Editor’s Note: In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, each Friday in October The Dispatch will feature an area resident’s story about battling the disease. If you know of an inspiring story we should share email [email protected].
When Katie Ballard had to schedule a follow-up appointment after a routine mammogram in July 2018, she thought there must have been something wrong with the machine.
She had a biopsy and was diagnosed with breast cancer three days later, on Aug. 2. It was stage 1 when it was discovered but soon became an aggressive stage 2.
Throughout the months of treatment that followed, Ballard’s only days off work were every other Friday when she went to West Clinic in Memphis for eight rounds of chemotherapy. She devoted her energy to her work at Oak Hill Academy in West Point, where she had just become assistant elementary principal and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) lab teacher after 10 years of teaching there.
“It kind of gave me a reason to get up,” said Ballard, 42. “I knew I had to come to work, I knew I had to be there for my kids and I hope that it gave them a sense of, ‘she’s trying to take care of herself, but she’s also trying to take care of us.'”
After chemo, Ballard underwent 25 rounds of radiation at Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle in Columbus. Her last treatment was in March. The Oak Hill community is “one giant family” and rallied behind her in the meantime, she said.
Oak Hill is a non-sectarian Christian school, and students wrote Ballard’s name at the top of the prayer lists in their classrooms. She received meals from the community both at school during the week and at home on weekends, she said. Her fellow faculty taught her classes while she was at chemo appointments, and some faculty and students wore T-shirts designed in her honor on those Fridays.
“I would get to Memphis for treatment and the pictures would start coming in,” Ballard said. “The teachers would take a big group picture waving and trying to give me encouragement for the day.”
The Oak Hill chapter of the National Honor Society dedicated its annual Pink Week fundraiser to Ballard last year and raised twice as much money as it usually does, said Sherry Freeman, the school’s librarian and NHS sponsor. The fundraiser includes bake sales and the option for students to pay to not wear their uniforms.
The school usually donates the money to the Susan G. Komen Foundation, but last year it raised about $600 and used it to buy supplies to donate to West Clinic, Freeman said.
She called Ballard’s resilience “inspirational,” and elementary principal Phil Ferguson said it stood out to him in his 30 years working in education.
“I’ve seen teachers and families go through difficult times, but I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone fight the battle as effectively as she did and still be as effective in the classroom,” he said.
Ferguson agreed with Ballard that Oak Hill is like a family and tries its best to support community members in need.
“We didn’t have to prop her up. She motivated us,” Ferguson said. “We tried, but she never came in here down and out. She didn’t have a bad day, and if she did, she hid it.”
‘It was just something that I had’
That’s not to say Ballard was completely unfazed. She received the diagnosis during her lunch break on the faculty’s first day reporting back to school, and she went straight to headmaster Cathy Davis’ office.
“She said, ‘Hold on, we’re going to pray about this,’ and we prayed together,” Ballard said.
She did not want her students to worry about her, she said, but they handled knowing she was sick better than she expected. When she started losing her hair due to chemo, she wore hats because she preferred them to wigs, and one student asked her if she had gotten a bad haircut, to her amusement.
“Then when my hair started coming back, my little ones were amazed by how soft it was,” she said. “They would say, ‘Can I touch your teddy-bear hair?'”
Ballard is a sixth-grade math teacher in addition to her other positions, and her son, Chip, then 11, was in her class last year. He would ask her every day after class if she was OK, she said.
Chip is on a traveling baseball team, so support for Ballard went beyond Oak Hill and included Chip’s teammates and their families, she said.
Ballard maintained her positive attitude by choosing not to think of the disease in dire terms, she said.
“I just tried to think, I’m sick and I’m going to get over it,” she said. “I don’t want to say it was like the flu or something, because I knew it wouldn’t be that quick, but that it was just something that I had, it was treatable and it was not a life-or-death situation.”
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