Ellen Faubus Kreth

LITTLE ROCK — In July 2001, Ellen Kreth was looking forward to summer recess from her job as a law clerk with the Arkansas Court of Appeals, imagining that she would spend long days at a swimming pool with her 3-year-old and 5-month-old daughters. Instead, her right breast began to swell and her life was changed forever.

Today, Kreth is chairman of the Oct. 17 Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure in central Arkansas and is determined to top the record of 45,938 walkers and runners set in 2008. But until eight years ago, breast cancer was not something she thought about everyday.

At that time, she was 33 and had made a decision not to breast-feed her infant daughter, Celia, because she had suffered from frequent bouts of mastitis when she nursed Gracie three years earlier. Mastitis is an infection of the breast tissue that causes pain, swelling and redness. It commonly affects women who are breastfeeding.

When her right breast began to swell, Kreth thought it was another infection and went to her gynecologist, who gave her an antibiotic and advised her to seek another opinion. She had an emergency mammogram. As she sat in the waiting room for the results, she saw women come and go, quickly getting their results. Finally, the radiologist told her that her situation was "unusual," her breast was thickening and she needed to "seek answers."

Four days later, on July 21, Kreth underwent a fine-needle biopsy at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. She and her husband, Kelly, got the results in 20 minutes.

"All I heard was, 'You have breast cancer,' and I remember saying, 'I can't have breast cancer. I have a 5-month-old baby and a 3-year-old. I can't have breast cancer.' It was almost like I was saying, 'You take that report right back on out and come back with something else.' I was pleading with her," Kreth says.

Kreth had an inflammatory breast cancer, with 90 percent of the cells from the biopsy showing a malignancy. According to the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, inflammatory breast cancer is a rare form that accounts for only 2 percent to 6 percent of all breast cancers. It is a highly aggressive disease with a poor prognosis, a 40 percent chance of surviving five years.

Kreth turned to Dr. Jack Sternberg, an oncologist who has since retired. The next day - a Wednesday - Kreth went in for bone scans. The following day, she had a CT scan. On Friday, she had a port put in and started chemotherapy.

By that time, her tumor had grown to 10-by-10 centimeters - almost the size of a grapefruit. A tumor that is 2/10ths of a centimeter is considered large. Since the cancer was spreading so fast, it had to be treated aggressively. She knew she was going to have a mastectomy, but the surgery could not be performed until the cancer cells were contained.She underwent three months of chemotherapy to try and shrink the tumor. By the end of three months, the tumor had only shrunk to 7-by-8 centimeters.

"Ellen was a remarkable patient," Sternberg recalls. "When she first came in, she got in my face and I got back in her face and she said, 'All right. You are the one who is going to treat me.'"

Sternberg, now a volunteer physician at the Hot Springs Charitable Christian Medical Clinic in Hot Springs, adds that her situation was "critical." But he says when a tumor grows that fast, it sometimes reacts quickly to chemotherapy.

UNDERGOING THE KNIFE

Kreth underwent a bilateral (or double) mastectomy on Nov. 2, 2001, a Friday. Dr. James Hagan, the surgeon, promised to call her between 5 and 7 p.m. the following Monday with the results. Kreth sat by the telephone all day. Her phone rang at 5:30 and her caller ID read Dr. Jack Sternberg.

"I thought, 'I am toast. It has come back and they made Dr. Jack call me,'" Kreth recalls. "But Dr. Jack said, 'Ellen, we cannot find one microscopic cell of cancer.' It was completely eradicated. The chemo had taken it out."

But before she could celebrate, Kreth had to complete the treatment plan, which included more chemotherapy, radiation and a hysterectomy. She did not have breast reconstruction surgery because she had to restart chemotherapy just a few weeks after the mastectomy. After her treatment came to an end, Kreth decided against reconstruction.

"I lost a lot of time with the girls and it would have been another surgery," she says. "It would have been another recovery period and why? No way."

During her treatment and recovery time, Kreth couldn't leave the house very often because her immune system was compromised. She said her friends were going to Junior League meetings while she attended breast cancer support meetings.

