By Bev Parker

The prospect of a fifth round of chemotherapy filled Martha Haley with such horror that she was ready to give up.

“I was really having a hard time,” recalled the 44-year-old Chicago native. “I was so sick and I felt like I wasn’t getting any better. I didn’t know where to turn.”

A friend told her about a unique breast cancer hotline and encouraged her to call.

Haley made the call and it changed her life, as it has for thousands of other breast cancer patients.

“All the woman on the other end of the line said was ‘Hi, my name is Joan,’ and I started crying my eyes out,” recalled Haley, who has been a hotline volunteer since 1997. “It just meant so much to know that someone was listening.”

Founded in 1978 by breast cancer survivors Ann Marcou and Mimi Kaplan, the Y-ME National Breast Cancer Organization has always operated a telephone hotline. More than a quarter century later, Y-ME boasts the only 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week breast cancer hotline in the country, staffed entirely by breast cancer survivors.

From the days when Marcou and Kaplan answered phone calls by themselves at a kitchen table, the Y-ME hotline has grown to a 20-person operation, that fields about 30,000 calls a year, from across the country.

Y-ME is now even making plans to expand its hotline’s capacity and conduct an outreach campaign to many areas of the country where breast cancer patients don’t know about the service.

What won’t change, however, is that the people taking the phone calls on the Y-ME hotline are all breast cancer survivors.

“Many of the women calling in are newly diagnosed and it’s very important that they talk to someone who is still alive with their breast cancer years later,” said Bev Parker, director of the national hotline, who at 59, is a 19-year breast cancer survivor. “We are all survivors and nobody understands what breast cancer is like more than a survivor.”

Parker said that she was “awestruck” when she called the hotline after first being diagnosed. “It made me think that I had the chance to survive too,” she recalled. “I thought that if she can do it, so can I.”

Like a lot of women who call the hotline, Parker was so moved by the experience and by the help she received that she wanted to volunteer to take calls.

“I wanted to start right away, but they advised me to finish my chemo and my other treatments so I wouldn’t be so emotionally involved,” said Parker with a small chuckle.

Breast cancer patients call the hotline for any number of reasons: to discuss medical treatments and personal relationships, breast reconstruction and hair loss from chemotherapy, medical coverage and how to cope with the disease when the caller has small children.

Mainly, though, they just call because they are sad, or scared, or lonely, Often, all three.

“I remember talking to a 32-year-old woman who had a couple of children and who was in the advanced stage, said Parker. “She was crying a lot because she feared that she wouldn’t be a part of her children’s lives.”

Many of the women are repeat callers and Y-ME often forms buddy systems with callers and checks in with them.

Sometimes it’s the ones who don’t call back that stick in the counselors’ minds.

“I still think of one woman who called in about 10 years ago and told me that she was finally responding to a drug she was taking,” said Parker. “The woman was raised in Michigan near where I was. I always wondered what happened to her.”

The telephone counselors embody a wide variety of personal histories and callers sometimes ask to speak to someone of their own ethnic background or religion.

“Many of us are single heads of households and callers sometimes need to ask how to cope with that,” said Ethel Nettlesbey, who is African-American and has been taking calls for about 20 years.

Luisa Martinez, who has been taking calls for six years, said that she has sometimes given counsel to religious Latinas who are embarrassed to have a breast exam from a male doctor.

“A lot of Spanish speaking women who are new to the country will also call asking me for advice on how to pay for a doctor or for medicine,” said Martinez.

Y-ME counselors will talk about virtually any topic, but will not give medical advice, short of suggesting that a caller may want to get a second opinion on a diagnosis. They also shy away from discussing religion, but will sometimes do so if the caller raises the topic.

Many of the counselors say that they have come to see their colleagues — and the callers — as their extended families.

“I could never stop doing this, never,” said Martha Haley, who actually prefers the tougher night shift when cancer patients are often feeling most lonely and vulnerable.

Though she is dealing with her third recurrence of cancer and describes herself as having a “bad prognosis,” Haley spends 10-15 hours a week on the hotline — the calls patched through to her home where she talks to callers from her kitchen or living room.

“I want people to understand about dying,” she said. “I want people to know that I am a fighter and that they should be too.”

She paused for a long moment and then added in a whisper, “if I knew that I wasn’t going to be here tomorrow, I would still want to be on the telephone line tonight.”