TORRINGTON – Stacy Buchholz has a suggestion for anyone who keeps putting off a mammogram: Make it a birthday present to yourself.
Buchholz, executive director of the Wyoming Breast Cancer Initiative, encourages people to challenge their friends to get screened during their birth month, giving themselves what she calls the gift of good health.
"You know your body the best," Buchholz said. "If something feels different or odd, you get it checked and be safe because outcomes are so much better the earlier you can catch breast cancer."
The numbers back her up. According to the American Cancer Society, the five-year relative survival rate for breast cancer caught while it is still confined to the breast is greater than 99%. Once it reaches nearby lymph nodes, that rate falls to 87%. If it spreads to distant parts of the body, it drops to 32%.
In Wyoming, the American Cancer Society estimates about 500 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year and about 80 will die from it.
The state has work to do. According to the initiative, Wyoming ranks last in the nation in breast cancer screening among women older than 50, a gap it attributes to long distances to care, cost and cultural barriers.
Goshen County trails even the state average. In 2023, 36% of female Medicare enrollees ages 65 to 74 in the county had an annual mammogram, compared with 40% statewide and 46% nationally, according to County Health Rankings.
Buchholz's organization, a Cheyenne-based nonprofit now in its 10th year, has granted more than $1 million, according to its website. Working with the Wyoming Department of Health, it pays for mammograms, ultrasounds, MRIs and biopsies for people who can't afford them.
"We fund anybody in the state who needs that through the Wyoming Cancer Program at no cost to them," Buchholz said.
That help reaches people without insurance, but this year, she said, much of the money has gone to people who are underinsured or have high-deductible plans and are called back for follow-up tests they can't afford. The initiative also helps cover counseling, gas and groceries for patients in treatment, and screening events held after work hours and on weekends.
"We're doing the best we can with the little we have," Buchholz said.
Five women who have been through breast cancer, and the daughter of one of them, shared their stories with the Telegram this month.
Stephanie Skinner, 59, of Cheyenne lived with a lump for three years after being told it was nothing. Sandra Sample, 74, of LaGrange has had breast cancer twice, and her mother and four of her aunts had it, too. Her daughter, Natalie Clayton, 49, has watched it from the family's side. Judy Cummings, 59, of Torrington had a mammogram that came back clear, until a worker who couldn't shake a bad feeling called her. Lindsay Walker, 36, of Torrington spent about six months barely able to walk because of a reaction to her treatment. And Nicole Heron, 49, a nurse at Banner Health's Community Hospital in Torrington, went from a routine mammogram to a cancer diagnosis in five days.
Their diagnoses differed, and so did their treatments. But the same lessons kept surfacing. Most felt perfectly healthy when they were diagnosed. Several had to push to be heard. And nearly all of them said they got through it with the help of faith, family and a sense of humor.
No warning signs
Skinner was living in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, in 2016 when she noticed a bump in her breast. She pointed it out to the nurse at her annual checkup.
"She said, don't worry about it. I feel those all the time. It's just a cyst," Skinner said.
She could still feel the lump three years later. When she raised it again in 2019, at 52, things changed quickly.
"It just went from 0 to 100," she said.
She had a mammogram, then an ultrasound, then waited alone in a room for what she said was about five hours. A doctor she didn't recognize walked in and gave her the news.
"He didn't introduce himself. I didn't know who he was," Skinner said. "It was like he was telling me I had a cold."
Through all of it, she never felt ill. "There were no other indications at all," she said. "It was so bizarre because you think, oh, I should feel this way or I should feel that way. But no, there wasn't."
That was the most common thread among the women interviewed. Heron went to her mammogram this February with no family history and no reason to worry.
"I have zero family history. I have zero genetic markers," Heron said. "So I went in with absolutely no thought that I would have breast cancer."
Walker was 32, too young for routine screening under national guidelines, when she found her lump herself while lying down one day.
"I just kind of ran my hands across the top part of my chest area and I noticed that there was pretty big lump around the top side," Walker said.
Her mammogram did not show it. "While on my mammogram, it was not caught," she said.
An ultrasound and a guided biopsy did. Mammograms can miss cancers, particularly in dense breast tissue. Since September 2024, federal rules have required mammography centers to tell patients whether their breasts are dense and that additional testing may be worth discussing with a provider.
