Transcription of Love Maine Radio #332: Matty Oates and Jessica Jordan
Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Topsham. Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com.
Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 332. Airing for the first time on Sunday, January 28, 2018. Today’s guests are Matty Oates, former program director of Tall Ships Portland and young breast cancer survivor Jessica Jordan, this year’s top fundraiser for Tri for a Cure. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 1: Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is the city’s largest and is located in the heart of the Old Port at 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the work of contemporary Maine artists and hosts a series of monthly solo shows in its newly expanded space including Ingunn Joergensen, Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy, and Dave Allen. For complete show details please visit our website at artcollectormaine.com.
Lisa Belisle: Matty Oates is the former program director for Tall Ships Portland and he currently works as media manager at Shipyard Brewing Company. He and his brother also host a podcast called Bach to Bock in which they discuss both classical music and beer. Thanks for coming in.
Matty Oates: Thank you. Happy New Year.
Lisa Belisle: Thank you. So did I pronounce this correctly, Bach to Bocks. It’s B-A-C-H and then B-O-C-K.
Matty Oates: Bach to Bock, yeah. It’s seen a lot of variations over the years. Bach being Johann Sebastian Bach the composer and then B-O-C-K, Bock is a type of German beer. We thought we were pretty clever when we came up with that name. There was beer involved in creating that name as well so it came out pretty well.
Lisa Belisle: How long have you been doing this podcast.
Matty Oates: We just hit two years. We’ve gone through a little bit of a lull at the moment just because both of us lead fairly busy lives. Getting content out there’s been a bit tough recently. But it’s always a lot of fun. We’ve had a lot of great chances to interact with the local music community and both beer and classical music community around the country as well through phone interviews or visiting musicians. It’s been great.
Lisa Belisle: Is this becoming more popular? Beer and classical music?
Matty Oates: From our very biased perspective I’d like to think so. There’s a great organization of talent run by the PSO called Symphony in Spirits. Takes young folks from 21 to 39 and rotates through different local watering holes before PSO concerts. There’s either a beer or a cocktail designed specifically for the program coming up. For 25 bucks it’s a chance for young people to mingle, learn a little bit about the program before they all they just walk down to Merrill Auditorium and get to see an amazing performance. All in all the scene’s coming up slowly but it’s coming up.
Lisa Belisle: I remember interviewing Emily Isaacson and she had beer happening on beach blankets in the summertime and at the bowling alley and she’s really trying to bring this back to into the more popular vernacular.
Matty Oates: Yeah. Why not? We’ve created this mystique around classical music that you need to sit in a seat and be completely docile and quiet and we love the idea that if you really appreciate, just like a jazz musician, a solo finishes, it shouldn’t be taboo to express that in some way, shape or form. There used to be beer concert halls, why can’t there just be beer again? We think it’s a good combo it breeds, in moderation it breeds a really good time, a really good night out.
Lisa Belisle: Do you still play the violin.
Matty Oates: Absolutely. I still teach a bit as well. Kevin and I both, my brother Kevin Oates, both started quite young. I saw Elmo playing on Sesame Street with Itzhak Perlman the great violinist when I was three. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. So after pestering my parents weeks in weeks out, I finally started taking around four years old and now it’s just a great release. It’s like an old friend. But Kevin’s taken it to a much more professional degree whereas I keep it on the back burner.
Lisa Belisle: He’s working with the Maine Youth Rock Orchestra and also the Maine Academy of Modern Music is that right?
Matty Oates: He did in the past but Kev’s now out on his own as the Maine Youth Rock Orchestra is its own nonprofit entering their, they’ve just past their third year. They’ve just released a documentary as well about their tour that they took. The Maine Youth Rock Orchestra for those who don’t know, it’s a chance for students 12 to 18 to take their classical instrument or their orchestral instruments and play with visiting rock bands. They’ve played with Spencer Albee, they’ve played with what’s him name? They’ve played with Guster this past year at Thompson’s Point. Gregory Alan Isakov, lot of great names. It’s a chance for kids to realize that their instruments aren’t just to be relegated to the formal concert hall but they can take it and they can use it in every way, shape and form in every genre of music out there. It’s a really wonderful nonprofit. People should check it out.
Lisa Belisle: So you’re actually now doing the media for your brother.
Matty Oates: Oh no.
Lisa Belisle: I was just kidding. I was just kidding. Just putting that nice plug in. He’s appreciative of that, the sibling love that you were giving him.
Matty Oates: Oh go yeah. No absolutely. He’s the reason I moved here to Maine. I was out overseas for a very long time and I just saw him doing really amazing things here with MYRO and I saw a chance to come back to the US and he was the reason. And hence Portland. And I got to see him build this thing from nothing to a really successful nonprofit.
Lisa Belisle: Where did you grow up?
Matty Oates: Albany New York. It’s on the way to everywhere but there’s a lot of people from upstate New York that have come up to Portland. I don’t know what that says about both places but we grew up on a farm in Albany New York and we used to come up to Ogunquit. Our grandparents had a cottage there since the 40s so from the earliest age we were just running on Ogunquit Beach. And then the early 90s when it blew up and Route 1 became a parking lot and so Kev went to school at USM Gorham and he came back then afterwards and then I followed so we’ve always had this love affair with Maine.
