52-year-old Barbados native Janice Klotz never could have predicted she’d spend so many years in Indiana, far from the beach she loves. She grew up a rebellious child, she says, impatient at her mother’s orders to stay inside. “As soon as she was gone,” says Klotz, “I’m out.” Klotz would rush outside, riding her bike to the beach with neighboring kids.

After meeting her future husband, a Hoosier, while he was working in Barbados, Klotz was persuaded to move to his home state by a different kind of lure. Snow was “the whole reason I wanted to come,” she says. “I’d never seen snow before.” She says she lived in Indianapolis with him and her youngest child, Davon, from her mid-twenties until her husband died in 2010.

Klotz was planning to return to Barbados in the summer of 2023, where her oldest two children, Keishann and Damien, and most of her extended family still live. Snow had lost its appeal once “the bones start to hurt,” at which point, she says, “it’s like okay now, I’m over this.” The “suspicious” mammogram result she received from St. Margaret's Hospital Guild Diagnostic Breast Center at Eskenazi Health led to a discovery that changed her plans: she had stage 2 triple-positive breast cancer.

“When it came back that I had breast cancer, “ she says, “it was like you stop breathing.” She wasn’t the only one. Davon, her 27-year-old son who lived nearby, admitted to her after she made it through her first round of chemotherapy, “Mom, I can breathe now.”

Her oncologist, Kathy Miller, M.D., relieved Klotz by saying she’d be a longtime patient of hers. “You’re going to be an old woman,” Klotz recalls her saying.

“So yeah,” Klotz laughs, “I was excited about that.”

Breast surgeon Lisa Korff, M.D., “talked me through everything,” she says. When Korff told Klotz “all the different stuff that we could do, she kind of brought my fears a little bit down,” she says.

With the costs that accompany a cancer diagnosis, Klotz has also been thankful to the Eskenazi Health EMBRACE team, which provides support services and addresses barriers to care for oncology patients. Thania Salazar, social worker with EMBRACE, helped Klotz apply for financial assistance from nonprofit organizations that aid patients diagnosed with cancer. In addition, EMBRACE provided transportation to and from her oncology appointments, access to her prescriptions and access to food and nutritional supplements that are crucial during treatment. After learning about a new Medicaid option for breast cancer patients, Salazar called Klotz to encourage her to apply. Now Salazar is investigating ways to assist with Klotz’s rising rent.

Salazar is “awesome, she really is,” says Klotz.

Along with her cancer medical team, Klotz is a fan of Autum Sauer’s, a nurse practitioner in internal medicine at Eskenazi Health Center West 38th Street. “She finds out everything,” says Klotz, “and she tries to get me everything I need.”

Klotz was relieved to discover that only her left breast needed a mastectomy. In a follow-up procedure; led by Brett Hartman, D.O., plastic surgeon; a tissue expander that was added after the mastectomy was removed, an implant was placed, and the right breast was given a lift, she explains.

Expecting to see a “crater” on the left side of her chest when she awoke from that surgery, Klotz says she was so pleased to still see a breast there that she was “just showing everybody.”

“I couldn’t ask for better results,” Klotz adds. “I had no problems. I didn’t develop — knock on wood — infections or anything like that.”

Even Lydia Nelson, a physician assistant student on Hartman’s team, told Klotz during a post-surgery check-up that she’d forgotten Klotz just had surgery because she was healing so well.

Klotz practices her own recovery rituals. She crochets and journals. She reads frequently thanks to her mother’s early instruction, enjoying James Patterson novels, the Jack Reacher series, “anything with a lot of killing” She is also fond of her “comforting” mastectomy pillow, admitting, “I still sleep with it.”

Family support from nearby and afar keeps Klotz going. Her son Davon has been “here for everything,” she says. “If I’m not feeling good, he will stay up all night,” she says, “checking on me, just to make sure I’m okay.” She FaceTimes with her kids in Barbados regularly and often calls one of her sisters multiple times a day. That sister, her “best friend,” visited in November and her daughter, Keishann, is visiting in February.

“Everyone is so nice,” she says. “Everyone is getting me through this. I don’t really have anything negative to say.”