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The women have a mutual goal: to compete in two regattas; one in mid-August, the other, more competitive venture, on Sept. 25.
Clumsy, unsure, they board the boats.
‘‘Woman in pink!" Matt keeps yelling.
In the boats, chaos and laughter. Lots of laughter. Nobody knows how to row.
They float on breeze-rippled water. Sun filters through finely layered clouds.
‘‘Cancer sucks," announces one woman’s hat.
Sandy Wigginton, with the help and advice of her breast-cancer surgeon, Dr. Linda Han, thought up the rowing idea and asked Westerville Crew coaches Matt and Trish to share their expertise and resources.
These two are self-proclaimed rowing evangelists. They met through rowing. They married on the dock where their boats depart and return. Their wedding bands are miniature platinum oars rimmed in gold.
And here they are, smiling and chuckling, helping these women fall in love with the sport.
Learning to row is like learning a complex dance. Arms, wrists, knees, feet, butt, shoulders, eyes belong somewhere.
At exactly the right moment.
In sync with seven partners.
Some days, the sun blasts and the humidity soars. Sweat floods down foreheads and stings eyes.
Some days, the mind is willing but the body longs for bed. Other times, the dance could go on all night atop water glittering with the retiring sun.
Rowing leaves its mark. It colors shoulders purple. It coaxes blisters and calluses. It stretches and tears muscles comfortable with routine.
The gravel and dirt slope between the boat racks and the docks doesn’t forgive age, inexperience or exhaustion.
Two weeks in, Kristi Ferguson sends her teammates some inspiration in an e-mail: ‘‘Hang in there everyone . . . bruises, boat bite, blisters and all."
Sue Edgar, all over the rowing idea from the beginning, says she’d never quit.
‘‘I think it resets your perspective on life. It’s just hopeful." Sue awoke in her Clintonville home one morning wanting to create something beautiful.
In 1997, she’d gone through treatment for breast cancer, including a lumpectomy. In 2003, she was hit with a second diagnosis, prompting removal of both of her breasts.
‘‘I said, ‘I’m done. They cease to be anything more than just totally anxiety-producing things on my body.’ "
She never cared for prosthetic breasts, found them hard, hot and uncomfortable. She didn’t want reconstruction.
When she woke up that day, she told her husband, Neal, that she wanted something where her breasts once were. The hospital massage therapist and mother of two young men marched into Stained Skin on High Street and laid it on the line. ‘‘My name is Sue; I have a bilateral mastectomy. I’d like a tattoo. If you want to do a design, fine. If not, fine." Giovani, a tattoo artist who goes by one name, was honored. Now, scrolled across her chest are yellow roses edged in deep orange. Four purple butterflies fly among the flowers. Sue remembers what Giovani said to her as he finished: ‘‘ ‘You don’t have scar tissue. Now you have a garden.’ " The garden is for her. She thinks of it as personal and shares it with few. It was designed with more than pretty flowers in mind. Near the northeast corner of Sue’s home is a rose bush she and Neal planted in memory of their only daughter, Maren Michelle, lost to a chromosomal disorder at birth in 1985. When the roses bloom, the petals are yellow, edged in deep orange. A day after Giovani finished, the sting of a fresh start across her chest, Sue rows. It’s stifling, and Matt seems like a slave-driver. But Sue and most of the rowers are committed to this. It’s becoming addictive, even for those who’ve never been on a team.
‘‘You know what they had for girls when I was in high school?" asks 57-year-old Connie Kobalka.
‘‘I’m not a cheerleader type."
She and many others have been cautioned against repetitive arm motions because of the specter of lymphedema, swelling that sometimes follows lymph-node removal.
But Han, honorary team doctor, says there’s no evidence rowing will hurt, encourages the exercise and offers guidance.
‘‘They told me to lift no more than a gallon of milk!" says Vicki Ballog.
Sometimes, rowing numbs her right arm.
‘‘I just row through it."
A handful of women drop out right away. At least one is frightened of the water. Another is undergoing chemotherapy and won’t have the energy and stamina.
