College Sisterhood Gives Alumna Strength to Beat Breast Cancer

When the calendar recently rolled around to September 2014 – the 25th anniversary of Hurricane Hugo and the 13th anniversary of 9/11 – College of Charleston alumna Krista Ellis Bannister ’92 thought about how those events, in different and indirect ways, shaped and reshaped her life.

Krista Ellis Bannister ’92

She thought about the hurricane and the terrorist attacks and the death and destruction they caused. She thought about the people she was with during those frightening times. Without them, she doesn’t know if she’d be alive today.

They came together more than a quarter-century ago as sorority sisters at the College of Charleston. The 10 women have remained close ever since, celebrating marriages and babies and job promotions; and comforting each other through adversity, loss and sickness.

This year, nearly a quarter of a million cases of breast cancer will be diagnosed in the United States. Like Bannister, who was diagnosed when she was only 30, some who get cancer don’t meet common risk factors and believe it won’t happen to them.

In recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October, Bannister is sharing her story to emphasize that it can happen to anyone.

RELATED: Know if you are at risk of getting breast cancer.

“Pin Order”

In the fall of 1988, Bannister was a freshman at the College of Charleston living in Buist Residence Hall, an all-female dorm at the time.

She was tall with long, flowing brown hair. She wore a perpetual smile that you might expect to see on the face of someone who had been a beauty queen and president of her high school class in Columbia, S.C. She was bubbly and social – a connector of people.

The Tri Delta Sorority juniors in 1991.

Susan Fitch Stow ’92 lived next door to Bannister on the second floor of Buist. “We became fast friends,” Stow says. “We quickly figured out that we had a lot in common and got along well. We were in each others’ rooms all the time.”

Determined to make the most of her time at the College, Bannister joined the Student Government Association as a senator, and she and Stow rushed the Tri Delta sorority. It was there, at the Tri Delta house at 35 Coming St., that Bannister and Stow became friends with several other members of their pledge class.

At their weekly meetings, the 50 pledges lined up in “pin order,” alphabetically by last name (married names in parenthesis): Travis Bowles (Dew), Elizabeth Currey, Trina Dalton (Hutchinson), Katy Dew (Amling), Christy DuBois (Falco), Krista Ellis (Bannister), Susan Fitch (Stow), and Lyndi Flint (Schilling).

“We were all alphabetically right there in the same row, and that’s how we got to know each other so well,” Stow recalls.

Two other “sisters,” whose last names fell later in the alphabet, rounded out the group: Jennie Sasser Kappel and Ricci Land Welch. Welch is now a member of the College’s Board of Trustees.

Winds of Change

With Hurricane Hugo bearing down on Charleston in September 1989, the College cancelled classes.

Bannister and three friends from the sorority packed into her Toyota Corolla and headed for the relative safety of her parents’ home in Columbia. As the storm moved inland, the girls huddled together in Bannister’s bed, feeling helpless as the wind violently shook the windows and toppled trees.

The Tri Delta House after Hurricane Hugo.

With classes at the College suspended for more than two weeks, the girls took a road trip up and down the East Coast. When they returned to Charleston, in addition to finding the city still in cleanup and recovery mode, Bannister got some bad news about one of her classes.

The daughter of a banker (mother) and an insurance agent (father), Bannister had selected business as her major. Surely, she thought, accounting was in her genes. But when she learned that her accounting instructor wouldn’t be coming back when classes resumed and that the “C” she had earned up to that point was now permanent, she was devastated.

She took the second required accounting course the next semester but struggled even more, so she dropped it and picked up a class in extreme politics with professor Bill Moore. The material and Moore’s stories fascinated her. She eventually switched her major to political science. Moore became her advisor and mentor. The two would stay in touch after Bannister graduated and up until Moore’s untimely death in 2009.

To this day, she points to Hurricane Hugo as the impetus for her change of heart.

The Real World

Political science was a better fit for Bannister’s personality and interests. After all, she’d been active in student government throughout high school and was now rising through the ranks of the SGA at the College. She was elected vice president as a junior and president her senior year.

A 1991 article about Bannister in the student newspaper, The Cougar Pause.

It was a particularly important year to be SGA president. In the fall of 1991, the Board of Trustees was searching for a new College president. It was customary for the student government president to sit on the search committee.

While she admits to being naïve about the search process, Bannister says the experience was a crash course in organizational politics. She took it in stride when other members tried to bend her ear about different candidates. She liked the excitement and prestige of being part of a group tasked with such an important decision.

“It was very insightful,” she says. “I learned as much on that search committee as I did studying for my political science degree.”