Be your own advocate
Skinner put it bluntly.
"I think the moral of my story is you have to learn to be your own advocate," she said.
After her first diagnosis, Skinner was prescribed tamoxifen, a drug that blocks estrogen.
"I could not handle the side effects. And I kept telling them that, and nobody would listen to me," she said.
She eventually stopped taking it, and in 2023 the cancer came back. Skinner believes the two are connected.
"I stopped taking that medicine. And that's probably why it came back," she said.
This time, treated in Cheyenne, she had the tumor removed and went through radiation. She is now on a different medication she plans to take until 2030.
Sample caught a mistake in her own care by reading the paperwork.
"They need to read all their paperwork, because when they were telling me how they were going to do my chemo for my first one, my doctor did not notice that I had double negative cancer," Sample said. "And when I said that to her, they had to change the formula of my chemo."
Walker had to push back during treatment, too. When her joints swelled so badly she could barely walk, she said her oncologist doubted the immunotherapy drug was the cause. She contacted a rheumatologist in Fort Collins on her own, and he told her he saw reactions like hers to the drug often.
Cummings had someone else advocate for her.
She had a mammogram every year from age 40. Near the end of 2022 she felt a lump in her left breast, scheduled a mammogram through Banner Health and was cleared.
Then on April 24, 2023 – her birthday – Jennifer Troxel from Banner's imaging department called. Troxel told her she had a bad feeling about the result and couldn't stop thinking about her.
"She knew it was cleared, but she wanted me to get a second opinion," Cummings said.
An ultrasound in early May found the cancer, and at 56, she was diagnosed with stage 3 triple-negative breast cancer.
"If I'd waited, I would have been at stage four and I very possibly would not be here today," Cummings said.
She holds no grudge. "Mistakes happen. And I don't blame Banner," she said. "I just know it happened for a reason."
Five days in February
As a nurse, Heron knows how a cancer diagnosis unfolds. Hers moved faster than she expected.
A year earlier, she had found a lump that turned out to be benign. That put her on Banner Health's follow-up program, and this February the program called to say she was due for another mammogram. She agreed to go, partly to earn points with her insurance.
She had her screening mammogram Feb. 18 and went back to work.
"I came out of the room, and the mammogram tech was sitting in my desk at my chair," Heron said. "And so I said, is this for me or is this for a patient? She said, we need you back right now."
A diagnostic mammogram came next, and about an hour later she was called back again for an ultrasound. That same day, radiologist Dr. Michael Young called her himself.
"He said, I hope I'm wrong, but I'm not gonna sugarcoat this. There's very little chance that you don't have cancer," Heron said.
She said she appreciated his directness, and that he joked with her all the way through the biopsy the next day. By Feb. 23, she had her diagnosis.
An MRI then showed the cancer was not one tumor but several.
"They found multiple scattered lesions. So I actually had, like, eight tumors. ... They were all small, and none of them were connected," she said.
Heron's care moved to Banner MD Anderson Cancer Center in Greeley, Colorado, where she met with a multidisciplinary team of five specialists. A surgical oncologist would perform the mastectomy, and a plastic surgeon would handle reconstruction. A medical oncologist would manage her long-term medication. A radiation oncologist would oversee radiation if she needed it, and a geneticist would test for inherited risk.
The geneticist tested her for 44 inherited cancer markers. All came back negative.
"This was literally a fluke," she said.
Her emotions swung with each new result. The survival odds were reassuring, she said, until a second lump turned up, and then she braced herself again.
"I decided to go at it as more of a fight mode rather than feel sorry for myself mode," she said.
Not all breast cancer is the same
When a biopsy confirms breast cancer, the tissue is tested to see what is fueling it. Heron's cancer feeds on the hormones estrogen and progesterone, so she can take hormone-blocking medication for five to 10 years to lower the odds of it coming back.
"So in my case, it's kind of a personal choice whether I take them or whether I don't," she said.
Cummings and Walker both had triple-negative breast cancer, which is not fueled by hormones or a protein called HER2. It tends to be more aggressive, and because hormone-blocking drugs don't work against it, it is treated mainly with chemotherapy, surgery and radiation.