Sue Hale, one of the original champions of the effort, drops out eventually — reluctantly — because of hearing difficulties and flagging endurance.
She’s not weak. She works out for two hours, three times a week and leg-presses 220 pounds.
‘‘I’m not used to quitting," she says.
Some rowers bristle at the aggressive, reach-for-the-stars coaching style Matt and Trish use to motivate winning teams of teenagers.
Gretchen Firchau shares early frustrations with her mom, who asks, ‘‘Doesn’t he know you have breast cancer?"
Gretchen says it wasn’t easy getting used to being coached, but she appreciates the result. ‘‘It kind of made you get to a different place. It forced you not to think about your cancer."
Gretchen finished chemotherapy in January, radiation in late April.
She drives from Newark to Westerville to row three times a week, works full time and has twin toddlers.
They were 18 months old when the doctor told her she had breast cancer.
They cling to her when she’s home. Before her hair grew back, they’d say, ‘‘Mommy, no wig! Mommy, no wig!" when she got ready for work. The wig meant she was leaving them.
The product of three years of fertility treatment, Zoe and Drew fill Gretchen and Rob’s house with toys and laughter.
Gretchen has no proof, but she suspects her hormone-based treatments might have helped the cancer grow.
It was worth it, she says as she plays with the green, yellow and red pile of blocks scattered in front of her. Zoe tugs on her mom’s sweater for attention.
Gretchen’s mom had been on her to get a mammogram. Gretchen was just 38 and had no symptoms.
Call it motherly instinct.
‘‘I called my mom. I said, ‘I just don’t want to die.’
‘‘All you want to do is see your kids grow up."
Chemo brutalized Gretchen. Her mom took the kids on the worst days. On the better days, she continued to work as a pulmonary nurse at Children’s Hospital.
The memories of a flight of stairs sapping her, of wondering if she had the energy for a load of laundry, are fresh.
Yet she rows.
‘‘It was hard in the beginning. I was weak."
In rowing, unity is paramount. On a perfect stroke, eight oars slap the water at once, glide forward just under the surface and break through with a single satisfying splash.
But go ahead and try for unity in a just-organized group of adults trying something new.
Some feel comfortable only if they’re in charge. Others run as far and fast as possible from lead roles. Some seem to thrive on conflict.
The rowers had enough foresight to develop a management team, but still there are bumps.
On this Tuesday, Matt’s irritation from last week is fresh.
‘‘There is too much segregation between the breast-cancer survivors and the supporters," he explains out of earshot of the team while cruising alongside a boat of women struggling to follow his commands.
‘‘I said, ‘Some of you are breastcancer victims, not survivors!’ I was mad.
‘‘It’s natural in a group. With highschool kids, it’s, ‘I don’t want to be with the freshmen because I’m a sophomore,’ " Matt says, lifting a megaphone to his mouth to bark instruction.
‘‘Their paradigm is breast cancer."
From the beginning, the rowers included a few women who hadn’t had cancer. A ‘‘wig lady," oncology nurses, a woman whose genetic predisposition to breast cancer prompted her to undergo a pre-emptive double mastectomy.
Once they begin to hone their skills and focus on competing as a survivors’ team, some rowers question whether they should trim the team to those who’ve had cancer, or limit the number of so-called supporters. At one practice, a woman who did not have cancer is asked to give up her spot in a boat to make room for a survivor who shows up late. Several rowers are put off. Some leave, at least in part, because they don’t feel welcome. After a particularly rough practice, the women have their first team meeting, at Sandy’s house. They begin to know one another on a deeper level, not just as the back in front of them or the oar behind. They tell their stories and step closer to becoming a team. Nobody, including Sandy, expected the group to be this big. ‘‘After the first two weeks, I thought maybe 10, 15 would come back," she says later, walking to her car after a mid-summer evening practice.
‘‘We’re going through growing pains because we didn’t expect to grow into an organization."
It’s early August, a year since a nurse wheeled Sandy into a St. Ann’s operating room where Han removed both of her breasts. This checkup with Dr. Philip Kuebler, her oncologist, holds particular significance.
Sandy is the type to remember anniversaries with clarity.
