Feel good Story of the Brotherhood/Sisterhood in the Fire Service

Climbing for `a tough chick’: – Colleagues of firefighter with breast cancer will help her make stairclimb for leukemia research
2006-03-05
by Mary Swift
Journal Reporter

She’s 41 and battling breast cancer for a second time.

Even so, not much reduces Bellevue firefighter Camari Ferguson to tears — not much until she starts to talk about how others are reaching out to help her.

Then, her voice breaks and she chokes back tears, struggling with emotion.

“I just blows my mind,” she says. “I’m very lucky.”

She was 33 the first time she battled breast cancer. Last November, eight years after her previous cancer, she found another lump in the same breast.

Doctors tell her it is not a reoccurrence of her previous cancer, but a different — and rare — form of the disease.

Go figure, says Ferguson, who has no history of breast cancer in her family.

She was on duty at Bellevue’s Station 2 when she got the news shortly after Thanksgiving.

She called her husband, Brian, a member of the Kirkland Fire Department. Co-workers gathered around to give her hugs.

She and Brian, who met while both were in the military, share their south Everett home with three cats, the oldest now 20. The couple has been together 20 years and married 15. They enjoy an active outdoor lifestyle that includes scuba diving, rock climbing and skiing.

“How I get to do things is say, `Oh yeah, you’re not tough enough,”’ Brian says with a laugh. He became a firefighter five years ago. Camari, a former prostate researcher, followed suit two years later.

Before she had surgery in late December, the couple threw a “boob” party for friends. (Read More)