Last Thursday I got a chance to have dinner with Terry Martin and Mary ann Bump to talk about their battles with cancer in advance of their “Power of Pink” game on Thursday. The resulting story ran in Tuesday’s paper and is reprinted below.
I have to admit it was a little bit intimidating to sit down with the two titans of coaching in the area, who’ve been at this for a long time (in Martin’s case, longer than I’ve been alive). But both of them were very candid and warm, and most importantly, have a great message worth sharing. You can’t help but respect and be awed by the toughness they showed both in their health battles and now in sharing their stories. I can’t imagine there are too many better role models for young women than these two.
So a big thanks to them for sharing their story:
QUEENSBURY
Nearly three years ago, Terry Martin sat down at her computer and tapped out an e-mail to Mary ann Bump:
I heard this rumor, if it’s true you better get ahold of me. If it’s not you’re a lucky dog. But if it is, please understand there’s a lot of us around.
Cancer was the rumor, and Mary ann Bump was no lucky dog; she had it, twice over.
In that brief e-mail between longtime friends, in what should have been the darkest moment, the seed for today’s field hockey game took root.
Bump’s Warrensburg team will play Martin’s Queensbury squad this afternoon at 4:15 in the eighth annual field hockey Pink Game at Queensbury High School.
With a breast cancer survivor on each sideline, the message is more powerful than ever, and much like the one in Martin’s first e-mail: Please understand there’s a lot of us around. You aren’t alone. Help is out there.
Between them they’ve guided their programs, two of the most successful in the area, for 55 years.
“The winning of the game isn’t as significant as the life winning that both of us have already done,” Martin said. “We’ve already won.”
Each of the Queensbury’s fall teams will play a pink game. There is no admission charge, but donations will be accepted. All of the money goes to the American Cancer Society, and it stays local, helping to provide mammograms for uninsured women at Glens Falls Hospital.
Last year, the school raised more than $8,000, including a charity walk, which will be Oct. 26 this year.
But like the game’s outcome, the fundraising component is secondary to the statement they made by surviving, and the different ways they went about staying alive.
“I will be on the soapbox the rest of my life,” Bump said. “If you don’t tell your story and it’s not out there then it’s like gone.”
Bump’s cancer story is more unusual than most.
Bump, who was also diagnosed with colon cancer at the same time — “Well, you’ve been struck by lightning twice,” her oncologist said — took a detour through the realm of alternative medicine, one that took her all the way to Quito, Ecuador.
Bump, now 50, found her lump in April of 2006. Her first move sent her to the library.
“I said, ‘I’m a competitive person. How do you prepare and beat the team you need to beat?,’ ” Bump recalled. “If this isn’t a fight for your life, I don’t know what is. You better go in prepared. Gotta go scout your opponent, learn everything you can learn … and then go from there. Fight like crazy.”
After she found out it was a malignancy and had a lumpectomy, that scouting led her to believe that pumping her body full of toxins via chemotherapy, and then maintaining a diet of prescriiption medicine for the rest of her life, wasn’t a path she wanted to pursue.
She looked for something outside the American health system. She called it keeping an open mind.
Through a friend, she found an American doctor practicing alternative medicine at a clinic in Ecuador. She sent a blood sample, and she received back a list of instructions — vegetarian diet, no alcohol, no caffeine, no chocolate — and an invitation to come for treatment.
In the summer of ‘06, she took him up on the offer, despite the misgiving of some people who cared about her.
“You don’t have to support my choice, just support me,” Bump said at the time.
Through it all, she stayed in touch with Martin, who received her diagnosis 10 years ago, and underwent a lumpectomy and a traditional course of radiation and chemotherapy.
Despite her different experience, Martin didn’t quibble with Bump’s choice.
“Whatever your decision is it’s the right one,” Martin said of her thoughts at the time. “And it’s going to bring her back so I can kick her butt again.”
Bump spent seven weeks in Quito getting massive infusions of oxygen and vitamins while attacking the cancer with poisonous oleander, a treatment not allowed in this country. She also received electrical stimulation.
All that came in the morning. Afternoons she wandered the capital as a tourist, hiking and sampling the local cuisine; walking around as if everything were normal.
When she returned to the United States, her scans showed she was cancer free, and she’s remained that way.
Her only maintenance since — the part she calls the hardest, which caused her to miss weeks of school — was having the dead tumor on her colon removed.
Bump knows the road she took isn’t for everyone — “Not having children probably freed me up to make the decision that I did without having any second thoughts,” she said — but by putting the story out there, it’s another piece of the awareness puzzle, what this game is all about.
On Monday night, at her team’s final practice, some of the Warrensburg girls asked Bump, what do you get out of this game?
“I told them my story is a story of options,” Bump said. “Pay attention to your body, be educated, and be your own best advocate for your health. Trust your instincts.”
Sports writer Tim McManus may be reached at tmcmanus@poststar.com
