Science writer and Nanticoke native grateful for early detection

Science writer and Nanticoke native Ann Jenkins has a message for women.

“Please get your mammogram,” she said in a telephone interview from Maryland, where she lives and works. “Mine saved my life.”

Jenkins, 52, had surgery for breast cancer last month and will follow up with radiation and hormone therapy.

“The prognosis is good, because it was found early,” she said, adding she is grateful for the technology that made it possible for her stage 0 cancer to be found before it had even spread to her lymph nodes.

Jenkins has been a fan of technology, especially the space program, since childhood, and says she has a scar on her chin to prove it.

“When I was 5 years old, in 1970, during the heat of the ‘space race,’ Apollo 13 was in orbit, and it looked like it wasn’t going to get home safely. I was waiting for the capsule to splash down, and there was a long communications blackout while it was reentering the atmosphere. I was sure they were dead.

“Finally, the capsule came hurtling through the sky and splashed down safely in the ocean.”

Little Ann jumped up in excitement, slipped on a throw rug and cut her chin, which started bleeding onto the floor. She needed stitches, and eventually received six, but insisted on watching more of the news report first.

“I wanted to wait until they popped the hatch before I went to the hospital,” she said.

Jenkins wanted to be an astronaut herself until she realized, somewhere in her early teens, that she had more talent for writing than for physics and math. After studying mass communications and English at King’s College, she earned a master’s degree in journalism with concentrations in sociology and public relations from the University of Maryland.

In 1988, she started working at NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where she became a full-time writer on the Hubble project in January 1994.

That job led to an unusual coincidence.

At the time, technology that was developed for the Hubble space telescope to probe deep space led to technology that could probe the depths of the human breast. Jenkins wrote a press release about how women who underwent stereotactic biopsies with low-radiation mammograms to pinpoint a suspicious location in a breast would go home with just a nick in their skin instead of invasive surgery.

Working on a video to follow-up the press release, she went to the University of Maryland Hospital, one of the few places that had the equipment, “and they said, ‘Too bad we don’t have a ‘patient’” to demonstrate the use of the machine.

“I said ‘I can be the patient,’ ” Jenkins said, explaining how she went through the motions of having a stereotactic breast biopsy.

“They put the needle up to my breast but didn’t puncture me and I thought, ‘Oh, God, I hope I never need this.’ Now all these years later, I’m actually benefiting from this.”

Jenkins would have gone home to recover from the little nick if the suspicious area had been benign, but it did show signs of cancer — stage 0 cancer, but cancer nonetheless. So she had further surgery and scheduled radiation treatments.

It was helpful to return to work nine days after her surgery, said Jenkins, who is still writing about the Hubble space telescope, now as a senior science writer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “I love my job,” she said. Though she felt tired physically, she explained, “Emotionally, it’s good to get back into the swing of things.”

Her emotions have run a gamut over the past few weeks, she said.

“At first I didn’t believe it. Then I was angry. Then I was resolute. I’ve got to tell people about early detection.”

Mostly, Jenkins feels grateful that her routine mammogram found the cancer.

“It was so small and deep, it would not have been found in a self-exam for years,” she said. “By then, God knows what it would have become.”

As a science writer for NASA in the 1990s, Nanticoke native Ann Jenkins wrote about technology that was developed for the Hubble space telescope and became useful in breast biopsies. She’s still a science writer, now at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and is grateful for the technology that detected her breast cancer early.

Nanticoke native and science writer Ann Jenkins, who is grateful that her breast cancer was found at an early stage, urges women not to postpone their mammograms.