Breast cancer survivors form special bond

In the past six months, Gina Arms and Debbie Griffin have lost breasts but gained an unshakable bond.

The women had known each other through their board positions with Leadership Pikes Peak, but when Griffin called Arms in the spring to say her life plate was overflowing with the possibility of breast cancer, the relationship began its shift into one of support, empathy and laughter.

Arms, who lost her mother, an aunt and a cousin to the disease, had a mammogram scheduled a few days after Griffin’s phone call.

“The moment they told me that I had an abnormal mammogram, I knew,” she said.

A week after Arms’ diagnosis, Griffin finally got the same dreaded news. Arms came to Griffin’s house as Griffin began to shed the first of many different kinds of tears she would cry in the coming months.

The two shared oncologists, plastic surgeons and the eventual title of “bosom buddies.” They discovered they had mutual friends, some of whom came to a party at Hooters, part of Arms’ credo of keeping a positive attitude and sense of humor throughout her battle.

“We were on the phone like every other day,” Griffin said. “Nobody else knew what we were experiencing. You could say as much as you wanted to your friends and try to share. But unless you were in the position of, you know, am I going to keep one breast? Am I going to lose both breasts? And to realize that you have cancer. The big ‘C.’ I say that God put Gina in my path.”

Griffin was at Arms’ hospital bedside the day Arms had her double mastectomy, one week before Griffin lost one of her breasts.

“There are a lot of people that have come forward and helped make the friendship connections for Debbie individually and for me individually that we may not have had if we hadn’t have experienced this ourselves,” Arms said. “

Arms will be walking on Sunday in the annual Susan G. Koman Race for the Cure in Garden of the Gods Park. Griffin is considering joining Arms’ team of roughly a dozen survivors and supporters in the walk.