In March 1992, the board chose Alex Sanders as the next president. But by then, Bannister was focused on graduation and starting a career. Five days after she gave her speech to the graduating class in Cistern Yard, Bannister pointed her Corolla toward Washington D.C. She’d landed a job as a legislative correspondent for the Senate Judiciary Committee and hoped it would be a springboard to a career in politics.

But at the time, Washington’s penchant for scandal was on full display. Acrimony still lingered from the previous year’s Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill controversy and partisanship was rife in the wake of the Bill Clinton/George Bush/Ross Perot presidential election.

Bannister was no longer sure she had the stomach for the bare-knuckle world of Beltway politics. “I went up to D.C. with a Pollyanna outlook about the government, and left with a cynical view of some of those in power and the media.”

The silver lining to her one-year stint in the nation’s capital was that while there she met her future husband Jim, a native of Greenville, S.C. The couple moved back to South Carolina, first to Columbia and later to Greenville. He built a law career while she took a position with the Columbia Chamber of Commerce. She worked her way up to vice president of membership before leaving to start what would become a successful career in sales. They had their first child in 2000.

Some of the “sisters” on one of their annual Garden City trips.

Throughout this period, Bannister remained close with her sorority sisters, most of whom had also moved on to new cities and started careers and families. Their busy lives presented a challenge when the group planned their annual get-togethers. But they always seemed to make time for each other. For several years, they convened in Garden City, near Myrtle Beach, S.C.

“Krista is the tie that binds our group,” Welch says. “She is tireless in working to coordinate our reunions.”

Whenever they got together, it was like time had stood still; they fell into their familiar roles from college. As always, they kidded Bannister for talking a mile a minute.

The Night Everything Changed

As the fall of 2001 approached –– the 10th anniversary of the beginning of their senior year at the College –– the women made plans for a girls-only trip to New York City. It was going to be a fun-filled weekend; a breather from their busy lives back home.

Then the planes hit the Towers. New York City was in a state of emergency. The trip was off.

But the mayor of New York City was on television saying that if tourists stayed away, the terrorists had won.

“We almost didn’t go,” Bannister says. “But they were on the TV saying please come, tourism is taking a hit. So we ended up going.”

The 2001 trip to NYC when Bannister (far left) discovered the lump.

The aftermath of 9/11 hung heavy in the air on the streets of Manhattan, but the women were happy they hadn’t cancelled their trip. It was comforting to be surrounded by close friends. They reminisced about the College, took in a couple of Broadway shows and went shopping. Bannister bought a red sweater, which she wore when the girls went out on the town for their last night in the Big Apple.

That night, the girls wound up at a bar that was partially reserved for a private party. It was a birthday party organized by a group of friends who worked on Wall Street. Their celebration had been postponed from weeks earlier. They had been busy the past few weeks burying friends who died in the Twin Towers.

Bannister was wearing her new red sweater. It was sleeveless, so she kept tugging at it to make sure her bra strap wasn’t showing. That’s when she felt something round and dense under her left armpit. It felt like a pea-sized marble underneath her skin.

At first, she was scared. The characteristic smile she always wore went slack. The other women took turns feeling the lump. They made Bannister promise she’d get it checked out as soon as she got back to Greenville.

“I’m only 30,” Bannister thought. “I have no family history of breast cancer. I work out and go to a personal trainer. I just went to the doctor for my annual checkup five days ago. ”

The night was young. The Wall Street party upstairs had just broken up and soon the two groups were mingling and dancing.

“Cancer was something old people got,” Bannister told herself. “It’s probably just a swollen lymph node.”

Faith, Family and Friends

After the trip, Stow and the others were persistent. They harassed Bannister with phone calls and e-mails: “Have you gone to the doctor yet?”

Her OBGYN suspected it was a lymph node. The doctor said they should keep an eye on it but gave the all-clear for Bannister and her husband to move ahead with a planned trip to Italy for their fifth anniversary.

But the lump grew quickly to the size of an almond. After Thanksgiving, Bannister contacted her doctor and was scheduled for a mammogram that week.

“From the mammogram on November 29th to December 13th when I woke up in the recovery room and they said I had cancer, it all happened very quickly. It changed everything.”

She had a lumpectomy to remove a 1.8-centimeter tumor, which tested negative for a particular protein called HER2NU that can cause cancer cells to grow more rapidly. If that test had come back positive, she would have had a life expectancy of two years or less.

A couple weeks later, another test revealed that the cancer had spread to one of her lymph nodes. Doctors inserted a port in her chest and she was immediately scheduled for eight chemotherapy treatments and 34 radiation treatments.