Lisa Belisle: What were you doing in Europe?
Matty Oates: I was racing classic yachts. We were based out of the south of France. Yeah, it was the greatest job of all. It was 1911 big boat classic called Mariquita. There was only four made back in the day. It’s the equivalent of the America’s Cup boats of today. It was based out of the south of France and we would spend the summers racing around the Mediterranean and hitting up all through the Rivieras and the Balearics and and then the winter we would just take care of this boat which needed an amazing amount of work. And just traveling and exploring. It was fantastic.
Lisa Belisle: I’m trying to remember my geography but I don’t think that Albany has a lot of ocean around it.
Matty Oates: It does not have a lot of ocean. You are absolutely right. When I tell people I used work on boats, that’s actually the first thing they say is, “There’s not a lot of oceanfront.” My very first boat was the sloop Clearwater which was started by Pete Seeger back in the late 60s. He had built this as a replica of a 17th Dutch sloop to bring focus back to the cleaning up of the Hudson. This was right around the time of the 1972 Clean Water Act. That huge spurt of environmental legislation around that time. This a rallying point for him to start cleaning up the river. That was my very first boat. I had gone hitchhiking abroad for five months when I was 18 and I came back and I just took the first job that I could find which happened to be on this boat. I’d never sailed before. That was the beginning of the end.
Lisa Belisle: That unusual isn’t it? Don’t most people get into sailing or boats because they’ve grown up with it essentially?
Matty Oates: Yeah, I was one of the few people that hadn’t ever been on a boat before. Everyone else had grown up sailing Optis and J-boats. Especially around here in Maine sailing is such a, Casco Bay is one of the greatest spots in the world to grow up sailing. That was, I was a rarity in that case. But I just fell in love with it. I wasn’t even onboard the boat, I was still a quarter mile away and I could see the top of the mast from over this hill and that was it, I was a goner.
Lisa Belisle: What was it that I guess spoke to you about that? That scene, the top of the mast that was calling to you from afar?
Matty Oates: I still don’t know if I can put it into words but it is, in the beginning, there’s the romance of it. There is what we all picture tall sailing to be or sailing of old to be. Wind through your hair, salt spray and all that jazz. That is the hook. That’s what got me in. But then everything else that came after. The intense discipline. The need to care for the ship, care for your shipmates. An amazingly tight community and honestly the life skills that came out of it I think it was probably the best education I could have ever hoped for.
Just the learning empathy, learning, not that I didn’t have it before but being able to realize small social dynamics within a team and really trying to take that on and come up with a great result each day and learn to keep a cool head when everything’s falling apart around you. When stuff’s breaking, when there’s a storm at four AM and you are in the middle of the Atlantic. That kind of stuff that’s a forge that you don’t find a lot of other places. That’s what kept me, just this completely different universe.
Lisa Belisle: You worked as the program director for Tall Ships Portland. Tell me about that.
Matty Oates: I came to Portland, came off boats, came to Portland and again was going to just take on any job that came my way. I was just happy to be around my brother again. We were just perusing jobs online one night and Kev goes, “Matty, you seen this?” And sure enough here was a call for a program director for the local nonprofit 501C3 Tall Ships Portland. They were formed in 2015 to help put on the Tall Ships Festival that came through that year. They were going to take on their first full-time employee. I sat down with their board president, Alex Agnew and were meant to have a quick 30 minute coffee, it ended up as four hours talking about sailing. As sailors do we just ramble which I’m doing right now. That was the beginning of the end.
We had two great summers of sailing programs. The main mission, most people think it’s a nonprofit that does events. The events help fuel the real mission which is youth education at sea. The idea that getting teenagers out, high schoolers out is one of the best ways that they can, I don’t even know the right word here, it’s one of the best educations they can ever hope for. They learn how to sail but the sailing’s just almost a metaphor, it’s just the best classroom. They learn the same things I got to learn. They learn true teamwork and the idea that this is not going to get from point A to point B unless everybody pitches in. Everyone’s on ground zero. No one is the cool kid, no one’s the nerd, no one’s the jock. It is everyone’s out of their element and they are given a challenge that they have to rise to meet otherwise they don’t get to where they’re going.
Thankfully with the help of Falmouth assistant principal John Radkey, he also accredited their summer one week program. So now kids who go out sailing with them also get a semester’s worth of high school credit which is a really great validation of that education as well.
Lisa Belisle: Do you think that that’s something that we’re lacking in today’s educational system and not to dis teachers ’cause my mom was a teacher, I think that they work very hard and do a great job but is there something about teamwork that maybe we could use a little bit of extra?
Matty Oates: Yeah, I agree with you there. Both my parents are teachers as well and it is an intensely difficult job to be a teacher especially nowadays in an age where kids can pull up an answer to a question on their phone usually faster than a teacher can even say it. But yeah, utilizing different classroom, especially a classroom where it forces people to put the phone down and turn their eyes up, that’s a huge benefit that I think people still are hesitant to latch onto. Again, they do learn how to sail but the actual lesson is so much more. It’s just a great classroom. You can teach anything on it. You can teach physics when you’re talking about friction coefficients and pulleys. You can talk about the Bernoulli Principle, what makes airplanes fly with the idea of a lift over a curved surface when you’re looking at sails. You can teach how to clean a toilet. Anything at all. You can teach trigonometry with astronavigation. Any subject you can possibly think of, it can be taught onboard these boats. It’s an intensely useful tool.
