ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
Many breast cancer survival stories involve years of battle with the disease before victory comes.
For Angie Eatmon, the story has been considerably shorter, but it still involved many hospital visits before she overcame her cancer.
A lifelong resident of Liberal, Eatmon’s cancer journey began with a diagnosis in the summer of 2020
“In July, I did my biopsy,” she said. “I actually discovered the lump myself. It was funny how I discovered it. I was eating a snack and as I was cleaning up the crumbs, I felt something, and I remember thinking ‘That’s weird.’ I never had felt it before that day. I thought that was kind of strange.”
Upon feeling the lump, Eatmon’s thoughts turned to getting a checkup.
“I wasn’t worried at all,” she said. “I never was worried. I went to the doctor, and they said, ‘You probably need to get it checked. You get regular mammograms. You had one last year that was fine, but just check.’ I went, got the mammogram, and the lady who did it said ‘Hang on, I’m going to have them look at this.’”
Eatmon had many previous experiences with hospitals, and the knowledge she had gained from those experiences told her not to expect immediate results. However, this time, the results came back fast.
“She came back, and she said ‘They want to do a biopsy,’” she said. “I’m thinking in a couple weeks, I’m going to do a biopsy. So I asked ‘When do they want to do it?’ and she said ‘Right now.’”
The doctor, Eatmon said, performed her biopsy, and even though the doctor was not an oncologist, upon seeing the mammogram, believed she had cancer. Despite the news, Eatmon said she was still in a positive frame of mind at this point.
“I was already rebuking that,” she said. “I was thinking ‘It’s not cancer, don’t say that.’ I did the test, went home, didn’t lose any sleep, didn’t cry, wasn’t stressed. It was business as usual. They called me about two weeks later, and my doctor said ‘Can you run up here real quick?’”
Eatmon was then advised to return to the hospital, but medical workers would not tell her why, only telling to grab her husband, Isaac, to come with her. Because of that, she said she felt her condition would be less than fine, but being a faithful Christian, she still believed everything was okay.
“We go in the room, and she sits us down,” she said. “She passes me the report, and I’m looking at it. I’m not a doctor. I’m reading it. It’s not making any sense to me because it’s all medical terminology.”
As she was told the news of her cancer, Eatmon said the medical provider teared up, but she continued to refuse the diagnosis. She did say, though, all she needed was a plan in place before she could accept the news.
“I was thinking ‘If you tell me you’re doing this, this and this, then all right, let’s go,’” she said. “I asked ‘What are we going to do?’ She said, ‘I’m going to get you to KU Med in Kansas City, and they’ll get you taken care of.’”
So in September 2020, Eatmon received a double mastectomy after consulting with a team of four doctors.
“I had the chemotherapy doctor,” she said. “I had the radiation doctor. I had the surgical team for the reconstruction. The surgical team is also who did my mastectomy. They gave me options. I could’ve done nothing at all. They told me I could do a lumpectomy. I could do a single mastectomy. I could do a double mastectomy.”
Because cancer could still develop in one of the original breasts, Eatmon opted for a double mastectomy after consulting with Isaac, who advised her to do what she needed to do.
“I told him what I decided, and we scheduled the surgery,” she said. “I had the surgery, and I went back the following week for my followup. Some of the skin was dying, so she told me, ‘We’re going to have to go back in and have a second surgery.’”
At this time, Eatmon had expanders placed in her chest to stretch the skin, and she said this also flattens the chest, something that must be done prior to reconstruction. She would have to return to Kansas City every six weeks to fill the expanders.
Eatmon would later have flap surgery to remove stomach fat to reconstruct her breasts, which she said had many advantages.
“I get to lose the stomach fat I don’t like and repurpose it for something that’s beneficial to me,” she said. “That was a 12-hour surgery.”
In addition to the medical expenses of the situation, Eatmon also had to deal with the costs of traveling from Liberal to Kansas City multiple times, but she said those costs were lessened by being able to stay with a friend in Kansas City throughout her ordeal.
Following the surgery, Eatmon went back for her one-week checkup, with skin still not healing, and doctors would have to do another revision. Upon receiving another series of lab tests, she was told she had an infection, which led to another surgery, the third in two and a half weeks.
“It was wild,” she said. “I had just gotten out of the hospital. We had gotten back to the house, and they called me. That’s when she told me ‘You need to come back. We have to take you back into surgery.’”
After each surgery, Eatmon spent time in the Intensive Care Unit before returning to her friend’s house when more health issues happened.
“I was resting, but I woke up the next day after being dismissed and it hurt to breathe,” Eatmon said. “I could breathe, but it was painful. I just had surgery again. It’s my third surgery in so many weeks. I thought maybe I had slept wrong.”
After calling the hospital, Eatmon told medical workers about the breathing difficulty, and she was advised to get to the emergency room as soon as possible. She said, though, the ER in urban Kansas City is quite different than those in rural areas such as Liberal.
