By Anne W. Semmes
It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month in a state that has the highest incidence of breast cancer in the U.S, according to the American Cancer Society, so reports Greenwich’s Dr. Barbara Ward, medical director of the Breast Center at Greenwich Hospital. Ward was slated on October 1 to address the annual Town Hall gathering sponsored by the Breast Cancer Awareness (BCA) nonprofit. But breast surgeon Dr. Ward had a conflict. “I had a pre-planned double mastectomy with reconstruction.”
There is no doubt that Dr. Ward, in the many years she has treated women with breast cancer that she has looked for opportunities to awake women to healthy breast awareness. Back in the early 2000’s she had a breast cancer patient, Mary Ann Wasil of Milford, who was awakened, with her plight, to the need for educating young girls, like her two daughters, as to how to best read their healthy breasts – to know if anything ever changes, they can share that change with a medical professional from a place of confidence.
From Wasil’s wokeness was born The Get in Touch Foundation with its aim to educate young women in healthy breast awareness. Its first educative tool being the Daisy Wheel, with its eight breast self-exam steps – its first step being: “Think of your breast as a daisy.”
“Although our Daisy Wheel was created by a highly skilled team of medical professionals, which included Dr. Ward,” says Betsy Nilan, president of the Get in Touch Foundation, “The Daisy Wheel Program is recommended for grades 5-12 and our approach isn’t in detecting cancer, but rather knowing what your normal healthy breast tissue looks and feels like. Cancer doesn’t discriminate, and we want to recommend healthy habits at a young age.”
Nilan is Foundation founder Wasil’s daughter who is carrying on her mother’s work, to the extent of coloring her hair pink, as found in the pink ribbons worn this month in support of survivors and for those working to defeat breast cancer. Nilan tells well her mother’s story in a Ted Talk found on You Tube entitled, “Why young women should learn how to do a breast self-exam.”
Wasil was diagnosed in 2006 with breast cancer. “Dr. Ward was my mom’s breast surgeon,” says Nilan, “and she was an amazing resource for my mom and still is for me today. There was no educational program in schools teaching this breast awareness and my mom saw that gap in education and worked to fill it.”
Ward recalls Wasil sharing her educative concept with her and her colleagues. “We used to go to the high school to the girls’ health classes and teach self-exam there. But with so many individual health classes, there just wasn’t enough people to do that and it became too overwhelming…So, it was more teaching the health educators that were teaching the class, and giving them the tools, and the Daisy Wheels.”
That in-school learning could also be taken home. “They share it with their mom,” says Ward. “You’ve probably heard of the use of a shower card. They give their mom a shower card and say are you doing this. And have you gotten your mammogram?” This time there was a Daisy Wheel.
Two years after being diagnosed, Wasil, mother of three, could count 5,000 Daisy Wheels being rolled off the presses, and a year later, the Get in Touch Girls’ Program was launched to the world.
But in 2012 Wasil was diagnosed with a stage-four metastatic breast cancer recurrence. In the remaining years before her death in 2016 she reportedly endeavored to “spend every single moment educating everyone on the importance of breast health.”
Daughter Nilan notes that with the challenge of COVID-19, her Foundation has stepped up fully to the social media platform having launched an Educator’s Digital Toolkit. “This is available for schools and has outperformed our Daisy Wheel by 30 percent,” she says,” which tells us educators and nurses either like to use this as a tool alongside the Daisy Wheel or they want to be fully digital. The beauty of our Digital Toolkit is that it has all of our educational resources in it, is in a PowerPoint format, can be received immediately after ordering, and is free of cost.”
She adds, “The physical Daisy Wheel, available [for free and only] in schools, still has more reach but we are focusing our outreach efforts on getting it into the hands of more people to increase awareness.” And so, introducing the free Daisy Wheel app! “We recommend you download the free Daisy Wheel app so you can follow along easily and receive regular reminders! What’s great about our app is that it is available in nine languages and is very easy to use.”
Dr. Ward cherishes a memory in those earlier days of the Get in Touch Foundation, in October of 2010, when she and her mom, a breast cancer survivor, were honored by the Foundation with the Women of Strength Award, given to a breast cancer patient and to a breast cancer care provider. “This was a particularly meaningful time for us,” she shares.
On October 5, Dr. Barbara Ward and Dr. Linda LaTrenta, Breast Imaging director will address “Breast Cancer: During and Following the Pandemic” at Greenwich Library, 7-9 p.m. For more information on the Get in Touch Foundation visit https://getintouchfoundation.org