Lisa Belisle: What I was wondering about was the way that it seems that we have gone is a very competitive direction with our kids. And I have three so I’ve seen that this has evolved over time. That it seems often very individually focused especially in the suburbs we have a lot of, it’s very important for people to get into the right schools and in order to do that they’re sometime clawing over each other in order to be the best. Which is understandable but in the end when you get out of your great education, you still need to be able to work with people. I’m wondering if this is something that Tall Ships and other organizations like it can fill a void with.
Matty Oates: Absolutely. Tall Ships is just one of so many great organizations that offer that here in Maine. Ripple Effect is another. And you’re absolutely right, individual ambition is fantastic and it has driven so many wonderful things but you’re right, at the end of the day, not everyone can go it alone and do you need to know how to work with a team and when to give and when to push and when to compromise and when to support and that sort of thing is taught through all these great experiential modes. That was probably, I was a jerk when I was growing up. I was so up myself and not outwardly but I was right about everything and learning to just shut up and listen was a great lesson onboard these things. And realizing I don’t have all the answers all the time and it’s okay to be wrong and it’s okay to ask for help and it’s okay to do these things. And realizing how I fit into the larger puzzle of a team was instrumental growing up.
Lisa Belisle: I think it’s also something that I’ve seen with musicians who work for a long time with other musicians that especially when I’ve watched Spencer because he’s our producer for our radio show, seen how he interacts with his team and it really is, you really have to learn to read one another. You have to learn to give. You have to learn to take and it seems like that’s something that actually comes over time. So it’s not necessarily something that you can get out of even a semester working in a classroom together.
Matty Oates: It’s true. It would be piece of a much larger puzzle and experience is the best educator. I hate to quote it ’cause I just saw it yesterday but Star Wars when Yoda says, “Failure is the best teacher.” Yeah, it takes messing up, it takes a lot of different classrooms. To refer to a lot of different forms of education but it takes a long time to get there. The semester or even just a week onboard a boat it’s so intensive. It’s like immersion learning where you’re chucked into a completely foreign environment and your senses have to be firing all the time. It does help. I’ve seen some students make amazing transformations. Not everyone and there’s really no predicting who it’s really going to resonate with but there’s some students who have come back as completely different people. In a very short amount of time.
Lisa Belisle: Does it also help you to listen, to learn to listen to yourself versus, you talked about turning the phone off ’cause sometimes when you’re out on the ocean you don’t have access to the internet. And paying to the world around you but also to pay attention to yourself and your intuitive response to things or even your learned response to things like the weather or other people?
Matty Oates: Yeah, trusting one’s gut is something I’ve learned and talking about messing up. I’ve learned the hard way. Times where I’ve had the gut feeling and ignored it and then stuff’s gone wrong. That education’s been wonderful in the idea that now when I have that gut feeling I react to it. Even now it may be wrong but nine times out of ten it’s been the right thing. Like you say, with weather, you’d rather have prepared for it and be wrong than throw caution to the wind and then be wrong. Things can go much, much worse.
Lisa Belisle: Do you mind me asking about one of these times of failure and not trusting your intuition ’cause I think sometimes these are things that are good for us to hear about other people. Because we all assume we’re the only ones.
Matty Oates: True. A lot of it was just dealing with feeling like I should check, if we’re sailing and I look at something, I look at a line where we’ve been sailing out to Bermuda for four days and we’re always checking to make sure that no lines are chaffing and nothing’s wrong and to the times where you see something and the gut reaction says, “That’s going to chaff through.” Whether you’re tired and it’s ’cause you’ve been up for, you’re working on two hours sleep, three hours sleep and just out of it you go, it’ll be fine til morning and then next thing you know it’s two hours later and the line’s parted and everyone’s being called up to take in the sail that’s now flopping about ’cause I didn’t trust my gut on that.
Times where we’ve broken masts and broken spars and days we went out sailing we probably shouldn’t have been out in weather that was too strong and this was racing not voyaging. People getting hurt. People or gear breaking and just seeing where pride, seeing where for lack of a better term, machoism can just lead you down the wrong path in an attempt to prove someone wrong or better somebody. It gets you no where in the end, it really doesn’t.
Lisa Belisle: Is this part of that learning that you’re not always right? That you were talking about with regard to yourself when you were younger.
Matty Oates: Oh yeah, yeah, learning to be wrong is I think the best thing that we could possibly learn is just and a lot of times on a boat the hierarchy is very rigid and needs to be because the responsibility flows uphill that person at the top of the hill needs to then have the ability to control all the variables. A captain may need to be a bit of a tyrant but it’s because if anything goes wrong they bear all the responsibility. There’s no other way to it. There’s times learning to hold your tongue even if you don’t believe things right. The only time you really can speak up is if you believe people are in jeopardy, safety’s in jeopardy. But yeah, learning to swallow pride, learning to just accept the fact that you may not agree but you aren’t wearing the captain pants. You just got to suck it up and go with it because you may not have all the answers.