Ricci Land Welch ’92 with Bannister (right) during one of her chemo treatments.

What followed over the next eight months was a blur of medical appointments, doctors, needles, medications, tests, tubes, pain and discomfort.

Bannister’s faith and positive attitude made all the difference, says Travis Bowles Dew ‘92, one of the sorority sisters and now a photographer in Charleston.

Some people battling cancer will shut the world out. Bannister let people in and drew strength from their love and support.

“Each of us played a part in making her smile, cleaning her house or planting flowers in her yard,” Dew says. “She didn’t ask for it, but she allowed it to happen, which was helpful for us to be able to do something during a time period that was so scary.”

Bannister’s friends organized themselves into one-week shifts around the chemotherapy treatments, leaving their own lives and families behind to help her through each agonizing round.

“Because they had been with me that night, I think they just felt a part of the whole process,” Bannister says. “I felt so loved. It makes me want to cry even thinking about it 13 years later.”

Soon after the chemotherapy started, Bannister’s long brown hair – a defining feature by which she had always been recognized – began falling out in clumps.

Bannister treasures this photo of her and her sorority sisters with “bald” heads.

Her friends held a “hat” party for her. At a restaurant one night, the ladies surprised Bannister by donning caps that made them all appear bald. Bannister one-upped them, whipping off her blond wig to reveal her real bald head. They stayed that way the whole night.

She underwent radiation treatments with people in their 70s and 80s. She still had a daughter in diapers.

The treatments seemed to stretch on forever but mercifully came to an end in late August 2002. Slowly, the Bannisters began putting their lives back together, knowing fully that “remission” didn’t mean cured.

Eventually her body healed and the collateral damage from the chemotherapy reversed itself. The Bannisters had their second child in 2005. Their third followed in 2007. Bannister proudly nursed both children with her one functioning breast.

When she looks at her husband and their three beautiful daughters, she can’t fathom not being around – alive — to love them. “Thank the Lord for my friends,” she says. “They were the ones that encouraged me to go to the doctor.”

As a breast cancer survivor, Bannister became something of a local celebrity in her Greenville community. Her diagnosis at such a young age, her boundless energy and her comfort in the spotlight made her an ideal ambassador to educate women about breast cancer. She worked with outreach groups and mentored other young women with the disease. She volunteered at the Komen Race for the Cure and spoke at community events and fundraisers.

So it was not surprising when in 2009 the Komen organization went looking for a new executive director to head its Upstate affiliate and tapped Bannister for the job. She took on the huge task of moving the organization’s signature 5k race to a more prominent location in downtown Greenville. She put in long, grueling workweeks to keep all the balls in the air.

But it was perhaps too much too soon. Her littlest was only 2; her husband was often in court. She served a year before stepping down. “It was a great year in the sense that we accomplished a lot. But it was a hard year on my family because I was working like a crazy person,” Bannister says.

Since then, she has come to realize that there are many ways for her to contribute to her community, remain active in the fight against breast cancer, stay healthy and still make time for family and friends. She now fills many of her days volunteering with non-profits, shuttling between kids activities and sports, church, PTA and a healing ministry.

“I’m thankful it happened to me because not many 30-year-old people face mortality and realize how precious life is. It has made me pay it forward. I just don’t get worried about the little things anymore.”

Coming Home

Her life, as it relates to the College, has come full circle.

Back when she served on the SGA, Bannister always admired the trustees and other alumni who had returned to serve their alma mater. She imagined she would one day do the same. Cancer stalled those plans. But this year, Bannister joined the Alumni Association Board of Directors.

On a recent visit to campus for a board meeting, Bannister stopped by the Tri Delta house on Coming Street. Looking up at the top of the blue house, she laughed when recalling the year she and three of her friends lived in the cramped confines of the finished attic.

Across the street, groups of young women walked between classes, talking and laughing. While it’s hard for many of them to imagine that they or one of their dearest friends could someday get cancer, it’s never too early to begin educating themselves about the disease, Bannister says.

“I know college students sometimes think they are invincible,” Bannister says. “But these young women need to be aware, need to be their own advocates with their doctors, and need to keep an eye on their bodies.”

These young women also need to look out for each other in college and beyond. As Bannister and her sorority sisters know, the best friendships endure and grow stronger through life’s ups and downs. It’s a bond that only those who share truly understand.

“You have a different relationship with these people than you do with anybody in your day-to-day life. You really grew up with these people and you became a woman around them,” Stow says. “They can’t be replaced by anybody. There’s a core there that you can’t undo.”