First, her surgery on Aug. 3.
The next day, a dear friend, Linda Roer, died at 52 — of breast cancer.
Had it not been for Linda’s cancer, Sandy wouldn’t have examined her own breasts and found the lump.
Among hundreds at Linda’s memorial service, Sandy sat with hidden tubes still draining post-surgical fluid from her chest.
She had a double mastectomy with no reconstruction, transforming her body, the way she stands and the way her clothes hang.
‘‘They were Ds. They were still nice. I could prop ’em up."
Today, she wears prosthetic breasts to her appointment and remains undecided about reconstruction.
‘‘I’ve got the girls on today," she announces to the nurse who weighs her. ‘‘You’ve got to take at least 2 pounds off."
Sometimes her posture is impeccable. Sometimes she hunches. In a photo Sandy’s mom snapped not long after surgery, Sandy smiles, but her arm is up, as if to obscure her chest. Scrawled across the front of her flaming red T-shirt is one word: Sexy.
A deep pink line bisects her fair chest. On her long, slender torso, it seems substantial.
She describes her position in the boat — coxswain — to Kuebler: ‘‘I sit in the back and yell at everybody."
Sandy and Sue volunteer to serve as coxswains to guide the two eightrower vessels.
They pick teams grade-school style.
At this stage, it doesn’t matter if someone had cancer. Everyone’s on the same team.
Once boats are set, the teams improve. Each rower knows her place, her strengths and weaknesses and those of her teammates. They compensate for one another.
They have come to expect the exhaustion and bad days. They’ve all felt like quitting mid-row. They’ve cursed the crushing weight of the boats as they haul them uphill after two or more hours on the water.
The definition in the muscles of their upper arms shows their progress, as do firming legs and flattening bellies.
‘‘I used to have to go home and not do anything for hours," Janet Smith says.
‘‘I was sore every week," agrees Shelley Wysong.
Neither had thought of it until this early August day, but strength, endurance and better technique have eclipsed the pain and exhaustion.
They rely on one another to keep it going.
‘‘If it was just me in this boat, oh my God, I wouldn’t be rowing," Kristi says. ‘‘But here’s Vicki (at 59, a senior member of the team) rowing in front of me in this boat, and I can’t let her kick my ass."
‘‘Even the toughest row is nothing compared to chemo," says Gretchen.
She walks with Kristi, talks about her mom’s call the other night. Fresh from watching a television show about a young mother with terminal breast cancer, her mom was upset.
It’s hard to take those calls and dangerous to let the statistics and sad stories suck you in, Kristi cautions. She was 34 when the diagnosis came.
‘‘And look at me; I’m here five years later."
Kristi underwent a double mastectomy after chemotherapy to fight a particularly large, aggressive and hard-to-treat cancer.
She bought herself slippers. Sick people have slippers, she explains.
And she calmed down.
‘‘I thought maybe if I was facing my own mortality, I ought to quit cursing and flipping people off on the interstate."
This spring, when she heard about a breast-cancer rowing team, she was faced with another challenge: her impending split from her husband.
‘‘I knew it would be a weird summer for me."
The dissolution is behind her. The rowers helped her through, offering words of encouragement and experience. Commiserating helps. They tell her about how their lives had gone on, improved after divorce.
She has since gone dancing with a male friend she met in a support group for divorced and separated people. She won’t call it a date but grins when she says she wouldn’t rule out more outings.
She lights up when she talks about rowing.
‘‘I don’t think I’ve had this much fun in the summer since I was like 10 years old. Playing is part of my schedule."
They row under the name One in Eight, a reminder of the prevalence of the disease that brought them together. Their motto is ‘‘Courage to the catch." The catch is the moment when the oars slice the water.
Huddling near a Dayton boathouse, a knot of rowers forms on the morning of Aug. 13 for their first regatta.
‘‘I’m so nervous," says Carol Crosby.
A low-key affair, the regatta was dreamed up by members of the Greater Dayton Rowing Association in response to member Paula Sideras’ struggle with breast cancer and to raise money for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
‘‘This is such an inspiration," says Dayton rower Todd Sobol as he gestures toward the One in Eight rowers.
