FITZGERALD — Debbie Hamlin took her seat at Tonya Griffin’s station at Les’s Beauty Salon in Fitzgerald. Griffin whipped a zebra print smock over her and snapped it together behind Hamlin’s neck. She has been getting her hair cut here for around 15 years now. She used to have hair far down her back, but relented to shortening it to a more manageable shoulder length until the day she had to shave it all off.

It was the chemotherapy. First it was just a few strands, but soon it was clumps coming out. Hamlin called Griffin, her stylist for the majority of those 15 years. She wanted it all shaved off and she wanted Griffin to do it.

Stylists are supposed to make people feel beautiful. Griffin’s career was in boosting confidence.

“Everybody comes to me to feel pretty about themselves, whether they want a new hairstyle or they want something they can be proud of,” said Griffin. “I was glad to be able to do something for her that she couldn’t do herself, but at the same time I didn’t want a reaction that was going to be negative for her. And with her personality, it wasn’t. I was probably the one crying.”

The day came and Hamlin pulled out her phone and began broadcasting it live on Facebook. She said she was turning it into an event. Hamlin said by sharing it, laughing about it, she was able to control her experience.

“But yeah, it was rough for Tonya. I felt pretty bad,” Hamlin joked. “But having her do it was […] very comforting- to have someone I love and adore there to take care of those things, it made it an event and not a tragedy.”

“I appreciate that I could do something for her because you don’t know what to do in times like that,” said Griffin.

“I still don’t understand the ‘I’m brave,’” Hamlin said. “I had cancer and I lived.”

“I think it’s a lot easier to be the person with cancer than it is to be the people around dealing with it.”

“It was harder on me to shave her head, than her to get her head shaved,” said Griffin.

“It was! She had a hard time and I was laughing,” said Hamlin.

Getting her head shaved was one of the many pivotal moments of her breast cancer experience. One of the many that made her realize — this is real. The cancer is real. She kept sharing her thoughts, jokes and feelings by posting photos and live videos during chemo. After her mastectomy and after reconstruction she talked about it online, publicly.

She wasn’t going to fight breast cancer alone.

It started when Hamlin switched doctors and found herself being forced to get a mammogram. A nurse told her they wouldn’t accept new patients who didn’t get the exam.

Hamlin found out later that it wasn’t true, but one nurse’s white lie got Hamlin to undergo the checkup.

She didn’t do self-exams. She hadn’t had a mammogram in two or more years. They discovered a tumor the size of a chicken nugget. For a woman who made her journey public and filled with laughter, she didn’t laugh at the size of her tumor, or the comparison to a chicken nugget.

In retrospect, she would have done self-exams and gotten mammograms more regularly.

“That’s how I ended up with a chicken nugget in my breast,” Hamlin said. “There’s no reason it should have gotten to that size. That one’s on me.”

After finding out the tumor was cancerous she asked the doctor, “If this was your child what would you do?”

A mastectomy was recommended. She had it done. Every step was “textbook.”

While undergoing surgery, Brian Morris filled in for her as choral director at Ben Hill Middle School. She called it a “master class.” But there was a day she was able to come back to the halls of BHMS before starting chemotherapy.

She considered wearing “the fake one,” a prosthetic breast for aesthetics, but she thought it was a pain. She knew the difference would be obvious.

 “I came back full unicorn to school,” she said.

Because of where she is located in the school, nearly every student passed by her in the hall, and the day she came back “full unicorn” was no different.

“It was a dramatic difference between the unicorn and non-unicorn. And I was so incredibly surprised – not a single child, not a single child at the school said anything negative, at all.”

Even when she announced her diagnosis to her students she was impressed. She encouraged them to ask questions, to talk about it. She said “they asked very politely and with great respect.”

“I believe very much in asking questions and answering them,” Hamlin said. “So, I answered.”

Her daughter is in college but managed to get a summer off during Hamlin’s treatment. Her husband was “wonderful.” She found a support group on Facebook where she could ask questions and hear from others going through treatments, and from those who had survived. Now she gets to be the one answering questions.

By sharing her experience publicly online, in groups and on her personal page, she was able to relate her experience and keep everyone updated.