“Here, it’s very busy, but it’s not gunshot victim, stabbing victim,” she said. “We go there the first time, and we were there nine hours. They take me back. They do all the tests. They come back in, and they told me ‘You have blood clots in your lungs.’”
Despite the difficulty of her journey, Eatmon would only find herself crying twice – when she had to tell her sons about the cancer and when she was told she had blood clots.
“Up until then, I had never known anybody who survived,” she said. “I’d always heard these stories of they had surgery then they died, and they found out later after they died that they had blood clots. I had never heard they had blood clots, they took medicine, and then they got better.”
This was also the first time Eatmon found herself scared during her ordeal.
“I didn’t think I was going to make it out,” she said. “I was back in the hospital. They get me better. The blood clots are gone. I stayed there four days. I get out again, go back to my friend’s house.”
Eatmon would again awake the next day feeling the same way.
“I call the doctor again, and she’s like ‘Get to the emergency room,’” she said. “This is deja vu.”
Eatmon would likewise wait another nine hours, a time in which she developed a severe concern about her condition.
“I was thinking ‘What if I’m just sitting literally dying while I’m waiting for my turn?’” she said. “At this point, I’m calling my doctor and my friend’s calling the doctor.”
In this visit to the ER, Eatmon received good news in that she no longer had blood clots, but she did have fluid around her heart, and she would see a cardiologist for this condition. This left her asking what it means to have fluid around the heart, and she explained what the doctor told her about this.
“Everybody has fluid around their heart,” she said. “I happened to have too much. I don’t know why. I’m not worried about it, but the doctors had to check with the oncologist.”
Eatmon was told she would have a needle used to drain fluid from her heart, and the fluid would be sent to the lab for testing. At this point, she was not stressed out, but similar feelings came after a nurse told her she would be mildly sedated during the treatment.
“You mean to tell me this guy’s going to take a needle this long and stick it into my heart and drain fluid, and I’m going to be awake,” she said. “She told me ‘You won’t remember it.’ The fact they asked me if I had any favorite music and the fact they put it on and I was able to sing along to the music. I literally told them, ‘Never again.’ Then I waited for the testing to come back.”
As she recovered from the latest surgery, Eatmon said doctors were hopeful she would not need chemo, and she said her mindset told her the same. She was later told she did not need chemo, but it would still be in her best interests.
Eatmon’s breast cancer journey began at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in addition to everything else, she had to be tested for COVID six times. She had tested positive a few times, and doctors finally had to place a port in her chest to start chemo. She received six bi-weekly treatments with one chemo drug and 12 weekly treatments of another.
Many breast cancer patients upon receiving chemo lose their hair, but rather than lose it naturally, Eatmon chose to shave her head.
“We filmed it,” she said. “It’s funny because literally, you would’ve thought we were having a celebration. We shaved it, and as time progressed, I was eventually completely bald, no eyebrows. I had no hair on my head.”
Eatmon would never wear a wig, but she did don a ball cap and other head gear at times.
“I remember thinking ‘This is the season I’m in,’” she said. “I knew I wanted to go through it with grace and with my faith. The hardest part for me was I lost my dad to COVID. I got diagnosed in August 2020, and I was going through chemo in 2021. I lost my dad in December 2021.”
Eatmon would receive a 10th surgery in order to allow doctors to clean out the remainders of what was left from her cancer.
“I had another surgery to do some fat grafting to make things symmetrical,” she said. “When they move fat from one part of the body to another, sometimes, it’ll absorb into your body. My body absorbed some of the fat, so they needed to put more fat in there. I did that and recovered.”
In May 2025, Eatmon had been in remission from cancer for four years, and though doctors typically wait until five years to declare a patient cancer free, Eatmon said she has considered herself cancer-free since she finished her treatment.
“Next May, it’ll be five years,” she said. “I can see the finish line for sure. With the chemo, I did great. I wasn’t sick. I was tired. It gave me really bad headaches. I tolerated it very well.”
Eatmon said she feels she has blessed after what she has gone through on her cancer journey.
“I shouldn’t be here because of the cancer, the blood clots, my heart,” she said. “With everything, I see God’s hand in every step of that.”
Eatmon said Isaac and the rest of her family were very supportive through the ordeal.
“First day of chemo, my husband and my sister went,” she said. “I had several friends bring me care packages. It made the whole thing easier than what it seemed to be.”
Eatmon finished her chemo treatments on her birthday, and she celebrated with friends and family that night.
“I actually finished my chemo treatments on my birthday,” she said. “We had a really good celebration that night. I felt amazing, but honestly, I felt cancer free the whole time. I knew even through all the surgeries and all the complications and all the setbacks, I knew at the very end, I was going to be cancer free regardless. God gave me that peace of knowing you might have a setback, you might have some complications, but in the very end, you’re going to be fine.”
While she is grateful to have survived her cancer journey, Eatmon said she would still have been happy even she had not.
“There’s nothing to be sad about because at the end of the day, even if things didn’t go my way, they still would’ve gone my way,” she said.
