How an OLA teacher and coach took the fight to breast cancer

The last eight days have been big for Breanna Halley and the Our Lady Academy family.

The 25-year-old girls basketball coach and Hancock native has been in the midst of fighting stage 2 breast cancer for over 10 months.

On Feb. 10, she reached a milestone when she underwent her last radiation treatment.

Four days later, her peers named her the Region 8-2A Coach of the Year. It was a second bit of good news in what she hopes will be the start of a positive trend.

Halley originally discovered a golf ball-sized lump after going running. Twenty-two days before her 25th birthday in May, she was diagnosed with cancer.

Since then, Halley has undergone 17 rounds of chemotherapy, a double mastectomy in November, had seven lymph nodes removed and then endured another 34 treatments of radiation.

She could have taken upward of six weeks off from work after the double mastectomy, but the daughter of Pass Christian coach Greta Ainsworth missed just two games and was back in the classroom and on the court in no time.

Halley compared the radiation treatments to getting an MRI. They would leave her blistered with what she equated to really bad sun burns. The battery of treatments also zapped her energy. Still, she would leave her house before 7 a.m., drive to Gulfport daily for treatment, turn around and head back to Bay St. Louis to teach anatomy, physiology, physical science and seventh-grade science, and then coach.

The kids, Halley said, motivated her to return early.

“It would have been easier to take a couple weeks off — they tried to talk me into it — but I just couldn’t do it,” she said Friday afternoon. “That’s really what it was. I was planning on taking off four weeks, but they wanted me back. It was nice. It keeps me distracted, not thinking about it, and feeling normal.”

Halley pushed through practices and games, almost trying to hide her symptoms from her athletes. But kids are more receptive than many adults give them credit for..

“Sometimes they’d be like, ‘you need to go home,’” Halley said. “They were very responsible — especially for their age, which is something you don’t see a lot.

“(They would say) ‘Don’t over do this,’ or, ‘We got this,’ and I’d be like, ‘OK, girls, who’s the adult here? Me. Ok.’ It was pretty funny.”

During the last 10 months, Halley saw her students develop an empathy for what she was going through.

“They’d go to complain about something, look at me and realize that complaint is not as bad as they thought it was. The small things didn’t bother them as much,” she said. “It was awesome because as a teacher you love seeing that light bulb go off. Sometimes I wouldn’t even say anything and you could see them taking it all in.”

Standing in her empty classroom at OLA on Friday afternoon, Halley opened an over-sized card and marveled. She never told her kids when her last radiation treatment was, but they knew. When she arrived at school, she was presented with the white card with a pink ribbon drawn on the front, filled with signatures and well wishes.

Coach of the Year

When Halley received the Region 8-2A honor Tuesday, she said she was completely caught off guard. She hadn’t been to the region meeting late last week because of her last radiation treatment, so she missed the voting. While she may have been surprised, her husband, Zach, was not.

Zach posted a heartfelt message on Facebook shortly after Breanna received the award.

“... Those of you that know her know how strong she is and this is proof of that,” it said. “She could have easily given up her coaching duties this year, but to her that wasn’t even an option. There’s some days when she shouldn’t have left the bed, but she’d leave for radiation at 645, teach until 330, and not get home until after most folks have eaten dinner. Then she’d do it again the next day. She was coaching a game 12 hrs before she had a double mastectomy and was back on the court in just a few days. I promise you that there’s no one that puts more into their job than her. She earned this award and so much more.”

Halley credits her family for helping her to get through everything and balancing as normal of a life as possible.

From her husband getting her up and going in the morning to her sister and father driving her to treatments and her mom, well, being a mom, everyone has pitched in.

“There’s no way I could have done it without them,” Halley said. “None. No way.”

What’s next?

Now the Halley family waits.

Halley took a genetics test Friday, which will tell her a lot, but she’ll have to wait about six weeks for the radiation to be out of her body to go in for another screening.

Halley’s doctors are “pretty optimistic” her treatments did the trick, but they won’t be able to say for sure until that screening.

It’s then that she’s hoping to hear three magical words; words she’s been waiting for since May: You’re in remission.

“It’s finally like a light at the end of the tunnel is near,” Halley said. “... Those will be the best words. Ever.”

This story was originally published February 18, 2017 at 12:00 AM with the headline "How an OLA teacher and coach took the fight to breast cancer."