"It's a fast-growing cancer and stage three was pretty significant," Cummings said.
Family history does not always predict whether someone will get breast cancer, or what kind. Cummings' older sister was also diagnosed with breast cancer and carries a BRCA gene mutation that raises breast cancer risk. Cummings tested negative for it. Her sister's cancer was fueled by hormones, and hers was triple-negative.
"It doesn't always add up," Cummings said.
Walker had no family history at all. "It doesn't run in my family. I don't know anybody who has had cancer," she said.
Sample's family history runs deep. She has had breast cancer twice, five years and two months apart, and the two cancers were different kinds. The first, she said, was not driven by hormones, and she had a lumpectomy, chemotherapy and radiation. The second was hormone-driven and did not form a lump she could feel. It was treated with a mastectomy and medication. She has taken two different genetic tests, and both came back negative.
Clayton grew up with that history.
"I remember it being very prominent in the family," Clayton said.
She was in college when her grandmother was diagnosed, and that diagnosis came about almost by accident.
Sample had sworn off mammograms after a painful first one, until her doctor insisted and made the appointment himself. Her mother came along to make sure she went through with it. The clinic had cancellations that day, and when the staff learned her mother hadn't had a mammogram in 14 years, they fit her in too. Sample's showed only cysts. Her mother's showed cancer.
"They found mother's cancer that day. It was a Tuesday. And by Friday she had her surgery. ... It was a godsend," Sample said.
Today she tells women not to let a bad first experience stop them.
"You got to get your mammogram. Got to take care of yourself, you know? And they're not as bad as they used to be," Sample said. "The technology is a lot better."
Leaning on faith
Cummings got that April phone call on her birthday, while her husband was coaching soccer. She went for a run.
"God just gave me this peace that only he can give. And I honestly did not look back," she said.
The fear didn't disappear entirely. "I'd be lying if I said I didn't wake up anxious," Cummings said. "But I would wake up anxious and I would just ask for the peace, and it would come."
Members of her church, SonRise Church in Torrington, prayed for her. Friends from church threw her a hat party after she shaved her head, and the verses they brought to encourage her were collected into a book. She kept a journal throughout treatment.
"It was life-changing. Honestly, I would recommend that to anyone," she said.
The journal holds the lessons she learned. One of them reads: "Don't run the race alone. There is strength in numbers. You need people, and they need you."
Among the verses she held onto was Psalm 91:1, "Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will find rest in the shadow of the Almighty."
When she shared her testimony at church, she said she would never ask to go through it again.
"But my husband and I are so much closer, and I'm so much closer with my children and my God than I would have been, I think, had I not gone through it," Cummings said.
Clayton put her mother on every prayer list she could find.
"I believe in prayers. I think prayers work," Sample said. "I thank them all for it because I believe it works."
For Skinner, faith is part of why she agreed to share her story at all.
"When I went through the first time, you know, you make promises to God and I was like, okay, I'll help whoever and I'll do this and I'll do that," she said.
When she saw the Telegram's call for survivors to interview, she said, she saw a way to keep that promise.
Rebuilding
Heron had always told herself that if she were ever diagnosed, she would choose a double mastectomy. Her surgeons talked through other options, including a lumpectomy, but she held to that plan.
"I want to go through everything now," she said.
Her pathology results meant she did not need chemotherapy or radiation, so she never needed a port, only surgical drains. Her reconstruction was done in the same operation as the mastectomy.
"They did the mastectomy and the reconstruction all in one surgery," Heron said. "I think my surgery was seven and a half hours long."
In many reconstructions, surgeons first place tissue expanders that are gradually filled over weeks or months.
"They're miserably uncomfortable," Heron said. "So this was wonderful."
She said doing it all at once also meant less time away from work and family. And she wants every woman facing a mastectomy to know that reconstruction may be covered. Under the federal Women's Health and Cancer Rights Act of 1998, most health plans that cover a mastectomy must also cover reconstruction, and patients should check the details of their own plan.
Skinner's reconstruction went differently. After her mastectomy, she said, she wanted to stay flat, but her plastic surgeon was adamant she have reconstruction. He was also in the middle of leaving his practice, she said.
