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Navigating a breast cancer diagnosis can be a bit like life as a migrating bird: You’re soaring along carefree, and then all of a sudden there’s a storm in your path. You have to make decisions quickly, pivot even faster, and sometimes you find yourself in completely uncharted territory.
Molly Jimenez, aka Mama Hummingbird, aka Mama H, says she can relate. A little over a year ago, this 37-year-old mother of two was happily training women in self-defense and teaching Brazilian jiu-jitsu for programs she managed in Salt Lake City, Utah.
She saw the storm coming, though, she says. “I had been sick for a while, but I just thought that I had some sort of autoimmune issue,” she shares. “I had a lot of fatigue. This kind of felt like something was wrong. But I was also going through different stressful situations in my life, and there was always kind of a reason for it. And I was still breastfeeding my youngest, and I had discovered a little lump. I showed it to my midwife. She didn’t seem concerned about it. And then I thought maybe I had injured it while training.”
The lump got bigger, and her skin started puckering around it. That’s when she says she knew instinctively that it was breast cancer. “Unfortunately, it took six weeks after that to get diagnosed, to get in for imaging and then the biopsy,” she says. “They were looking at it with the ultrasound, and I could tell that they knew it was cancer right away.”
The main tumor was 7 cm, and there were a few other tiny tumors throughout her breast. The cancer also had already spread to her bones. “So I was Stage 4 inflammatory breast cancer from the beginning, but because it was just in a couple little spots, they still wanted to go after it with curative intent,” she explains. “So, I still did all of the Stage 3 stuff. I did chemo, radiation, a mastectomy.”
Ultimately, Mama H chose not to reconstruct. “Yeah, I’m really happy with that decision, and I think that’s just the easiest way,” she says. “You know, I already have, like, this foreign thing in my body that I wanted to get rid of, and I didn’t have fire for reconstruction, and then that was supposed to buy me time going that aggressive route. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Almost immediately I started to have progression and things mutated, and now I am on chemo indefinitely, so it’s like, a worst-nightmare scenario.”
She adds that the most frustrating thing has been the confusion around breastfeeding and breast cancer, and she’s hoping that the medical community will start finding answers. “I spent five years breastfeeding my kids, and all I ever heard was oh, breastfeeding protects you against breast cancer,” she says. “And I’m livid about that, because I thought, ‘Oh, I breastfed forever, and that’ll protect me against breast cancer.’ I’m not at risk for breast cancer otherwise, and so it is very confusing messaging.”
To honor Breast Cancer Awareness this month of October, we sat down with Mama H to talk about what it was like to be dealing with her diagnosis and join an FD program:
Someone had mentioned it in a group I belong to, a group of women who have Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer under the age of 40 on Facebook, and someone in that group was really talking about how amazing the FD experience is. So I thought, I need to jump on this opportunity.
I went kayaking on the Rogue River in Oregon at the beginning of this past August. I’ve always been terrified of kayaking. I was born in Sacramento, California, but I grew up in Fruita, just outside of Grand Junction in Colorado. I had been on rivers on rafts before, like years and years ago. I did the Grand Canyon on a private permit, and I’ve done Westwater, but both on rafts.
The first day on the program, when we were learning the wet exit, it was me and Dragonfly sitting next to each other, and we both were having the same reaction, just like, this is really scary. I feel really scared. I don’t want to do this.
But the way that they taught us, it was so gradual. It was a really good learning progression, yeah. Just the way that they very slowly introduced you to the concept, I could see, just as someone who has taught different sports, I could just see that it was a very good learning progression. And so that made me feel confident that I would not have that moment of panic, that I would be able to do what I needed to do. And so that was just really, really great guidance and instruction.
I think there was a day that I swam every rapid. So I got my T-rescue [an assisted rescue using the aid of another paddler in their boat]. We were practicing. There were some people that were working on the T-rescue, and I was like, will you show me how to do that? Because I keep flipping, and part of it, I think I was in a pretty aggressive boat. And then also I was just charging as hard as I could, because I caught a little boof on like the first rapid that I did, and I wanted to do that again.
