Terrifying diagnosis steeled valley woman’s resolve

She was shaving one morning, in a delicate spot, when Shannon Pinkard felt the lump, in her armpit.

She was pregnant at the time. Her obstetrician said she probably was just engorged, and then the lump seemed to go away. But she knew.

It's like when you hear a rattle in your car shifting gears, but when you take it down to Frank at the Sinclair station, it goes away. But not for long. And then in a couple of weeks, the transmission goes out.

Women know their bodies in the way men know their cars. They know when something's not right, when the transmission is about to go out.

"I knew," the bubbly 42-year-old Pinkard said after instructing Zumba and gymnastics classes Thursday morning at the Boulder City Parks and Recreation building. "I knew."

Knew she had cancer.

Usually, this is where I would point out that nothing can prepare you for the day you get that phone call, when the doctor says in a solemn voice that you need to come down right away.

By then, Shannon Pinkard, who was a kindergarten teacher in Hawaii, in beautiful Maui, and had moved to Southern Nevada virtually sight unseen because her husband had found a job and it was going to be best for her and the kids, had read everything there was to read about inflammatory breast cancer on the Internet.

What she didn't know is that hers was in Stage 4. There is no Stage 5.

The cancer had spread like wildfire on the Santa Ana wind, from her breast to her spine to her spleen to her lungs to her liver. She had cancer almost from head to toe. She had it in her brain, though she wouldn't find out about that until later, after the third round of chemotherapy.

She was told all of this on the Friday after Christmas in 2006. When she was seven months pregnant.

On Saturday after Christmas, she gave birth to a little boy, Takai. After cutting her open, doctors learned her placenta had ruptured. Had she carried the baby to full term, both mother and child might have died.

The ruptured placenta had nothing to do with her cancer. Quite the contrary. In a strange sort of way, the cancer had saved her life. That's the way she looks at it, because Shannon Pinkard is an optimist, of the most eternal kind.

"I don't have time for this," she said then. What she had was a 12-year-old stepson and a 6-year-old daughter and a 2-year-old son at home. Now she had a baby boy in her arms.

"Faith, hope and peace," she said. She had those, too. Along with unbearable pain up and down her spine.

"Our world was rocked, but I knew I was going to make it."

Those in her inner circle weren't so sure. The inner circle whispered when Shannon was out of earshot. She didn't hear. But she knew.

What she didn't know, what none of them knew, is that between the third and fourth rounds of chemotherapy, the tumors in her breast and on her spine and in her lungs and in her spleen and in her liver would be gone. She wasn't in remission. She was virtually cancer-free.

Virtually cancer-free.

Her oncologists hadn't thought to check inside her head for cancer.

They found it there, too.

So they drilled four screws in Shannon's head and put her in this halo contraption, like Iron Man, and zapped her with a serious dose of radiation. And then the cancer on her brain was gone, too.

She was thrilled, of course.

But while she was fighting cancer, reality continued to swirl about this determined woman, and sometimes reality swirls hard.

Her mother and chief surrogate died; her daughter, Tala, was diagnosed with diabetes; the baby developed a growth in his throat and was not breathing when they took him to the hospital in an ambulance; her sister and her best girlfriends, her secondary surrogates, were strong women, too, and having all those strong women around the house - combined with the avalanche of bills, because insurance only covers so much - put a strain on Shannon's marriage.

She and Roy separated a couple of years ago. Roy, a union painter, recently got laid off. But on the day he got laid off, he brought over a wad of cash for Shannon and the kids, because that's just the kind of man Roy is, Shannon said. He's a good man, and they still talk, and maybe they can still get back together.

Shannon survives by being strong and by being optimistic and by teaching Zumba and gymnastics classes. Though Zumba is wonderful and physically exhilarating and has helped her drop the 80 pounds she gained from the cancer-fighting steroids and whatnot, she and the kids are living on around $400 a week. They have lost their home, lost their car, lost a lot.

This cancer thing can be a real sonofabitch sometimes.

But only once did tears well up in Shannon Pinkard's eyes when she told her story, and that was when she said that she and Roy had separated.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.