"When people think you have breast reconstruction, they think you've got this beautiful boob job," Skinner said.
Instead, she had tissue expanders, and something went wrong with the expansion. She later had a 10-hour reconstruction using her own body fat.
When the treatment is the hard part
For several of the women, the cancer itself caused little discomfort. The treatment was a different story.
"Honestly, the medications make you sicker than what you felt like," Walker said.
Walker's cancer was diagnosed as stage 3C after it spread to her lymph nodes, and her treatment lasted about a year and a half. She started with 12 weeks of weekly chemotherapy alongside Keytruda, an immunotherapy drug. She then had four rounds, three weeks apart, of a chemotherapy drug patients nickname "the Red Devil." After that came surgery and 30 rounds of radiation, followed by about six months of chemotherapy pills.
The Keytruda hit her hardest. Immunotherapy drugs work by unleashing the immune system, which can sometimes turn on healthy tissue. Medical journals have documented severe inflammatory arthritis as a rare side effect.
Before the reaction set in, Walker was strong enough to walk a 5K the day after a chemotherapy treatment, she wrote in a message to the Telegram. Then her joints gave out.
"I couldn't walk for about six months," Walker said. "I was walking with, like, a cane. Sometimes I had to be pushed in a wheelchair."
She also has a deep fear of needles. When nurses accessed her port, she said, they had to lay her down and put a washcloth over her head.
Cummings went through six months of chemotherapy and three months of radiation. Chemo began with 12 weekly treatments, followed by a stronger dose every third week.
"I probably did not fare well, but I felt like I fared well, if that makes sense," she said.
Her side effects were serious. She lost about 20 pounds and had to stop running in July of that year. She developed painful mouth sores and needed a blood transfusion. Starting in September, Lynn Clapper of Community Hospital gave her IV fluids every other day to get her through.
"The medical care was phenomenal," Cummings said.
Her husband, Dave, drove her to treatments. His employer, Basin Electric Power Cooperative in Wheatland, let him work from home on chemo days and the day after. Her son's wedding fell during a good week between treatments.
Skinner's first medication brought on depression she didn't recognize at first.
"You tend to blame it on yourself. ... But a lot of it was just the medication," Skinner said.
If you are struggling, she said, tell your doctor, because there are options, and don't settle for the first answer. "And you have to be like, no, change it," she said.
The medication she takes now leaves her tired and has caused some hair loss, but it is manageable. "I don't feel completely exhausted," she said. "And the other medicine, like, my bones would ache and it was horrible."
Sample said chemo made her nauseous, but the medicine for it worked.
"They give you great medicine for your nausea," she said. "And don't be afraid to tell them about anything you're having."
Losing her hair was hardest on her young grandson, she said. He could not stand to see her bald or in a wig, so she wore a scarf around him.
Accept the help
Skinner's most reliable support came from a place she didn't expect.
"My major one actually turned out to be my brother, which I was surprised. ... The people I thought would be there weren't there, and then other people were," she said.
Her advice is to find at least one person who can go to appointments with you or just listen. If children or other family members are affected, she said, that needs to be addressed, too.
"You've got to have a support system," Sample said.
Her sister, Inez, drove a long way to take her to every treatment, every time. Sample still thinks about a woman who came to the infusion center with no one.
"She came alone, and my heart just went out to her," Sample said.
She also learned to be open with her family instead of trying to protect them. "Be truthful with your family. Don't try to hide anything," she said. "Because that just makes it harder on them."
Clayton said she has always been the one to jump in.
"I'm also, I think, the kind of person that's kind of like, when something happens, well, let's figure out what to do," she said. "Don't sit around and cry about it all the time."
Sample was living in Arkansas when she was first diagnosed. Clayton packed up her young sons, whom she was homeschooling, and went to stay with her for a month.
"Let's go take care of it," Clayton said of the decision.
While Sample was in radiation, the staff took the boys back to see the treatment room and the machine, answered their questions and gave them candy.
"It's so homey," Clayton said.
After they returned home, Clayton and her boys mailed Sample something nearly every other day, from preprinted postcards to pictures the boys drew.
"There's always a way to help somebody, even if you're not there," Clayton said.
