Jeri Millard understands the challenges that come with breast cancer, having survived it herself. Today, she operates In The Pink, a special nonprofit shop in Jacksonville Beach that offers a comprehensive supply of products and services specifically for others battling, or having survived, breast cancer. She’s also a key member of a local dragon boat club, which has a team comprised solely of breast cancer survivors. Her story is one of great challenges and great victories with the power to inspire others.
Tell me about your journey as a breast cancer survivor.
In 2000, I was diagnosed with breast cancer while we were living in Hawaii on the day my husband was retiring from the Navy.
So, we were getting ready to move to San Diego, where my husband was taking a job.
Thirty days from diagnosis, I had both breasts removed and chose to have what is called tram flap reconstruction. That’s where they remove your stomach muscles. It was a 13-hour surgery.
So, I had complications with that. The stomach would never heal. I was in bed for a year.
Five months later, once they got the wound to close, I started chemotherapy. I finished with that in April 2001.
Then, they wanted to put me on some medication, following chemotherapy. It’s called tamoxifen. I didn’t like how I felt and so I flew out to Jacksonville, which is where we knew we wanted to retire.
Flew out to Jacksonville, to Mayo Clinic. Met Dr. Edith Perez, one of the gurus of breast cancer. And she told me I did not need to stay on that medication, that there were other options that we can do.
So, I flew home and told my husband, “We’re moving to Jacksonville.” [Laughs] So, he told his employer that he needed to move for my health care.
I had kept a notebook while I was in San Diego about all the things that I thought should be provided. Like, why did I have to go over here to find a wig? And why did I have to go over to another place to find this? I thought: why couldn’t we do all this in one place?
So, I started looking for properties in Jacksonville where I could make that happen. I had this vision in my head of what is now In The Pink.
I walked into this location in Jacksonville Beach. At the time it was called Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod. It was a children’s store.
Anyway, I walked through it, and I thought: This is exactly what I want. A stand-alone location that has its own parking. It’s not in a strip mall. Where people can feel like they can just come in and not everybody’s looking at them … But, unfortunately, this house was taken.
So, I guess God sort of intervened.
Because of the surgery that I had chosen to have, when you remove your stomach muscles, something’s got to make up for it. And it was my back.
So, my back — L4, L5 — blew up. It broke into big pieces. And when a big chunk of it went into the cauda equina, I was paralyzed from the waist down.
Needless to say, I had to put the idea of having In The Pink on hold for a while, like three years.
They did major neurosurgery on me and picked the pieces out of my back and kind of put me all together again. Then I had to relearn to walk.
I was in physical therapy for three years.
You don’t know when you’re paralyzed, so I went to stand and my legs wouldn’t hold me up. And I rolled my ankle when I fell. I ripped two tendons, one in the foot and one in the leg.
A led to B led to C led to D. It just went on and on, and I thought: When does this nightmare end?
They weren’t really concerned about my ankle, even though my foot and my ankle were completely swollen, because they were more concerned about me not being paralyzed anymore.
When I did wake up from the surgery, my right leg was no longer paralyzed, but both my feet were, and my left leg has never regained the feeling that it should have. So, I have partial paralysis from it.
So, I went to physical therapy, and I kept asking them, “What about my ankle?”
I saw a physician about that. He said it would probably be a better heal if we let it heal on its own. So, they put me in one of those gigantic boots …
But as soon as I would walk on it, it would tear again. Finally, in 2008, they did surgery on my ankle, to tie those two torn ligaments to my ankle.
It was a long journey. All because of some of the choices I had made. One of the things I try to tell people when I’m working with them today is we make choices, and those are choices that we have to live with. You can never really look back and say, “Why did I do that?” Of course, we all do that in our head for a moment, but you can’t get stuck there. Because there’s nothing you can do about it.
Once I could drive again, I was driving by this property [the current location of her shop, In The Pink], and it had a “for lease” sign out front. I got so excited that I drove home — I lived in Ponte Vedra at the time —and told my husband, “That property that I want is available.”
This was 2009. The economy, the bottom had fallen out of it. It was a really bad time. A really hard time to start a business, especially one that no one had ever heard of.
I had forgotten to write down the phone number, so I looked it up on the Jacksonville tax rolls and found the property, found the owner, and called her and she said, “I already have five people who are interested in it.”
I said, “Well, could I meet you there?” Because I kept thinking: If I can tell her what I want to do in this place, maybe …
So, I did meet her up here and she loved the idea. So, In The Pink was born.
I had to apply to become a nonprofit. That took me nine months, but in the meantime, I had the shop.
There was no classification for it through the IRS. We’re the only one in the United States that does all the comprehensive things that we do as a nonprofit.
There were a lot of places you can go to get wigs. There were places you could go to get fitted for mastectomy products, but none of them that did all of it under one roof.
