Insistent husband saved my life, BC3 breast cancer survivor says
Jayme Steighner was gathering her husband and two daughters for a photograph in front of the touristy Pineapple Fountain in Charleston, S.C.
The cellphone within her purse began to ring near noon Aug. 9, 2022, not long before the vacationing Saxonburg family had planned to walk to a nearby Irish restaurant for lunch.
Butler Memorial Hospital read the caller identification on her screen.
“She kind of meandered away from us,” said Steighner’s husband, Cory. “Her head was nodding. She was looking down. She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye and had tears coming down.”
Cory and the couple’s eldest daughter, Kendyl, then 19 and five days away from leaving home as a college freshman, knew Steighner had undergone an off-schedule mammogram and biopsy a week earlier.
“When Kendyl saw my face when I got the phone call,” Steighner said, “she immediately fell onto the ground and started crying. She could tell it was not good news.”
The family photograph was never taken.
That night, and others to follow, the 44-year-old would break down and cry in the shower, the only place where she could be alone, where she could wash off the mask of positivity she wore to comfort Cory, Kendyl and Teaghan.
Invasive lobular carcinoma is a rare type of breast cancer, accounting for about 15% of cases. Its cancer cells are more likely to spread than to form a lump, according to medical reports.
Overall survival rates depend on numerous factors, such as the disease’s stage upon diagnosis. About 12% of patients die within five years and 26% within 10, according to medical reports.
Steighner is the director of a Butler County Community College Keystone Education Yields Success program that provides resources and services to BC3’s low-income students.
She had her first mammogram at 37 after her physician noticed an anomaly. Results of a subsequent biopsy, and of imaging and other such procedures at age 38, 39, 40, 41, 42 and 43 were negative.
None of her immediate female relatives had had breast cancer. Results of a scheduled mammogram performed in April 2022 at age 44 did not necessitate a biopsy.
“I was pretty excited,” Steighner said. “I thought, ‘This is amazing.’ This is the first time there wasn’t a next step.”
A month later, she noticed “this weird indent. But I didn’t really think anything of it. I was still relishing in the moment that I did not have to have any kind of follow-up to my last mammogram.”
Cory persisted in demanding that his wife schedule another scan.
“I’m very stubborn,” Steighner said. “He kept saying, ‘You have to go back to the doctor. You need to get them to look at that. That’s not normal. You need to go back.’”
“Well, that’s interesting,” Steighner’s physician said during a late June 2022 appointment she scheduled at the insistence of her husband. “You need to go back and get another mammogram.”
The scan and biopsy were performed in late July.
“I had a very poor attitude,” Steighner said. “I was thinking, ‘This is going to be fine. I’m not sure why I am here.’ I was trying to make light of a situation that, at this point, had become more of a nuisance. I was superconfident that it was going to be fine.
“And then we left and went on vacation.”
The caller from Butler Memorial Hospital that Wednesday was a radiologist.
“I thought, ‘Well, this is strange,’” Steighner said. “Usually it’s a nurse who calls. That should have been my first sign that it wasn’t good news.”
It’s cancer, the radiologist told Steighner. Invasive lobular carcinoma. You need to meet with a surgeon. Pretty quickly. There is a strong potential that it could have already spread.
Steighner had nothing with which to write down the information she was receiving during the 10-minute call, including the names and telephone numbers of surgeons the radiologist suggested.
Steighner motioned for her husband to be near her.
“He could see that it wasn’t good,” Steighner said. “I told him, ‘Get your phone out.’”
Cory typed into his cellphone information Steighner relayed to him from the radiologist as Kendyl shrank into a pile of tears on a busy sidewalk next to the Pineapple Foundation.
Steighner’s hands shook as she held her cellphone to her ear.
“I just felt like I was in a tunnel,” she said. “I remember seeing things around me. But I was like, ‘What is happening?’ It was kind of an out-of-body experience. I saw Kendyl on the ground. I needed to go and get her up off the ground. But I was still on the phone with the radiologist.”
Among her thoughts in the shower that evening on vacation was that her body had “a rare, aggressive form of cancer,” that she had to find a surgical team and “what scared me the most,” Steighner said, “was wondering if I am going to be able to watch my daughters graduate from high school or college, whether I would live to see grandchildren.”
A general surgeon in Butler with whom she met said he believed the detection of invasive lobular carcinoma had been missed on at least two mammograms, and recommended a double mastectomy and other specialists to perform the surgery.
Steighner called her friend of 15 years and two-time breast cancer survivor Cassandra Seth for advice and chose a surgical oncologist in Wexford.
“His recommendation was to do a double,” Steighner said. “He called my type of cancer the sneaky cancer. He said I was very fortunate because a lot of women don’t find this type of cancer until it was a lot farther along.”
Steighner on Oct. 24, 2022, underwent a 17-hour surgery that included reconstruction performed by a plastic surgeon from Pittsburgh.
In the first week of November, she received a call that she was cancer-free.
Neither radiation nor chemotherapy would be needed.
In a course Dr. Jessica Bronder instructs as part of BC3’s registered nursing career program are lessons about women’s reproductive cancer.
The assistant professor in BC3’s Shaffer School of Nursing and Allied Health asked Steighner, 47, and Seth — a Butler 44-year-old diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer in December 2021 and with HER 2 positive breast cancer in February 2024 — to inform her class about their experiences from detection to survival.
“There are so many different forms of breast cancer,” Bronder said. “Everyone’s journey is different. I want the students to have a real-life impact by listening to two breast cancer survivors, hearing what their life was like before having breast cancer, during breast cancer and now.”
Steighner and Seth discussed their experiences with the class of mostly female future health care providers Oct. 1.
“I am very fortunate that my story turned out the way that it did,” Steighner told the nursing students. “What I want you to know is that if something seems off, (you’ve) got to get it looked at. I literally made a T-shirt for my husband. It has two life-ring buoys like you would see on a boat strategically placed on the front.
“He literally saved my life. I think he now realizes the depth of what he did because he knows how stubborn I am. The cancer didn’t hurt. There was no pain. It just looked weird. Was it just age? I would have continued to just ignore it.”
Steighner and Cory will celebrate their 23rd wedding anniversary Oct. 12.
Daughter Kendyl, 21, is a senior respiratory therapist student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Teaghan, 19, a second-year social work student at BC3.
“I’m just glad that we’ve been together long enough and have a marriage that’s strong enough that she trusted me for being persistent and trusted her own intuition,” Cory said. “I would have rather been annoying and wrong than to not care, let it go and the worst could have happened. … It was caught early and she’s here and healthy to talk to others about her story and her journey.”
The gray T-shirt with strategically placed buoys that Steighner gave to Cory has two words across its chest: Wife Saver.
Bill Foley is coordinator of news and media content at Butler County Community College.