But on my last day, we ran the Class III. So, at the beginning of the day, our guide asked us what our goals are for the day. And I said, “Well, I really would love a successful T-rescue in the wild, but I also really don’t want to flip in another rapid again. I’d like to successfully run everything today.” And so when we got to our Class III, I did it! I ran through the whole thing, and then I was kind of in the eddy, and I was celebrating so much, and just like woohoo, and then I flipped over. And then I thought, “Oh, this is my chance.” I waited there, and I got my successful T-rescue.
I had a mama hummingbird that built a nest outside of my window in Salt Lake, and it was so cool to watch her, it was kind of my little friend for a while. I could have spent hours watching her, and I had shared that with the group on my program. It makes me smile!
Well, first of all, how much value that pushing yourself out of your comfort zone can bring, and the sense of accomplishment. Everything I experienced was a gift I wanted to give to some really good friends, and so I took four of my girlfriends on the Ruby Horsethief section of the Colorado River a few weeks ago. First Descents so inspired me to do it, and I wanted to give these women a sense of what I did.
I worked my a** off for a week to put together this trip, and I’d already had a massive appreciation for what everyone at FD does to make these programs happen for us. As somebody who’s organized different things, I notice the effort that other people put into stuff. And so at campfire, when we did our shoutouts, I just kept saying, “You guys are just amazing. I see the amount of effort that you’re putting into what you’re doing for us.”
And so, this is the first river trip that I’ve ever planned on my own and been like the trip leader. I had never actually even floated that section of river. So those variables of me not knowing what camps looked like, and, you know, trying to navigate, yeah, I had even more appreciation for what FD does.
Also, one of my friends on this trip, she told me something like this is so completely out of her comfort zone. I even asked her, “If I didn’t have cancer, would you do this with me?” And she said, “Nope.”
Also that I just love being on the river, and that you have to do the things. You live life more acutely when you really face your mortality. And there are so many things that are so isolating about being a cancer patient, especially a young cancer patient, that it can really just feel like nobody really understands. And so to be surrounded by people who get it from the beginning is amazing.
I mean, the first person that I met on the trip was also a Stage 4 cancer patient who was also going to be facing chemo, going home to a chemo infusion after this trip. And there were several other women who had a single mastectomy without reconstruction, and all these mothers with young children. These are all things that back home made me feel so isolated, and so I really appreciated that I found someone living that same reality.
So, first of all, the self-defense program that I was teaching is a very holistic program, and it’s very consent-based, and a lot of survivors of violence come through that program, and they find that some of these situations and scenarios that we work through can be very triggering. So we always talk about how important the concept of consent is, and so I really appreciated FD’s whole concept of “challenge by choice,” and I think that just knowing that you will not be pushed into anything that you don’t feel comfortable doing can make all the difference.
There are many, many ways to adapt whatever you need to get out of the program personally, and it’s not like some extreme thing—you get to choose where you want to push your comfort zone, and it’s just so inspiring to see all these people in different situations, with different variables going on with their health, just blossom and grow around you into this. I loved watching them learn that through their own pushing their own boundaries, they can find themselves again.
Welcome to the sh**tiest club, right? It’s full of amazing people, though! But seriously, it sounds like such a platitude, but literally just take one step at a time. Feel what you need to feel in the moment, but don’t live there.
You can suffer through anything in your life, or you can let it pass. Let the emotions go through you, and then you can choose joy. In spite of whatever it is that’s going on, you can choose joy. And I know everybody says that, but you really have to live one day at a time.
When I’m sick, like with this last treatment, I was so sick, so miserable, and I thought, “How am I going to do this for the rest of my life?” But I cannot do this for the rest of my life if I’m always thinking about it that way. It’s impossible, but I can do today. I can do this right now. I can get through the next minute, the next hour. And that’s all I need to do right now.