Lisa Belisle: Again, I wonder if there isn’t something cultural or societal or educational that hasn’t started us all down the path of believing that we all have to be right and we have to be right the first time.
Matty Oates: Yeah, it’s true. I completely agree with you. We’ve gone down that path but at the same time it feels like a lot of us don’t then if we are wrong, don’t have, we don’t want to accept the responsibility that we were wrong. That’s the other thing, just being able to raise your hand and say, “My name is Matty Oates and I was wrong.” That’s a lesson that should be taught more. Valuable life skills like you were saying before, in the strive to be more competitive and be more individualistic we miss some of the most crucial, my mom’s a preschool teacher and she has all these parents who are at age four and five they’re wondering if their kids are ready for kindergarten and are they going to do well on the test and she’s like, hold on, hold on. Can they share at playtime? Do they know how to take turns? Do they know, these are the real skills that will get them through life.
Colleges are not going to be looking at their preschool test scores. They don’t care those. But if you can share with somebody, that’s going to make you a good friend, a good partner, a good business partner. It’s so important.
Lisa Belisle: You decided that you were going to switch gears and go from the nonprofit world to work with Shipyard Brewing Company but you’ve actually been able to continue to bridge that gap and you found that there are important ways that working in for profit situation can help with nonprofit situation.
Matty Oates: Absolutely. I started working with Shipyard Brewing as program director of Tall Ships because Shipyard was a great supporter and sponsor of the nonprofit. I got to work closely with the staff there through our events. And then starting to work with Shipyard in June of this year. It really opened my eyes to how much Shipyard and really the entire brewing community here in Maine gives back to the nearly 13,000 nonprofits that are in Maine alone. There’s a lot of people with strong missions and great hearts but it’s tough to run a nonprofit on your own and to see the astronomical rise the brewing industry and then how they give back. I had no idea Shipyard gives back to the number of nonprofits that it does. It adds such a feeling of community, being able to be at these events and help support everything from Portland Trails and Spurwink and some of these organizations that do great and much needed work in Maine.
Lisa Belisle: It’s interesting having worked in that in between where I’ve experience in the for profit and the nonprofit worlds, sometimes for profit gets a bad rap. Sometimes you’re seen as like the evil organization that’s money grubbing. But then when you realize that not only are they supporting nonprofits but they’re also supporting people’s families and paying their health insurance and making it possible for people to have roofs over their heads. It’s easier to be less judgemental I guess.
Matty Oates: Yeah, that’s so true. It comes back to the yin and the yang. We wouldn’t be able to have one with the other. We couldn’t have nonprofits if there were no for profits to support them and having been through not just through Tall Ships Portland but also before I went out to France, all the boats I worked on were 501C3 nonprofits doing environmental education or historical education. From the beginning realizing how tight these budgets have to be and how important fundraising is and how important donors are. And yeah, without those for profits we would have great intentions for the nonprofit world but no way to execute. You’re completely right. They’re so integral.
Lisa Belisle: And I think that’s again something that maybe when I was growing up and all the stuff I’m saying to you I’ve experienced myself so it’s not as if I’m accusing other people of feeling a certain way about for profit organizations. I think when you go through, when I went through my academic training to become a doctor, there’s this sense there’s these ivory towers that we all can live within and then all the people down below who actually have to work for a living, scrub the toilets and do the for profit stuff, somehow there’s something base about that because they’re doing, they’re working for money. I think that’s a transition that we all have to go through, this sense that there’s this idealistic view of the world, that you get to be part of when you’re in the academic field but then once you get out there’s this reality of life.
Matty Oates: Yeah. There was a great article written I think 2008, maybe 2009, published in the New York Times. It was in one of the Sunday inserts. I believe the title was, A Case to be Made for Working With Your Hands. It was a guy who had english degree from University of Chicago, he had done a lot of freelance writing. He’d done a lot of work at think tanks in DC and he’d left it all, he did a bit of freelance writing but he left it all to open a motorcycle repair shop ’cause he’d been tinkering and he realized bit by bit that the thought process, the actual analysis that went through breaking open a motorbike was at the time for him, far more real that the think tank stuff he was doing in DC. And that’s not to put down what that work and that, which is integral.
He brought up that same idea of we pass the lineman working in a storm to repair a transformer and we say, “Oh my, what a tough job.” But is there a little tinge of jealousy in there as well? Do we actually want to be the one performing this crucial task? That’s another thing that we did focus on a little bit with Tall Ships with the idea of the maritime trades and how we have, we’ve turned away from promoting the trades. It’s been this constant stream that everyone needs to go to a four year university and that’s it and that’s why we’ve got electricians making six figures because there’s nobody out there. The thinking is not only incredibly difficult with a very, if you get it wrong, it’s a pretty abrupt end working with AC power. You gotta make sure you’re thinking clear and thinking ahead and thinking through everything that you do and same thing with plumbing and engineering and there’s Maine has so many opportunities.