We have free yoga for cancer patients, all the mastectomy products, and I’m a certified fitter and so are some of my staff. We have wigs. We do compression garments, which is a really big deal nowadays. Radiation cream. You name it, we have it.
I remember being really frightened that if I opened my doors nobody would come. Well, fast forward 15 years and we have 20,000 clients.
We accept all the major insurances here at In The Pink. How the nonprofit piece works is: people come in and if they have insurance, we file their insurance for them. Because many of these items are covered by insurance.
Then, there are a lot of items that aren’t covered by insurance that we carry. Any profit that is generated stays here in Jacksonville, and when someone comes in that has a Medicaid card or has no insurance at all, then they receive the items they need for free.
That would include things like wigs, mastectomy products, post-surgical garments, those kinds of things. About 35% of our clients receive something for free.
It’s been a journey, but I have to tell you, I’m so thrilled that I opened my first location in Jacksonville Beach, because it has been a really, really supportive community.
… We are a medical facility. We fall under what’s called “durable medical.” So, because we are a medical facility, we were allowed to stay open during COVID, but we had to follow their rules.
So, we went to appointment only. That’s one of the things we kept as a result of COVID. Because we have so many clients, we can’t give everybody the time that they deserve if they don’t have an appointment.
How can people get in contact with In The Pink?
We have a website that pretty much explains it all. It’s www.jaxinthepink.com. It has a lot of links to other resources. Or they can just call here. The phone number is 904-372-0029. And our location, of course, is at 522 3rd St. North in Jacksonville Beach. We have parking behind the building and in front of the building.
Tell me about the dragon boat team.
The first three years that I was open, people kept approaching me and asking me if I had heard of dragon boat teams for breast cancer survivors. I said no and said, “I really don’t have time to do that right now, because I’m just getting my business off the ground.”
About the fourth time someone approached me about it, I said, “Maybe I need to look into this.”
This was 2011. My business was kind of settling in. So, my husband and I met with a couple that had moved up here from Miami, and she was a dragon boater with a breast cancer team at the time. She wanted a dragon boat team. So, she told me all about it, and I raised the money, and In The Pink purchased two boats. Hence, dragon boating was brought to Jacksonville.
We started with a team for breast cancer survivors. We’re called the Mammoglams.
Once it started, everybody wanted to do it — all their spouses, their friends, everyone. So, we started the Jacksonville Dragon Boat Club, and we have teams for everyone: men, women, teenagers, mixed teams, breast cancer. We keep our boats at Windward Beach Marine.
It’s been very successful.
How can people learn more?
That also has its own website, www.jacksonvilledragonboatclub.com. That website tells you what you need to know about how to join.
We practice Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and then, sometimes we have other days that we practice, depending on if we’re getting ready to go to a festival or not.
It’s an old Chinese sport. There are dragon boat clubs all over the world. And every four years, the breast cancer teams from all over the world meet.
The club is 13th in the world, and we just went to competition in Italy in September. It wasn’t just breast cancer teams. It was world championships for clubs, so our club went.
And we did quite well.
It’s a 42-foot-long canoe that has a steering person on the back with an oar and a drummer that sits on the front and faces you and keeps the cadence. The key to dragon boating is not just the paddling; it is paddling in sync.
You have 10 rows of people, and you have two in each row, a person that’s paddling left and a person that’s paddling right.
It’s a great workout. It’s really good for you. My husband is on Team USA, so he represents the United States when he goes to compete at world competitions. And he has also trained and developed quite a few Team USA paddlers.
He’s another way that people can get set up to come. His name is Marty Millard and his phone number is 904-536-3475.
It’s also a great corporate team-building experience. He does a lot of those.
And we have a lot of people who paddle just to exercise and don’t choose to ever go and compete.
What would you like to tell people faced with breast cancer?
Like I said: Never look back. There are choices you have to make whether it is: Am I going to have radiation? Am I going to have a breast removed? What am I going to do here?
You get your information. Hopefully, not from the web. … There are a lot of sites that are based on fact, but one of the worst things that people can do is scroll the internet. Because that’s not necessarily valid or good information.
Yes, you’re going to have some days when you’re depressed. Anyone who has an illness understands that. And if you have issues, tell your doctors. Even if it’s something that you’re not quite comfortable telling them. They cannot help you if they don’t know.
So, I tell people, “Be really open with your doctors. And if you don’t like your doctor, go to a different doctor.”
We have so many good facilities and doctors here in Jacksonville. We’re very lucky compared to most places. We have so many major cancer centers, and so many great doctors in this town.
I have clients from all over the world, and they come here for treatment.
If someone says, “What can I do for you?” because they really feel like they want to do something but they know there’s not much they can do, let them come over a clean your house, let them bring you that milkshake, let them come over and wash your clothes or walk your dog. Let them do something, because people really do want to help you. And those are the things they can do.