“By sharing it with other people, it let other people who maybe were going through it realize they’re not alone,” Hamlin said. “You have to get advice from somewhere and you can’t do that if people are quiet. So I decided to talk about it.”

She learned that talking about hard experiences gives her power. The more she talks about it, and the more she laughs about it, the more powerful and in control she feels.

“I am a survivor of sexual abuse, and the way it helped me get through that was somebody talking to me about that,” she said. “And so I now speak out about that and I find that it gives me power over it. […] By keeping quiet about it, I find that things usually fester for me. By talking about it, it gives me power over it. It becomes then, ‘Oh yeah, I have cancer’ instead of ‘Cancer has me.’”

She said cancer was “almost ridiculous, Harry-Potter-ridiculous-curse.” She joked about her new hair care routine, where instead of a brush she was using a lint roller to de-fuzz her buzz cut.

She had community online to laugh with her, but she also had a family that was healing together. Her mother had ovarian cancer at the same time.  It was found on accident when she went to the doctor for x-rays and the machine was misaligned over her abdomen. It was there that they saw a “belly full of tumors.”

“I think it was a miracle,” said Hamlin.

This gave them a unique shared perspective. They were a mother and daughter both fighting for life, but having to recognize death as a possibility. Death was the subject they both wanted to discuss, but for the people around them, it can be hard to hear. They were able to confide in each other.

“When people have cancer one thing they usually want to talk about is death,” said Hamlin. “Because it’s a possibility and nobody wants to talk about that. But you have to think about it. So my mother and I were able to talk about death.”

“It allowed me to be a comfort to her and allowed her to be a comfort to me in a way that nobody else could,” she added. “Which was nice.”

Her mother, too, had to have her head shaved. Hamlin was the one who did it. Her sister and niece also attended. They gathered outside. They made it fun and they laughed together.

“Some of the hair went away and we were talking about, ‘Yay, it’s going to be in a bird’s nest. We’re creating life.’” She laughed. “And it became this wonderful event.”

“I believe that God heals through medicine, miracles and death,” said Hamlin. She prayed for a miracle or the medicine or both to heal her and her mother. But that’s not what happened.

“Mine was healed through medicine,” Hamlin said. “Her’s was for a long time and then death. She’s fine now. My mama is good.”

Ultimately she feels that being able to share that time with her mother was a blessing, one that few get to experience or can even understand.

Through surgeries, treatments and hair loss, confidence can be hard to master. For a woman who refused to wear a prosthetic, it might be a surprise to know even Hamlin doubted herself.

“Oddly enough, I did struggle [with confidence] and that disappointed me in me.”

She explained that having cancer didn’t change who she was. She had to focus on what mattered. Her hair would grow back. She had a supportive husband, family and community. She wasn’t dead.

“I had so much support around me – it was very comforting. Also the fact that part of my reconstruction process, for symmetry, was a reduction and lift of my other breast. So I thought, ‘Yay! I get young breasts again.’” Griffin and Hamlin laughed again.

For women who struggle with confidence during treatment and even after, Hamlin recommends they focus on the big picture.

 “The hair grows back,” said Hamlin “There are implants. There are fake breasts. The big thing is: you got life. That’s more beautiful than anything else. And anybody who can’t see that in you – you don’t need them in your life. You need to get the people who can’t see that beauty in you out of your life. So it may actually help to cull the herd.”

Everyone around her, online and off, helped her even if they felt like there was nothing they could do.

“But there was so much they did,” Hamlin said. “She shaved my head for me and I couldn’t do that. My husband made sure I had meals. People did things. Brian Morris was there to substitute. People did things. And that was wonderful.”

Her doctor’s advice, surgeries and chemotherapy went “without a hitch.” Everything, she said, worked out perfectly. Or as she put it: “Bad news: you’ve got cancer. Good news: everything else.”

In a few weeks, Hamlin will go to her two year checkup appointment. If she can make it to five years, she’s “home free.” The two year point is when the cancer is most likely to return.

“If it comes back we fight it,” she said.

To anyone going through what Hamlin has, she said, “It’s okay, breathe. It’s okay. We’re here. We’ll take you through this. Talk to us. Talk to other people. And it will be okay.”

“Now let’s go kick some cancer butt.”