still on such a high from the last year of events. We heard about Brett Wilson, who had been such a support to us, having his own struggle with prostate cancer.  That got us talking about how men’s cancers didn’t have much public support. Men don’t tend to talk about their conditions or rally like women do.  We decided to do one last book to help with that; a book dedicated to men with prostate cancer and to our husbands, who had worked so hard and supported us through these past years of travelling, meetings, writing and publishing.  We also wanted to include our sons, and our son-in-laws, who many times delivered books or hauled cases across the miles for us.  So “Breast Wishes for the Men in Our Lives” was born. This was a book full of our men’s favourite recipes.  My Dad’s raisin pie recipe took making 11 pies until we got the exact taste of the one my Mom made and my Dad loved.  We had fun with this book and filled it with gratitude and love.

That love and gratitude came right back at us!  This book won the Gourmand Award for the Best Charity Cookbook in North America.  We were blown away when we heard about the nomination.  Never ever expecting to win, we knew we wanted to be there together for the award ceremony. It was scheduled for February 25th, at the Louvre in Paris, France. What a way to celebrate the end of a 10-year adventure together.   As we were preparing to board our plane to France, we were met at the airport by members of the Saskatchewan Roughriders Organization and each presented with a Roughriders jersey.  We later proudly posed in front of the Eiffel tower wearing our jerseys.  The actual awards gala and ceremony was held in the lower level of the Louvre.  There were 1200 people in attendance. Sweden won the rights to the menu for the evening, so we enjoyed Swedish chocolate, meats and cheeses. Everybody that got up spoke a different language; it was the most international event we had ever attended. There were winners of different categories from all over the world.   When the winners were announced we couldn’t contain ourselves – there were cheers and tears. We actually tied for first of the Charitable Cookbook category.  We shared the honour with Microsoft employees for their book, “The Microsoft Cookbook” and Canadians Marie-Josee Morin and Katrine Paradis for “Les Recettes du Kiosque de Limonade.”  After the event and celebrations we didn’t waste a minute seeing as much of Paris as possible in five days.  We shopped, we ate, we toured and we laughed and loved being together. 

What a boost for sales,  the money poured in and we continued to donate. 

We knew we were getting close to the end of this journey. We were getting tired.  A couple of our members moved away, others were retiring- it was close to time.  But, one last opportunity arose.

We had been working closely with a group of doctors and researchers from Vancouver – an organization called “Inspire Health.”   They did some incredible research and worked closely with patients advising them on nutrition and lifestyle to prevent or fight cancer.   We had financially supported some newly diagnosed women to go to Inspire Health workshops in BC and they were so impressed that we started hosting workshops in Saskatchewan so we could educate many more.   The feedback was always so positive.

Inspire Health approached us and asked if they could have their team of health care professionals collaborate with us. They wanted to take four hundred recipes from our books, and modify them to reflect the current scientific literature regarding nutrition and cancer. We were thrilled to enter the joint venture with them.  This book also contained researched, substantiated information on health sustaining-strategies and integrated cancer care.

So, our sixth and final book was written and published.

Once again it became a Canadian bestseller and once again we were able to make some pretty significant donations.   In total 1.8 million dollars from our six books.

Looking back, we know that the books were so successful because they are really great books; the recipes are great, tried and tested family recipes. They are not complex and they reflected our rural Saskatchewan diverse cultures and crops. The pictures turned out great and we know the humour and quotes brought a smile and a good feeling to women.  But we always knew that the real success of these books is the dreaded disease that it is fighting; the shocking statistics and the toll on families, friends and communities. Any woman who has had a shadow on a mammogram or felt that dreaded lump and then sits in the office waiting for those results, has felt fear in the pit of her stomach. Any mom or dad that has had to share news with loved ones and suffer the battle, knows the impact of this disease.

I guess these books, in our own little way, helped to give us a feeling that we were joining in the fight so maybe our children and grandchildren wouldn’t have to.

Cecile Halyk, Ann Reynolds, Darlene Cooper, Val Helgason, Linda Helgason, Nat Dunlop, Jacquie Klebeck, Jeanie Johnson, Charlene Rokochy and Patti Hack all brought different and important skills and energy to the table that together made something happen that was so much bigger than all of us individually.

We shook hands, metaphorically, a few years ago and ended a meaningful and positive chapter in our lives. It was an incredible journey, shared with incredible women who will always be “Breast Friends”.