Breast-cancer survivor finds 'communal bond' at retreat

Patti Singer has an eye for one color.

She was attending a screening of a movie about fly-fishing at Whitefish’s O’Shaughnessy Center when she saw it: pink.

Or, as she recounted, it was more of a screaming “PINK!”

Either way, she made a beeline for the booth in pink — the color representing breast-cancer awareness, of which Singer is a 14-year survivor.

The movie that night, it turned out, was in support of Casting for Recovery, a Bozeman-based nonprofit that offers fly-fishing retreats and outdoor excursions for any woman who is fighting or has fought breast cancer.

For Singer, a Columbia Falls-based real estate agent and owner of the Meadow Lake View Bed and Breakfast, the connection with the nonprofit was instant.

“I bought a hat, I put it on, and I signed up,” she said.

Singer was 45 years old, the mother of two teenagers in Southern California, when she felt a lump “like a frozen pea” on one of her breasts in March 2004. She was less than a year out from a clear mammogram, and the picture of health.

“I taught cycle, I was an aerobics instructor,” she recalled. “I was in amazing physical shape. I didn’t smoke, occasional cocktails, I was the epitome of health. So you think to yourself, ‘What? You?’”

It’s funny how life works, she said, because at the time, she had just talked with a friend who was going through a scare with breast cancer. Singer immediately contacted her doctor, who performed a biopsy that week. The tumor was so hard, Singer said, that it bent the biopsy needle.

Shortly afterward, Singer’s doctor called her with the news. “I would never do this over the phone,” she remembered the doctor saying, “but I need to let you know right now: you have breast cancer.”

You never think it’s going to be you, Singer said, of course you don’t. But there she was, faced with telling her family and friends of a Stage 1 diagnosis, and eight sessions of chemotherapy in an attempt to shrink the tumor before removal.

“Chemo did everything that everyone imagines it does,” she said. Her hair fell out. She felt gross. At one point, the port in her chest, put in to help administer the treatment, developed a blood clot in her shoulder, requiring surgery.

“But I was one of the lucky ones who didn’t have a ton of fatigue, nausea, that type of thing,” she said, so she still taught her classes and kept her spirit up.

“I had a husband and two children, and I was the rock of the family. I could not afford to let them see me down. So I got my wigs and did what I needed to do,” she said.

It was, she admitted, a “pretty rough” time. But she often laughs when looking back on it now. She remembers her longstanding needle phobia; of course she developed a condition that demanded a never-ending stream of injections and blood draws.

“You have to have humor about this,” she said, “otherwise, it will bring you down.”

She got through chemotherapy, only to learn that the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes. After tumor removal, she moved on to three months of radiation. “And then that was it,” she said. “That was the end of the treatment, although I stayed on some medication for 10 years” to help manage estrogen.

Looking back, she said she was lucky for the treatment she received, that she caught the cancer early and had a strong system of support. “I just can’t give kudos out to those nurses and doctors any more than I possibly could, because they really helped to get through it,” she said. “And I really think you have to be positive. You can’t be down, you have to try, even though you get down, you’ve got to stay positive and happy and be thankful every day.”

Singer has been in the clear for 14 years, but the emotions from a scare like that don’t just fade away. They stay with you, Singer said — popping up randomly in the morning, or when she catches herself saying she’s having a bad hair day, or when she remembers having to tell her children of the diagnosis.

“Every day, you wake up, and I still think about it. It’s not front and center, but it’s there,” she said.

Casting for Recovery provided an outlet for these lingering emotions, and a weekend free of distractions to connect with other breast-cancer survivors at various points in their recovery.

After signing up at the O’Shaughnessy Center screening, Singer was selected, through a random drawing, to attend a retreat in September near Missoula. The retreat included 13 other breast-cancer survivors from around the country and several volunteers, including a chef, a social worker and an oncology nurse to answer any questions on treatment or recovery.

“There were no two women alike,” Singer said of the group. “Everyone was completely different, but there was that common bond.”

Singer got some waders, spent time on the river and learned to fly-fish.

“And the whole time you’re doing this, you’re not thinking of anything else, but getting that cast out there to get that fish,” she said. “I think part of what this whole Casting for Recovery is about is taking you away from your thoughts of everyday and out somewhere where you can clear your mind, and just have it be about you for the weekend.”

While she’s proud to know how to handle a tackle now, Singer remembers the after-hours chats most fondly — hours spent sharing stories with “flat-out honesty” to people who could relate, of conversations peppered with “You had that, too? You did that as well? Same here!”

“There were a lot of Kleenexes going around the room,” she said. “There were women from all different ages and sizes and different diagnoses and different treatments. Cancer doesn’t discriminate.”

She described leaving the weekend with a “communal bond, because we had that moment in time when we got that diagnosis.”

A photographer was there that weekend, and asked Singer to describe the retreat in a word. “My word was magical,” she recalled. “It was magical to me. I came away feeling lucky, feeling blessed to have met all these wonderful women.”

For more information on Casting for Recovery, call 888-553-3500 or email info@castingforrecovery.org.

Reporter Adrian Horton may be reached at 758-4439 or ahorton@dailyinterlake.com.