She had advice for both sides. Even if someone says not to worry about it, do something anyway. And if you are the one receiving help, take it.
"Accept the help because you need it. You will need it, and it helps you, and it's not a sign of weakness," Clayton said. "Just accept it. You want to help people, so why shouldn't you allow people to help you?"
Heron's two youngest children helped care for her surgical drains and dressings. "I'm very lucky," she said.
Walker often wanted to be left alone. Instead of texting updates to friends one by one, she posted them on social media.
"I felt like it was a good way to kind of tell my story, too," she said.
What she valued most was company that didn't ask anything of her. "I really enjoyed when I would have visitors come and, like, sit with me when I'm getting treatments done," Walker said.
Laughter is the best medicine
During one of Sample's infusions, Inez brought a stack of joke books and read them aloud. The room went quiet. Worried they were bothering the other patients, they asked a nurse, who told them people had gone quiet because they were trying to hear, and Inez should speak up.
"Because you have to have humor," Sample said. "Humor is like medicine."
Skinner calls it "booby cancer" and said she has enough jokes for a two-hour stand-up routine. When the cancer returned, she found something to laugh about there, too.
"I can't win the lotto, but I can have cancer come back," she said.
Cummings said she and her family found ways to laugh through the tough stuff, including the time she clotheslined herself with her own chemo tubing.
"Laughter and an attitude of gratitude will put a smile on your face," Cummings said.
When Heron sat her children down to tell them, her 15-year-old daughter guessed before she could get the words out.
"What are you gonna tell us? You have cancer?" Heron recalled her daughter saying.
Her daughter's reasoning was that when parents call a family meeting, it is either cancer or divorce, and Heron was already divorced.
The weight of the word
Heron said the word cancer changes how you see your own body, even after treatment ends.
"Once you hear the word cancer, everything is scary," she said.
A year before her diagnosis, she had a large mass in her eye that was never sent for testing.
"My first thought after I'm told I have cancer is, oh, my goodness, was that cancer, too?" she said.
Her own path went smoothly compared with a close friend's, and Heron said she has felt guilty about being upset at all. She said she held back her feelings until she read that two things can exist at once.
"I think people need to give themselves grace and let themselves be upset that they have to face this diagnosis," she said.
Walker spent three days on her couch with her dogs after her diagnosis. "It was awful," she said.
The hardest stretch came after treatment ended. In May 2025, her left arm went numb. A brain MRI showed what her oncologist told her was a spot on her brain, and she was told she had stage 4 cancer.
She had been dating her now-husband for about a month. She asked him to marry her, and he said yes.
"Being with him for one month and after figuring all this out was, like, the best support I've had," Walker said.
At a hospital in the Denver area, a brain surgeon ordered a new scan before starting radiation. It showed no cancer, only a small cluster of blood vessels.
"I just spent months thinking that I was going to die," Walker said.
She will mark three years cancer-free Dec. 23. She has blood work every three months and MRIs twice a year.
For Clayton, watching her grandmother and mother go through it taught her something about the women she had always looked up to.
"You put them on a Superman level. ... So it's a vulnerability that you learn," she said.
Worth it
Buchholz hopes more people will get screened and that cost won't stop anyone who needs to.
"If you don't think you can afford the screening or you have questions or things just feel out of reach, reach out to us or visit our website and let us help you get that screening taken care of," she said.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends women begin screening at 40. Anyone who needs help paying for a mammogram or follow-up test can visit wyomingbreastcancer.org or call 307-274-1022, or contact the Wyoming Cancer Program at 800-264-1296.
Heron has already seen what one story can do. She decided early that she would not keep her diagnosis private. After telling her family and closest friends, she posted it on Facebook.
Her message was simple: Whatever gets you there, go.
"Get those mammograms done because it literally saved my life," Heron said.
The response was immediate. Women who had been through breast cancer reached out, and so did women facing their own scares.
"I had actually a lot of women who messaged me and said, you know, I'm about a year overdue for my mammogram. I'm going in tomorrow," Heron said.
One of them found a lump, which turned out to be benign. The radiology department told Heron its numbers went up, and some patients mentioned her name.
"I think that made it all worth it," she said.