‘‘They’re like 20-year-old kids."
The boats take off along the Great Miami River, staggered and running against the clock, not one another.
Sandy wears a flamingo-colored, bobbed wig. In her boat, everyone is yammering at once at the start.
Leslie Griffin’s seat breaks from its track, causing her boat to drag as she fixes it, her oar sinking into the water.
They’ve looked better in practice. Sandy trades her wig for a hat.
Sue, serving as coxswain in the other boat, looks down the string of rowers, trying to offer support and guidance. Sue doesn’t have a cox box, which normally amplifies her voice, and she strains to be heard.
‘‘Give it what we’ve got, ladies! Do it together!"
The rowers try to relay her instructions, and it seems to work.
It’s a soaking, sweaty day; the sun merciless.
The rowers in Sandy’s boat had fun, but know they didn’t perform at their best.
Those in Sue’s boat feel great, except maybe Judi Heston. She is recovering from a concussion after smacking her head on a boat at a recent practice.
‘‘We did such a good job," Gretchen says, pointing out that all but two of the women in her boat are over 50. They beat the other boat by more than 20 seconds.
Those who have seen the One in Eight rowers through surgeries, chemo treatments and radiation watch their wives, daughters, sisters, lovers.
Celia Fritz raves about the performance of her partner, Karen Klamert, in a four-woman boat. She looked strong. Celia is the athletic one. Karen considered herself, well, uncoordinated before the rowing.
Vicki’s granddaughter clutches pink posterboard: ‘‘Row Nana Row."
LaFreida Harrell’s big sister, Jackie Patrick, can hardly believe it.
‘‘It was a shock when she told us, ‘I’m rowing.’ I said, ‘You don’t even know how to swim!’ "
Swimming has scared LaFreida since she was a child when someone yanked her by her feet into a pool. But without the lessons, she wouldn’t be allowed to row.
‘‘I’ve gotta learn how to breathe underwater," she says, gasping as she emerges about a quarter of the way down the East Side YMCA pool.
‘‘A couple strokes and then you’re standing up!" says Tracey Pryor, who has been teaching the 61-year-old woman how to swim and float for the past month.
LaFreida is committed to overcoming her fear, drawn to it by the joy of rowing, spending time with other women who share her history and becoming more fit.
Midway through her classes, she remains uncomfortable in the deep end.
‘‘I’m getting there, guys; I’m getting there," says LaFreida, who is proud of losing 13 pounds, between swimming and rowing.
‘‘ ‘Turn your head, open your mouth, turn your head, open your mouth.’ Y’all expect a lot from people." It’s time to get serious. Matt and Trish are going to make some calls that not everyone is going to like.
‘‘You need to have a fastest boat," Trish says.
That means putting the eight best together and the other eight in a second boat. Any extras — as of tonight there are three — will have to challenge other rowers for their seats.
Out on the water, the women who were in the slower of the two boats in Saturday’s regatta are critiquing their performance.
‘‘How was it?" asks Matt. He and Trish were on a biking vacation and missed the race.
‘‘Bad!" shouts Jodi from the stroke seat — first in the boat, the rower who sets the crew’s cadence, a coveted spot.
‘‘Lunch was the best part," says Susan Richmond, five seats back.
Matt pushes for the fastest sustainable pace, rather than a slower pace punctuated with sprints, ‘‘so when you’re done, you’re damn glad you’re done."
And he seeks precision through a seemingly endless session of squareblading — asking the rowers to keep the oar blades perpendicular to the water’s surface.
Square-blading is hard work. Some rowers detest it.
Matt describes it as the vitamins, broccoli and pea soup of rowing.
Lisa Davis gets it.
‘‘Beautiful! Beautiful, Lisa," Matt says.
She beams.
He listens for the telltale plunk of an ideal catch. Eight oars breaking the water should sound like a tennis racket connecting with a ball.
Matt hears it once and the team sighs in relief as he lets them go back to rowing normally.
‘‘It’s a beautiful night. Quiet. Good friends. What more do you need?" he says.