There’s a boatyard Washburn and Dowdy up the way that make these state of the art tractor tugs that we see plowing up the waterways here. They are having a tough time finding kids at 18 years old to sweeps the floors of the workshop for 18 bucks an hour. Which, if you’re 18 years old is a great wage around here. And they will take you and they’ll see what you’re interested in whether it’s welding or whatever and they’ll put you in an apprenticeship and provide you with a great career in the state of Maine. And I feel like a lot of people don’t even know these exist. That was a bit of a tangent there.
Lisa Belisle: It’s an important thing for us to keep considering that we live within a community and different types of intelligence are valuable. You can have the type of intelligence that enables you to get a PhD and study something at the university. You can have the type of intelligence that enables you to keep the power on. You can have the type of intelligence that enables to build a boat. It’s not that any of these are better or worse or more valuable or less valuable. They’re all very valuable and they keep us all moving forward together. I’m okay with that tangent because I believe in it. That’s the bottom line we’re talking. I’ll let you go on that one.
I’ve been speaking with Matty Oates who is the former program director for Tall Ships Portland who currently works a media manager at Shipyard Brewing Company. He and his brother Kevin also host a podcast called Bach to Bock in which they discuss both classical music and beer. It’s been a fun conversation, thanks for coming in.
Matty Oates: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is also brought to you by Aristelle, a lingerie boutique on Exchange Street in Portland’s old port where every body is seen as a work of art and beauty is celebrated from the inside out. Shop with us in person or online at aristelle.com.
Lisa Belisle: Jessica Jordan was 34 when she was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer. Her mother passed away soon after she finished radiation. To honor her mother’s memory, Jessica completed the Tri for a Cure in July of 2017 and she was this year’s top fundraiser breaking her goal by $44,000. That’s pretty impressive.
Jessica Jordan: Yeah, it was a pretty amazing experience.
Lisa Belisle: It’s interesting that you were able to turn something that really was for most people and I’m sure for you also a very difficult experience. Two things that were very difficult, breast cancer and your mother passing away, into something important and meaningful in a fairly short period of time.
Jessica Jordan: Yeah, it was a short period of time. It was only a couple months after my mom passed that I was going through actually some emails of hers and somehow I thought of the Tri for a Cure and I remembered that I had signed up for it. And one of the last things my mom and I had talked about was trying to raise money for cancer research. And I was in such, getting through cancer and then being hit by losing somebody so important to me, I had thought cancer was one of the toughest things I’d ever gone through. And my mom used to always say, “Things can always be worse.” I felt like I was faced all of a sudden with something that was, felt so much worse. I actually missed the days of just dealing with chemo because that seemed easier than what I was faced with with losing my mom so suddenly.
I really needed some kind of outlet. I knew my family needed some kind of outlet and we were in a really bad place. I said to my sister, “I don’t have anything left to deal with this kind of enormous loss. I’m physically and emotionally exhausted,” and I felt like I just wanted to give up because I’d been so positive through treatment and through my whole journey with cancer and now my mom’s not here.
I went through a couple of months of being really, really in a dark place and really having a hard time and I looked through some of my mom’s emails and found that I had gotten into the Tri for a Cure. All of a sudden I just, I didn’t even really plan it, I just thought, you know what? I’ll sign up and I’ll worry about the training and everything later I don’t know how I’m going to do that because the last time I had run I had gone to hospital. I had run three miles and I had gone too hard and I was nervous about just the training aspect of it but I figured I’d start training. It would get me out and I’d worry about that later. We were able to write a page about what our inspiration was for doing the race. I just started writing about my mom and about how wonderful our relationship was and why I wanted to raise money for this cause and I wanted to do it in honor of her and feel like I was doing it with her.
I came home and I said to my husband, I said, “I’m going to do the Tri for a Cure this year. I just signed up.” And he said, “Okay, good for you. That’s great.” And I said, “And I looked into who, the person that raised the most donations last year,” and I said, “it was $20,000 so I want to raise $20,001.” And he looked at me and I don’t know if I gave him a look of like, that’s it I’m doing it because he looked at me like, okay, I don’t know about this. And he’s been so supportive and he just said, I said, “No, I want to do it and I want to do it this year.” And he said, “Okay.” And that was it. I started, I told my story and I immediately started seeing money being raised. And started to feel something again. Started to feel that positivity again that I had really lost after my mom passed.
Lisa Belisle: Did it feel as if somebody had moved the finish line on you?
Jessica Jordan: That’s a really good way of putting it. Yeah, yeah. It was two months after I had finished radiation that my mom passed away and I literally remember, I remember the day that she passed. I remember walking out to see Connor and we were watching one of the playoff football games. It was the new year. It was two weeks into the new year. It was January 14th and I was finally ready to say, “That’s it with the past.” My mom always said, “Let’s move forward.” We put enough towards cancer, let’s move forward and I was ready to be done with that. Like you said, I was ready, I crossed that finish line, I was ready to be done. I was ready to move forward. The day she passed, I remember looking at my husband and we gave each other this smile. I’ll never forget it because it was almost like a moment that we had where everything’s okay now. We got through all of that.