"I thought they don't live in the same world I live in and I was angry for a while," she says. "I was angry when I would see moms around their kids because they seemed so carefree."

She feared she wouldn't be around to see her girls grow up.She knew her children would be well cared for if she didn't make it, but worried about who would do "all of the little mommy things." Around that time, she started a journal for a daughter but quickly abandoned it because it "read like I was scared to death."

"But I am not angry about it. I am glad I am here," she says. "I am really glad I got to see Celia walk and there was a time I thought, 'Am I going to see her walk?'"

At one point during the ordeal, Kreth says she turned to her Bible to "just see what God is going to say to me." She randomly opened the book to Psalms 30, which talks about healing.Psalms 30:2 says "O Lord my God, I cried unto thee, and thou hast healed me."

"I have Psalms 30 framed and when I look at it, I feel like God made me that promise," says Kreth, who attends Lakewood United Methodist Church in North Little Rock. "I felt like he was going to take care of me."

During the treatment, she began losing her hair. Her older daughter, Gracie, didn't understand why.

"I let Gracie pull it out in the front yard when the wind was blowing because I needed her to understand that my hair was falling out," she says. "I needed her to understand she wasn't causing it to fall out because she was pulling it out. I pulled it out too and Kelly pulled it out and we watched it blow away in the wind. We kind of laughed about it, but she needed to understand that my hair was going to be gone."

Husband Kelly asked her to throw away the sweater she was wearing the day of the diagnosis. And the couple does not celebrate each year she is cancer-free.

" That was such a painful time. I don't like to be reminded of it and I don't like to look back," he says. "Ellen doesn't live in the past and I don't like to either."

Today, Kreth has a full head of auburn hair and a perky attitude. She has check-ups every six months and has been cancer-free for eight years. Her condition is classified as NED - or no evidence of disease - which she says is "just a little bit happier than remission."

"Inflammatory breast cancer is not a good diagnosis," she says. "But here I am eight years out and I am not on any kind of drug. Nothing."

But she says her life will never be the same.

"Out of respect for the people who don't make it, you don't want your experience to go away," she says. "I am blessed, but it changed my entire life. And I never want to be the same person I was because that would make all I went through for naught."

GROWING UP FAUBUS

Kreth is the granddaughter of the late Orval and Alta Faubus. Orval Faubus was the longest-serving governor in Arkansas history, his tenure of 11 years and 363 days eclipsing former President Clinton's gubernatorial tenure by 24 days. Faubus served from 1955 to 1967.

A lifelong Democrat and proponent of states' rights, Faubus is known for sending the Arkansas National Guard to Little Rock's Central High School in 1957. Faubus said he called out the National Guard "to maintain ... the peace and good order of the community" and directed the Guard to prevent nine black students from entering the school, notwithstanding a court-approved desegregation plan. President Eisenhower later sent federal troops to assure the students' admission to Central.

Ellen was born a year after her grandfather left office. She is the daughter of the Faubus' son, Farrell, and his wife, Martha. Farrell and Martha divorced and Farrell later took his life, when Ellen was 8 years old. She grew up in North Little Rock with her mother and stepfather, Ray Shilling.

She says one of her favorite memories of her grandfather is that he could never get her birthday right.

"I remember one time he called me on the 22nd to wish me a happy birthday and I remember saying, 'Nope. It's the 24th,' and he would argue with me. I have a lot of good memories of him as my grandpa," she says.

Kreth says being a Faubus descendant has affected her in "good and bad ways." She adds that one of her "greatest fears about that has been people making a judgment about me based on that name and I am so fiercely independent and that bothers me."

Because of that independence, Kreth decided to attend the University of Alabama, earning a degree in journalism.

"I knew that I was going out of state to college because I didn't want to ride on his coattails," she says. "If I earned it, then I was going to earn it on my own. I didn't want anything given to me because of him. I didn't want any of the good given to me because of him and I don't want any of the perks. Unless I earn it, I don't want it."

