Sue Brannan Walker is an editor, a publisher, a college professor, an author and poet, and one of Alabama’s Poets Laureate. She is also a breast cancer survivor.

She was teaching English at the University of South Alabama when a good friend was diagnosed with breast cancer. Since Walker had never had a mammogram, she decided it was past time to get one. Much to her surprise, on this first mammogram, they found a lump, and she was diagnosed with Stage One Infiltrating Ductal Carcinoma with Comedo Cells.

Although she’s been cancer-free for 23 years now, Walker recalls being devastated when she learned she had breast cancer. She told me she remembers not knowing how to get out of the exam room. She didn’t know which door would take her back to the lobby.

After a mastectomy, she was treated with a chemotherapy regime, which included Cytoxan, Methotrexate, and Flouroucil. According to Walker, the hardest part of her breast cancer diagnosis was the journey itself. With each chemo treatment, she felt increasingly weak and unwell. Scheduling her treatments on Friday allowed her some “recovery time” on the weekends before having to teach on Monday.

A serious diagnosis like breast cancer doesn’t just affect the patient. It can also be frightening and devastating to the family. Walker’s husband Ron passed away on July 21, 2019. As she was sorting through some of his things, she found several letters he had written to their son Jason. In those letters, he reminded Jason to call his Mom and told him in every letter how difficult a time this was for them.

Walker recalled a specific time when she was reading some poems she had written about her breast cancer; her husband was sitting in the front row. As she read, she looked at him and saw that, as she was reading, he was crying.

Walker was adopted as an infant, and her diagnosis caused her to search for her birth family. She wanted to know if breast cancer ran in her family. Although she didn’t find breast cancer in her birth family, her diagnosis and subsequent search let her tap into some feelings of loss she didn’t know she had.

She considers the cancer a blessing and added, “After the diagnosis, I began to live more fully and creatively than I ever had before.”

She also began to write about the experience. Her book, “Blood Must Bear Your Name” is a series of poems about her breast cancer. About her diagnosis and treatment, Walker said, “It seemed that I needed to speak to my body – so I wrote and thanked my body, my breast, for the years we had had together.”

Seeing the connection between mind and body, Walker wrote about it – in poetry, in fiction, and in critical articles. She also educated herself by reading everything she could find, whether articles or books, on breast cancer.

“To me, poetry is life-giving. It helped me to communicate with my body. It enabled me to share my experience with other women – and men – who were thrust into an experience not of their own making,” Sue said. “Poetry teaches me to understand myself, what I am going through and how to navigate where I was, where I am, and where and how I might be.”

Walker added that she believes attitude, relationships with others and faith are essential aspects of getting through surgery and chemo. And having the soul of a poet, she ended with a quote by T.S. Eliot: “Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past/” And added, “this is memoir–which I am writing now, incorporating my past experience with breast cancer into my ‘now’ and leaving this commentary for future contemplation.”