And literally that same moment my cousin walked in to tell me that something had happened to my mother. It all started all over again. It’s been brutal. Brutally hard. Really, really two of the toughest things I think you could ever deal with literally simultaneously. And they were both so unexpected. That’s the crazy part. I was 34 when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Very healthy, young, wasn’t genetic. I have no idea where it came from. My mom passed of a pulmonary embolism. Neither of these made sense. I think it’s human nature to want to feel like if I hadn’t done this, then this wouldn’t have happened. If only I had done this differently then I maybe I wouldn’t have gotten cancer. Or there’s some way to rationalize somebody passing like that.
What this has proven is that we just have no control of our lives. My mom always used to say, “You never know what tomorrow’s going to bring.” And she taught me so many lessons. But I think one of the biggest lessons she taught me was that how true that really is. I was worried about myself for a year. She was worried about me for a year. And now she’s not here. Cancer or no cancer, none of us have any certainty of what tomorrow brings. That’s how I choose to live my life now. It’s not in fear but knowing today that I’m lucky.
Lisa Belisle: This is all still very fresh. Your mother passed away in January of 2017.
Jessica Jordan: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: Within the last year.
Jessica Jordan: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: It hasn’t even been a year as you and I are talking and then you yourself, you were diagnosed just a little, about two years ago.
Jessica Jordan: Yeah, almost exactly two years ago. February 24th.
Lisa Belisle: And that doesn’t even really feel, I know when I was diagnosed with cancer that the time immediately afterwards, it all sped up ’cause you’re just doing all the stuff you need to do and then you put your head up and all of a sudden you look around and six months has passed or a year has passed.
Jessica Jordan: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: This for you is all so, still so present.
Jessica Jordan: Yeah, it honestly time is a weird thing. It really is. It sometimes being diagnosed with cancer seems like it was a 100 years ago. That was a different life. That was a different period. You start to forget. You probably experienced this too. You start to forget some of those things that you went through. In other ways it seems like it was just three seconds ago. It’s the same thing with my mom. I think that these things too are both such shocking things that it takes you so long just to even realize that they happened. I don’t know if I’ve even fully realized that these two things have really happened. I wake up every morning, I have to say, “Yep, you had cancer, that happened.” And, “Yep, Mom’s not here, that’s true.” And I have to remind myself that these things actually happened. I don’t even feel like I know. I’ve said this a few times, I don’t feel like I really remember who I was before all of this. It changes you so profoundly.
I just, I feel like I look at that person with the long hair and just completely no idea what cancer’s like or what real loss is like and I almost just want to pat her on the back and say, “It’s okay.” It changes you so profoundly that I just look at everything differently now but at the same time I really don’t know if a lot of this has really even hit me. I’m just now starting to feel like in the last couple of weeks, more emotion. I was in such shock that now I’m starting to feel more emotion when I think about my mother because I’m really starting to realize that she’s not with us. And I’ve never experienced anything like that before where time just, it’s just a crazy thing.
Lisa Belisle: It’s interesting because I know going through my own breast cancer, part of what I needed to do was to be positive and to be strong and to move forward in a direction of healing. I think when you’re doing that, it almost shuts down some of the necessary processes of grieving the person you once were.
Jessica Jordan: Absolutely.
Lisa Belisle: I was just, this was for me, I can’t remember how many years now, not that long ago, maybe three, four. The other day I actually started to tear up thinking about my breast cancer. I’m like wow, where did that come from.
Jessica Jordan: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: So it’s interesting that you can think that you have dealt with stuff and then it’s there.
Jessica Jordan: It is.
Lisa Belisle: Just below the surface.
Jessica Jordan: It is. Right after I was diagnosed I started seeing a therapist and thank gosh because everything got so much crazier. I’m so glad I’ve had her. I said to her at one point, I said, “You know, I’m worried about myself because I’m not crying. I’m not emotional. What is that? Why am not crying every single day? Why am I not curled up in a ball? ‘Cause that’s what I would’ve thought if something like this happened to me let alone both things.” And what I realized is that you can feel so many different emotions and be grieving so, so much. But it doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily crying all the time. You can grieve in so many different ways, that’s just one emotion. But I do find there is still, there are times where something will happen, something with spark an emotion I didn’t even, it’ll be the strangest thing that I wouldn’t have expected and suddenly I’m so emotional and something you would think would make you really emotional I’m fine.
I don’t know if it’s a coping mechanism but it’s there. It just comes out in these odd, odd times. But I do think that it’s a great point that you had. I think that we don’t know, everything happens so fast when you’re diagnosed. You don’t have the time to even think about mourning who you were because you’re trying to figure out what to do for the next thing and how to get through this next period and you’re in such a state of just trying to fix the situation that you never think about the fact that I just ended a chapter of my life. I just goodbye to the person that I was all of those years of not having to deal with this. Because I think that what a lot of people don’t realize when you are diagnosed with cancer and you start to look like yourself again after treatment and you start to feel like yourself again, everybody says, there’s this mentality of, “Oh you got through it. You’re done with it.”