A truck full of young men — honking, hollering and waving — cruises over a nearby bridge. Nine arms wave back.
‘‘If they would have seen us up close, they’d regret it," Leslie deadpans.
Women who’ve had breast cancer have looked their mortality in the face.
Doctors and nurses have poked and prodded. Strangers have gawked at their bald heads.
Many find solace in one another — an e-mail buddy, a friend from chemo. Support groups help some, irritate others.
Judi Heston has watched her three children grow to adulthood in the 15 years since her diagnosis.
And since 1993, she has been a rock for the women who’ve come after her. Her best friend, Nancy Morse, who is going on five years since her surgery, helped her come up with a name for their support group: Breast Friends.
They share information and compare notes on treatments and antinausea drugs. The senior members help ease the fears of the newly diagnosed.
They’ve lost members, beloved friends.
They tell jokes. They know about people staring to figure out which breast had the cancer. They know how infuriating it is when an acquaintance, even a friend, says something absurd.
Judi calls herself the reluctant leader. Her son has been after her for years to quit, to leave the constant reminders of cancer behind.
She tried to get away last year; they persuaded her to stay.
Everyone’s milling around on this late-August evening, one by one talking quietly with Matt, who shares their scores. More than one woman is biting her nails.
‘‘It’s like seeing the names up on the gym door," Shelley says under her breath.
With teens, Matt tests on high-tech rowing machines, eyeballs their performance and chooses the rowers he thinks are strongest.
With the One in Eight team, he thought a graded approach was more reasonable. And gray hair counts for something good: Older women earn extra points because they have higher handicaps in regattas.
Grading day, the Saturday before, was rough, a scorcher on choppy water. Not everyone was in her usual seat or on top of her game.
Today, Janet has her gym towel over her mouth to hide the smile that her eyes and blushing cheeks give away. Matt has just told her she scored the highest. She’s in the A boat.
An A boat and a B boat. Sixteen rowers, two coxswains and two alternates, LaFreida and Susan Lapp.
Susan takes it hard. She’s been diligent, loves being on the water. Her tears sadden some of the other women.
‘‘I felt horrible. I could have cried right with her," Karen Rugg-Klapheke says later.
When Karen puts her diminutive frame under the boat and walks it to the shore, when she settles into her seat and listens to coaches’ commands, she’s a million miles from last summer.
Three years after a double mastectomy, she picked up the telephone and couldn’t hear.
A brain tumor. Her doctor couldn’t rule out cancer, possibly having migrated from the breast, until he removed it.
Last July, the soprano who teaches at Worthington Christian High School and helps direct a 150-member church choir, awoke from a six-hour brain surgery with permanent hearing loss in her right ear and no sense of balance. She had to learn to walk again.
The mass was not cancer.
‘‘I’m doing everything I was before, which is a miracle."
Rowing is a challenge. As she has moved back in the boat — now in bow seat, the furthest from the coxswain — she has struggled to hear.
‘‘It makes me feel bad sometimes, like I’m holding people back."
And her balance is a constant struggle. Sometimes at home she falls unexpectedly.
Boom. Just like that.
‘‘When I’m on the boat, I can’t look around much. I zero in on that back in front of me and concentrate."
Karen married Greg on June 18 in front of 200 friends and family. Her two older sons walked her down the aisle.
But not before she rowed that morning (after verifying they’d be off the water in time for her hair appointment.)
‘‘It’s the best summer of my life," Karen says.
‘‘There is a real sisterhood there. We’ve walked a road where our life was threatened at some point. We do understand each other."
Student coach Katie Salvator cruises alongside a boat at practice.
‘‘They know how to row; I don’t think we need to talk to them all the time. Sometimes you just have to work it out on your own."
She chuckles at the gloves several women wear to protect their hands from blisters. There’s no way her Ohio State University coach would go for that.
She makes them give it their all for 2,000 meters. The time: about 13 minutes. They ask Katie how fast her team does it. She mumbles something about 7-some minutes.
‘‘That’s disheartening," Sandy says. ‘‘We’ve got a lot of work to do before the 25 th."
Heading back to the dock, they belt out Happy Birthday.
