A Way in the Wilderness: What She Wishes She had Known, and Where Laurens County Can Turn for Help (Part 4 of 4)

Editor’s note: This is the fourth and final installment in A Way in the Wilderness, a series following Laurens County resident JoDee Watkins through her breast cancer journey, told in her own words and with her blessing. Earlier installments traced her diagnosis four days before Christmas (Part 1), the decision she reached and the day she told her children (Part 2), and her surgery and the news that her journey was not over (Part 3). Readers can find all three on the Buzz website. This final part turns from Watkins’ story to the lessons she hopes others take from it, and to the local help available to anyone facing a diagnosis.

JoDee Watkins did not set out to give anyone advice. She set out to survive a breast cancer diagnosis and to hold onto her faith while she did it. But in the months since that December afternoon when a MyChart notification changed her life, she has talked with friend after friend facing the same fear, and she has found herself sharing the things she learned the hard way.

Her story, told across this series, holds lessons for anyone who hears the words she heard. The first may be the simplest: do not wait. Watkins made an appointment with her primary care physician within days of noticing something was wrong, even when there was no lump and little reason, at first, for alarm. Her warning sign was easy to dismiss, a few spots of blood and some pain, with nothing that announced itself as cancer. Catching it early, she believes, shaped every option she had later, and she urges others not to brush aside the quiet signals their bodies send. Early detection, she says, can change everything.

She also learned the value of the waiting itself. The 28 days between her diagnosis and her first meeting with her medical team felt agonizing, but she used them to research her options, and in doing so she discovered a path almost no one had mentioned to her. The lesson she draws from it is that patients should ask questions, seek out their choices and not assume the first option presented is the only one. She learned, for example, about aesthetic flat closure and about her protections under the federal Women’s Health and Cancer Rights Act of 1998 only because she went looking.

When she met with her interdisciplinary team, Watkins did not go alone. She brought her husband, Jonathan, and a close friend who served as what she called their ears and their note taker. For anyone walking into an appointment where the information comes fast and the emotions run high, she found that a second set of ears is not a luxury but a necessity.

Much of what carried Watkins through was not medical at all. Early on, she returned to a practice she had long taught others, deliberately filling her mind with what would steady it rather than what would sink it.

“Fill it with positive scripture, sermons, books, podcasts and people,” she wrote. “Those things can and will renew your mind.”

She leaned, too, on people. A friend told her early on that she did not just have cancer, that everyone close to her now carried it alongside her, and Watkins came to see that as one of the truest things anyone said to her. She talked with her best friend every day. She connected with someone who had walked the road before her. She let friends coordinate meals, travel and care, and she allowed herself to lean when she could not stand on her own.

“True connection isn’t found by a screen and a scroll,” she wrote. “Friends talk. Friends show up.”

Watkins is not the only Laurens County resident who has chosen to tell her story. Susan Tallman of Clinton, a two-time breast cancer survivor, shared her own journey publicly last fall, one marked by humor, deep faith and a community that surrounded her family at every turn. Tallman often speaks of how her mother faced the disease decades ago in near silence, and of how much has changed since, of how openness and support have replaced isolation. Her story, which can be found on the Buzz website, sounds different from Watkins’ in many ways, and that is precisely the point. Everyone walks this road differently. One person finds strength in humor, another in scripture, another in research and a plan. That variety is the gift of sharing, because the person who is newly afraid may need to hear the voice that sounds most like her own.

For those who need help that friendship and shared stories cannot provide, Laurens County has a resource many residents do not know exists.

The Laurens County Cancer Association is a local nonprofit dedicated to supporting county residents who are battling cancer. It is not affiliated with the American Cancer Society, a distinction its leaders are quick to make. The organization grew out of community grief and generosity. It began when a local man, Tim Mann, was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, and a group of his friends organized a 5K run to help him. The association became an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2012.

Because there is no cancer treatment center in Laurens County, nearly every patient must travel, often to Greenville, Spartanburg, Greenwood or as far as Charlotte, sometimes several days a week. Much of the association’s work is aimed at easing that burden. Through its fuel assistance program, the organization helps cover the cost of gas for patients traveling to treatment. It also provides nutritional support, prescription reimbursement and a supply of household and personal hygiene items. Executive Director Anna Drew Miller has said the programs carry no income requirements, because the toll of cancer reaches every kind of family. In 2024, the association served 176 people, providing tens of thousands of dollars in fuel, nutrition and prescription help.

The association also hosts a monthly support group for those living with cancer, a space where, as office manager Teresa Bussey has put it, patients who simply need to come in and cry will find someone to cry with them.

For Watkins, the point of telling her story was never that everything turns out fine. It was that no one should walk this road alone. Laurens County is a place that shows up, with casseroles and cards, with rides and prayers, with friends and strangers willing to walk the journey alongside those who are afraid. Whatever the diagnosis, and however a person chooses to face it, the message from those who have gone before is the same. Do not go it alone.

“God is good,” she wrote. “God is good to me. God is good at being God.”

For more information, the Laurens County Cancer Association is located at 1337 Medical Ridge Road in Clinton, behind Prisma Health Laurens County Memorial Hospital. The office is open Tuesday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and can be reached at 864-358-7376 or by email at [email protected].