I think because I’ve been very positive through my own diagnosis as well I think maybe it’s been forgotten. Or I didn’t realize this either, to be fair, I didn’t realize this before cancer how much was involved with trying to just make sure that this doesn’t happen again. But everyday is I’m still taking medication. I’m still going to get blood work every three weeks. I will be on this medication for 10 years. I’m getting mammograms and MRIs and dealing with the emotional. It’s the emotional piece that lasts longer than the treatment itself. And I think that once you start to look and feel like yourself there’s this sense of oh, everything’s okay again. It’s a lifelong change. This is for the rest of my life. I will always have this on the back burner of something that I’m thinking about. What if that ache or pain isn’t just an ache or pain? I think it’s the getting through it mentally that ends up being the longest journey of all of it.
Lisa Belisle: This all happened too coincidentally with around the time that you were preparing for your wedding.
Jessica Jordan: Yes. That’s how I found it. Yeah. Yeah, I always say my wedding saved my life. It’s really crazy. I was really stressed out. Connor and I got married the day after Christmas in 2015 and I wanted to start a family very soon and I laugh at that now ’cause I thought I had this whole plan figured out. Right? We’re going to get married, I’m going to have kids, we’re going to get a house. It’s going to be one thing after another, all my ducks in a row. It all changed so quickly. Two months after we were engaged, I was planning a wedding and we were trying to do a real quick turnaround, eight months of planning and I was really busy with work so I was stressed out and I woke up in the middle of the night feeling anxious so I was rubbing the stress out of my chest and I felt something.
It was something I never felt before and thought it was almost a piece of my bone because it was really, it didn’t really move when I touched it but I was also stressed so I thought, “Jess, you’re anxious. This is why you’re doing this anyway. Just wake up in the morning, if you still feel it then call your doctor.” Well I woke up in the morning, I still felt it. So I called my doctor and I remember sitting in her office and I was trying to find it again and I couldn’t find it and I had this moment of thinking, “Oh my gosh you’re wasting everyone’s time. You don’t have the time to be out here. She’s going to think you’re crazy because you can’t even find it and you’re just anxious because you’ve got a lot going on.”
She came in and I apologized I said, “I’m sorry. I feel like I’m overreacting.” When she felt it, that’s when I started to think maybe something was not right. I looked into, I did some research on my own and I know that there’s benign cysts that you can have. So I thought well maybe that’s all it is. So I went in there, I got a mammogram and I thought that’s probably all it is and when they ruled that out and said they want to do a biopsy that day I remember that was the moment that I went in the bathroom and I started to really get emotional and lose it. I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, “What if this is, what if you have cancer? What if this really is cancer?” And then, as I’m sure you know, you have to wait five to seven to hear the results which is the longest five to seven days of your entire life.
When they called and said that it was something I needed to come in for, Connor and I still were under the impression that it wasn’t, the way that they had said it, they didn’t think it was invasive so I didn’t think it was going to be anything too bad. I thought I could just get it removed. We had planned to go out to breakfast the next day after this appointment. And we were thinking about where we were going to go to breakfast. And we went in there and sat down and she said, “It’s serious.” And I said, and I’m sure you probably felt the same thing, it’s like this beautiful music that’s playing and then all of a sudden it just stops. And you hear that and it’s like your whole life just goes on pause. I said, “Is it breast cancer?” And she said, “Yes.” That ended up being a seven hour day of MRIs and blood work and needing a team that’s talking to me about things that I’d never thought I’d be talking about and trying to figure out how to tell my family.
That was the biggest thing. That came to my mind. Is how do I tell my mother? How do I say cancer? And not make it sound like a big deal. How do I say that and say oh don’t worry about it? I’m like, is there another word for cancer that I can use? Because she worried about everything. I really didn’t know how. That was my biggest focus was how do I pull myself together and call our families and tell them not to worry when I don’t have the answers for them that they’re going to want right now because we still didn’t know a lot.
Lisa Belisle: It’s funny that that’s the thing that we worry about.
Jessica Jordan: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: That we worry more about how it’s going to impact other people. Which I think is probably fairly common actually. Especially among women.
Jessica Jordan: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: They’re so much more worried about how this is going to impact everyone around them.
Jessica Jordan: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: Than they are able to worry about themselves.
Jessica Jordan: Yep.
Lisa Belisle: And maybe that’s a good thing.
Jessica Jordan: I think it’s a good distraction.
Lisa Belisle: Exactly.
Jessica Jordan: To be honest.
Lisa Belisle: Exactly.
Jessica Jordan: I didn’t have time to really think about what if this is really, how bad could this possibly be because I was so concerned with how to relay the information to my family and my friends who I’d, God love them, I’d sent a text message to them because I couldn’t call everyone and talk to them all and give them time that I knew that they deserved so I had to send a text message. I can’t imagine being the other end of a text message from my friends saying that they have breast cancer but as you know, it’s so overwhelming that you can really only put so much energy into every single individual thing. And at that point it just you need to figure out the game plan. Do I need chemo? Do I need radiation? Do I need a lumpectomy, a double mastectomy? What are we talking here? Those are all things that at that point I still didn’t know.
Lisa Belisle: There’s a lot of processing that when you tell somebody some sort of news, they will need to do for themselves. If you call every person, you’re going to get everybody else’s process which is completely legitimate but also you need to retain a little bit of your own self to care for yourself.