Her grandmother, Celia Alta Faubus, was a "spitfire."

"I remember I was f ive months pregnant, we knew we were having a girl, and my grandmother said, 'What are you going to name her?' I kind of teared up thinking this is a Hallmark moment. And I said, 'We are going to name her Celia, and she said, 'I never liked that name.'"

Kreth met her husband, Kelly, at the North Little Rock Airport. Her mother and stepfather had a plane there and she was learning to fly. Her pilot husband now flies for Continental Airlines. They dated for three years and married on Sept. 1, 1990, shortly after she graduated from college.

"She is probably the most determined person I have ever met," Kelly Kreth says. "I always call her a list maker. She gets out a pad and pen and makes a list. She gets a plan together and sets out with her plan and follows through with it."

Kreth was a reporter for the Democrat-Gazette when she decided to go to law school. After she passed the bar, she went to work as a law clerk for Arkansas Court of Appeals Judge Sam Bird, who has since retired. She worked for him from 1997 until she got sick in 2001. She went back for one year in 2003, but then decided to stay at home with her children.

"She was not a 'yes' person, which was what I needed," Bird says. "You don't need someone who will agree with everything you say. You need someone who will argue with you and that was Ellen."

Kreth's only sibling, Fara Faubus, is also a lawyer. The sisters inherited The Madison County Record newspaper after Alta Faubus' death in 2002. They still own the paper and Kreth said she is in touch with the managing editor daily.

"Politics was their passion," Kreth says of her grandparents. "The eradication of breast cancer is my passion. I am not trying to distance myself from them. They were my grandparents. But I am not who they were. My purpose in life, which is based upon circumstances way beyond my control, is to find a cure forbreast cancer. And I am not going to stop until I do."

RACE FOR THE CURE

Kreth had volunteered for a number of Susan G. Komen-related events when she was asked to serve as race chairman for the 2009 event. She said it is truly a Kreth family event. Her husband participates in the Three Milesof Men event and her daughters will participate in the race. Her mother, Martha Shilling, has the honorary title of "race nanny" because she baby-sits Gracie and Celia so Kreth can attend meetings and other functions.

"We didn't think she was going to be OK," Martha Shilling says of her daughter's illness. "But she just kept on fighting. She never once gave up. She always thought she was going to win."

The theme of this year's event is "It's My Race to Win," which includes a six-week fitness program that will train women to walk or run the race. The program will be held at 6:30 p.m. Mondays and Thursdays at War Memorial Stadium. Participation is limited to the first 500 women who register for the race and sign up for the program. It begins Sept. 7.

Also this year, Kreth kicked off Kids for the Cure. The first 3,000 children who register for the race will receive a T-shirt.

Since her fight with breast cancer, Kreth has become a runner. She said she believes exercise helps keep her cancer in remission. She has a personal goal - she wants to finish in the top 300 runners, which would qualify her for a medal. She said after she was diagnosed, a friend ran the race in her honor and gave Kreth her medal. Now she wants to earn one of her own.

"The race has allowed me to give back," Kreth says. "I still kind of feel like I am on this journey and it is my time to pay it forward. I do feel blessed to have survived it, and I am blessed that I am healthy enough to be able to share it and I want to give back."SELF PORTRAIT Ellen Kreth

BIRTH DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH Jan. 24, 1968, Huntsville.

MY FAVORITE BOOK IS Same Kind of Different as Me, by Ron Hall and Denver Moore.

MY FAVORITE MOVIE IS Terms of Endearment.

MY FAVORITE SPOT IN ARKANSAS IS The Ozark Mountains.

MY FAVORITE SPOT OUTSIDE OF ARKANSAS IS Costa Rica.

MY FAVORITE RUNNING SHOES ARE New Balance.

MY FAVORITE COLOR IS Pink (of course).

BESIDES THE RACE, MY FAVORITE RACE FOR THE CURE ACTIVITY IS Three Miles of Men Tailgate Party. "Beer, pizza and a bunch of guys. Hello."

ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP Determined.