Support These Girls HELP FM BREAST FRIENDS BRING HOPE TO WOMEN WITH BREAST CANCER

PPam Knapper’s world collapsed in 2006 when she was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer. So she knew exactly what her high school classmate, Lisa Verworn, was thinking when Lisa got her own diagnosis that she was battling breast cancer, too.

“Within hours of disclosing my diagnosis, Pam reached out to me via email,” Lisa said. “I felt an instant connection. Her words were powerful, and they were exactly what I needed to hear.”

Turns out, scores of other women in Fargo-Moorhead were fighting breast cancer and were desperate to hear a similar message of support and friendship. After all, one out of eight women are diagnosed with breast cancer. Only there wasn’t anybody — or anything — offering that message in town. When Knapper and Verworn were both healthy enough, they teamed up to establish the area’s first support group just for breast cancer — FM Breast Friends.

“When you are diagnosed with a major medical condition like breast cancer, it’s like going to sleep and waking up in a foreign country where you don’t know the language or the customs and no map to get home,” Knapper said. “Our support group offers that guidance. To get us back to ‘home’ and live with your new ‘normal’ or at least get to your new normal.”

Knapper said FM Breast Friends offers women with breast cancer a safe place to ask questions and share their emotions and concerns with women who are on or who have shared the same journey. “The main goal of the group is to make the journey easier, less frightening. To listen and be heard,” explained Verworn. “To allow women to share their inner-most thoughts and know that someone else has had those same thoughts and knows exactly how I feel.” The group meets the first Wednesday of the month at 7 pm at the Moorhead Library.

Knapper and Verworn also have several other lofty goals they’d like FM Breast Friends to achieve in the next five years.

One is to help women pay for medical needs that arise from a breast cancer diagnosis. “Cancer treatment creates a huge impact on a family’s finances, and this impact does not stop the minute you are done with treatment,” said Verworn. “It goes on for years and years.”

Last year, FM Breast Friends hosted its first-ever “Support the Girls” fundraiser, an event the group will continue in January 2012. It raised enough money to sponsor 10 members to travel to the Young Survival Coalition Conference, an annual gathering for women to learn all aspects of the fight against breast cancer.

Another goal the women are working to achieve is to establish the organization as a non-profit. Knapper feels this would enable FM Breast Friends to expand its community outreach. “We want to bring awareness and make sure that no women feel alone and that they know the resources that are available to them. I want FM Breast Friends to be a household name so when someone is diagnosed with breast cancer, people automatically think of us and know they have a place to go where they will not be alone on their journey with breast cancer,” said Knapper. [AWM]