Virginia woman inspired by London man's tragic story

By Tara Kaprowy

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of stories tied in with Breast Cancer Awareness Month.



Though Bill Sparkman’s violent death has many reeling, Janet Barnes, who is battling Stage IV breast cancer, has focused on his life and found inspiration.

“If he could do that, have chemo treatments and go to school and raise his son, then I can scoot myself down to the Women’s Center and get busy,” she said.

A few weeks ago, Barnes, who lives in Virginia Beach, read an article about Sparkman on her friend’s Facebook page. The article focused on the former substitute teacher who, at the age of 47, went back to college to earn his teaching degree. In the midst of earning his degree, he was diagnosed with Stage III non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Despite the dire diagnosis, Sparkman persisted with his studies, and, upon graduation, was asked to be the keynote speaker of his class.

Barnes, 53, said she always wanted to earn her degree in education, and was immediately felt impassioned to echo Sparkman’s accomplishments.

“That article was my turning point,” she said. “He’s the one person I can look up to and say, ‘I can do it in his honor.’”

Like Sparkman, Barnes’ education was interrupted by illness — after earning her associate’s degree in administration, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“I went and had a mammogram and when you go and have these mammograms, they’re very nice,” she said. “They give you the pink cotton grown and I was sitting in the lounge waiting for them to read my films and send me home.”

Rather than being given the green light to head out, however, a technician asked if they could perform an ultrasound.

“I got that gut kick,” she said. “I’d done this before and I really thought it would be like everything else.”

A few weeks later, a biopsy showed the rapidly growing tumor in her breast was malignant. More tests showed 11 of her lymph nodes were malignant as well and there was a lesion on her liver.

“It will rock your socks, I tell ya,” she said. “I honestly thought I wasn’t going to survive. It was Stage IV. It was in my liver, in my lymph nodes. After my first round of chemo, it appeared in my left lung.”

She swallowed the news with brave acceptance.

“I was very happy in my life when I was diagnosed,” she said. “I was ready very quickly to accept what I thought was my imminent fate. I didn’t go into the anger and the bargaining, I just thought, ‘OK, it’s been a great ride. Nothing better than to go when you’re happy in your heart.’ I hoped to grow old, but at least I would die happy.’”

Still, she was willing to fight. Barnes had a radical mastectomy and started undergoing an aggressive form of treatment at Virginia Oncology, a franchise of U.S. Oncology.

“It’s just wall-to-wall rows of big, old Barcaloungers of all ages of people, all varieties of cancer,” she said. “I would look up at the ceiling tiles, people had hand painted them. You want to look up because you don’t want to look around. It would just break my heart to see teenagers there, maybe a young married couple with a toddler.”

Through it all, Barnes’ husband, Ray, stood by her, even shaving his own head after Barnes started losing her hair while on a weekend cruise.

“That single night aboard the ship was when I first noticed my hair beginning to fall out,” she remembered. “I lost gobs of it in the shower. Falling out is an understatement. It was as if my hair was leaping off my head in a mutiny at sea. I was devastated. Within a few days, it was time to shave the remaining wisps. Ray, in an uncharacteristic act of tenderness, did this for me without a single wise crack. He then shaved his own head in an act of solidarity and continues to do so each day.”

Nine months after her treatment began, the tumors in her liver and lung had disappeared. But the chemotherapy, which involved an experimental drug called Herceptin, continued — for the next four years.

“Stage IV breast cancer is not yet ‘curable,’” Barnes explained, adding the Herceptin worked to control her cancer as if it were a chronic disease rather than one that could be overcome.

“The danger which lies in not continuing prophylactic chemotherapy is that the cancer can mutate at any time and produce what are known as daughter cells, which would be resistant to the Herceptin I have been treated with so far,” she said.

Still, last year, Barnes had had enough. For four years, she’d been forced to have a Mediport, a device that was implanted under her skin so chemotherapy could be delivered directly into her blood system. After blood clots blocked the Mediport twice — which nearly killed her — Barnes wanted the “alien in her chest” out. She decided to take her chances and stop treatment.

After she did so, she finally started to feel relief from her survivor’s guilt, which largely stemmed from thoughts of the many cancer patients she’d seen lose their battles.

“I wished I could give my recovery to them,” she admitted.

But, in the past months, she’s been able to overcome her guilt.

“Especially after I read about Bill Sparkman,” she said. “It’s like I was staring at the barrel of a loaded shotgun for the past four years and no one bothered to pull the trigger. I just made a decision to step out of the way. I just decided if it’s going to take me, it’s going to have to hunt me down.”

Sparkman’s story clinched that thought process.

“I just thought, ‘How many signs can you have that say move on?’ Go forth, move on, because I’m loitering,” she said.

And for Barnes, moving on means going back to school. At the age of 53, she wants to earn her degree and teach English as a second language.

“It is my decision time, it is time to act now,” she said. “If I’m still sitting in a parking space, I’m going to think about Bill Sparkman.”





Barnes thinks hormone therapy may have led to condition



By agreeing to tell her story, Janet Barnes hoped to impart some preventative information to readers.

Like many breast cancer survivors, there was a history of the disease in Barnes’ family. But Barnes’ mother and aunts were unaffected. Instead, her great-uncle and cousin Henry were diagnosed with very aggressive forms of breast cancer.

“Men need to be aware of the fact that they, too, are susceptible to breast cancer,” she said. “They need to practice self examinations just as vigilantly as women.”

In addition to her family history, Barnes thinks the 17 years she spent taking hormone replacement therapy may have triggered her illness.

“Premarin and some others have now been strongly linked to breast cancer,” she said. “There are plant-based alternatives available. Ladies, sweat it out, because it’s just not worth it.”

“Men need to be aware of it,” she advised. “And before you pop that Premarin in your mouth, reach for the fan, girls.”

Staff writer Tara Kaprowy can be reached by e-mail at tkaprowy@sentinel-echo.com.

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