Jodi Heilman is 38.
As the last patient of the day is about to leave Mid Ohio Oncology/Hematology, Jodi gives him a bear hug.
‘‘How’s that rowing?" he asks.
The rowing is fabulous.
The rowing gives her the chance to spend hours in the company of healthy women who’ve survived cancer.
She adores her patients — most of them — but they’re sick. They don’t come to see her for fun. They come for hours of chemotherapy.
She cares for as many as a dozen cancer patients a day.
Before this job, she worked with Children’s Hospice. Before that, she treated children with cancer.
Jodi doesn’t have cancer, but it never leaves her life.
‘‘I always said if I ever quit crying or if I ever quit getting depressed, I’m going to quit," she says, remembering her hospice job.
The other day, she excused herself and closed the bathroom door behind her to cry. She still watches the frustration and illness that burdens patients.
There are those who seem to improve and then lose the fight.
‘‘I’ll see them, and three weeks later they die and you didn’t get to say goodbye."
Recently, several breast cancer patients relapsed.
On the water, though, she’s with fellow athletes who happen to have had breast cancer.
Sometimes, she feels like an outsider. Mostly, she feels privileged to be part of the group.
‘‘We’re all equal when we’re out there. Sometimes, I forget that they’re breast-cancer survivors. I just started to look at us as a team."
As the high-school season resumes, Matt and Trish turn over the coaching duties to Katie and her roommate, Elena Thomas. They’ve been helping much of the summer already, but now they’re in charge.
The Ohio State seniors row with the school’s club team. They were drawn to the One in Eight team not just by the promise of some spending money and a passion for rowing. Their mothers both had breast cancer.
Elena’s mom, Jan, is on the team.
It’s funny to Elena when she has to yell to her by name, instead of calling her ‘‘Mom."
The new coaches aren’t easy on the women, but their advice comes with less bite, especially at the start.
The rowers stumble some as they adjust to new boats, seats and teammates.
But after a few weeks, they look competitive, intense as they prep for the Dayton Five Rivers Regatta.
It’s late September and the dark comes fast. The women can barely see each other or their coaches as they push them through a final workout.
Elena hands Katie the megaphone.
‘‘Yell at them; you’re better at yelling at them."
Jan’s pride in her daughter is beautiful. She loves the way Elena coaches. She brags about her behind her back.
She embarrasses Elena with her tears when she thinks back on this summer, this experience as mother and daughter.
‘‘We’ve reconnected and spent so much time together."
They both laugh when they talk about Jan hauling a gardening seat and kayak paddle into the living room and demanding that Elena show her how to do it; show her what she was doing wrong.
More than four years have passed since they were trying on swimsuits for spring break and Jan felt the lump.
‘‘I am back. And I am strong."
One in Eight is a proud new grandma. A nurse. A teacher. A mother of twins. A stay-at-home mom. A volunteer. An executive.
She has a wicked sense of humor; a hot temper; an easy, intense hug that belies her reserved, timid side. She has a voice that fills a sprawling house, a giggle so small it could fit in the palm of your hand.
One in Eight is newly divorced, newly married, divorced forever, remarried, engaged. She’s happily married for decades to a guy who lives to make her laugh; committed to a woman who loves to make her laugh.
She’s single, waiting for the guy who’ll cook and clean.
She had a lumpectomy, a mastectomy, a bilateral mastectomy. She had reconstruction and revels in going braless. She skipped reconstruction and doesn’t miss her breasts. She laughs when she remembers her prosthetic boob popping out of a swimsuit on vacation.
She’s trying to distance herself from breast cancer — for her, for her family. She’s decorated an entire room in pink, with stuffed animals and other breast-cancer mementos and almost always wears her new favorite color.
She’s had chemo, chemo and more chemo. Radiation. Relapses. A clean bill of health for going on 15 years. She hasn’t had cancer, prays she won’t ever, but fears it less now that she’s met her new friends, the ones who don’t let it stop them and who’ve let it make them appreciate life more fully and laugh more freely.
She lives.
She rows.
Together, she’s a team.
mcrane@dispatch.com
rsauer@dispatch.com