Jessica Jordan: That’s a very good point.
Lisa Belisle: You need to be able to triage almost. Like okay, I’m going to talk to these people in person, these people get a phone call, these people get a text message, maybe these people get an email.
Jessica Jordan: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: And it’s not that you don’t care about all these various friends and family just everybody wants to tell you how they feel about it.
Jessica Jordan: Right.
Lisa Belisle: Which is great and hard.
Jessica Jordan: It is hard. And I feel like sometimes it can also add to your anxiety because certain people you tell and God love them, they get so nervous, they ask all these questions that you didn’t think about. And then the next thing you know you’re going, oh my gosh, should I have thought about that? What if that is the case? I don’t know. It adds to sometimes an already anxiety, obviously an anxiety producing situation. I think that’s one of the hardest things too is not letting other people’s fears and thoughts or ideas become something that you’re taking on as your own because you already have so many of your own to try and to figure out. Trying time like that.
Lisa Belisle: I think that that’s a really important point. It might actually in some ways the fact that we have access to so much information now, may not be the best thing because it does actually cause you to second guess yourself and the worst thing you can do when you’re trying to set up a treatment plan is second guess because there is no perfect option.
Jessica Jordan: No. And they don’t tell you that. Not that anybody would ever tell you this but I always thought that, I always had this idea that if you were diagnosed with something serious, the doctors would just say, “Okay here’s exactly what you need to do.” I went in there and they said that. I’m like, “All right so what exactly do I need to do? Just fix it.” And there’s no perfect recipe it’s more like, here are your options. Let me know which one you would like to move forward with. And I wasn’t prepared for that. I don’t think a lot of people are. We’re not the experts but you have to almost become an expert and you do have do your own research which can be a long rabbit hole to fall into because that starts to address other issues that you didn’t think about. Or other problems that might be yours or might not be.
Or other people’s, one thing that I stopped getting involved in is other people writing their own stories or their own experiences because I started to be convinced that all of those were going to be my story and my experience and I couldn’t really separate reality from what I thought might happen or what happened to somebody else. I had to constantly say, “Is this my diagnosis? Is this my situation?” And lots of times it wasn’t but if you really do, I stopped reading anything really at this point. I’m lucky enough I have a friend who’s an oncologist so I just call her. Or I know the trusted sites to go to. But no longer do I just randomly Google something because you almost always find the answer that you don’t want if you’re looking for something and you’re worried about it. You’re going to surely find that that inevitably what’s going to happen. I think that’s a huge point is to just refrain from, there’s almost too much information out there now. There really is. And that really can be really hard when you’re going through such a serious diagnosis.
Lisa Belisle: It’s all of these things that we’re talking about I think also that makes Tri for a Cure so powerful because so many people are in that survivor wave of participants that you look around and you think, that person went through this, that person went through this, this person went through this. Or you look at the people who are impacted by cancer in other ways and you think, she has a sister. She has a mother. And even though you may not have exactly the same experience, it’s interesting to be part of that bigger group now.
Jessica Jordan: Absolutely. It was actually a really emotional moment to, I did the 5K for the Tri for a Cure too. I stood on the line and they had a thing for the survivors and they start first. And there weren’t that many of us. And everybody else is supporting us but they’d all had some kind of cancer related story. My friend caught up to me ’cause she ran it with me and I looked at her and I said, “I can’t believe that I’m running in this wave.” And she said, “I still can’t either.” And there was just this moment of I’ve been a competitive runner since I was 11 years old. To be running along with other women who didn’t have their hair and my hair was just growing back and now to be running, it was just a totally different experience. I used to always love to support causes like this but I’d become the cause. That was one of, a really pivotal moment for me to say, “Oh my gosh, I’m on the other side of this now. I’m not just cheering these women on. I am one of these women.”
The Tri for a Cure is just, it’s incredible for so many ways. Not only what it raises money for but yeah, you start to look around and you see all of these people that have been affected in some way, shape or form. A lot of them are young. And when I came to Maine and I started my treatment here, I felt like I was the only 34 year old woman with breast cancer in Maine and I remember saying that to a nurse. I said, “Am I the youngest woman in Maine to ever have breast cancer?” And she said, “Oh no. That’s not good that you think that.” She said, “You guys just don’t come in at the same time.” She said, “There’s actually quite a few of them.” We started a group where we would meet every week and we would just talk about all the things that none of our other 34 year old friends could talk about or could relate to.
And God love them they tried. It wasn’t that they didn’t care but there’s just things that happen with a diagnosis like this. Different side effects, different ailments, different emotional stressors that is not common for a young 30 year old woman to be going through. And that’s hard as well when you start to think, why me? What did I do wrong? That was one thing that I really struggled with was that I really felt almost like, I almost felt like I was ashamed when I was first diagnosed because all these other women were having babies and getting married, getting engaged, buying houses, doing all the things that they should be doing and I was at home bald and going through treatment and really not recognizing myself emotionally or physically. And to do that as a 34 year old woman before you’ve really even started your life with someone, presents so many different challenges that a lot women my age couldn’t relate to.
Lisa Belisle: I think it’s really important that you have raised this money for cancer research and here’s why. Because cancer is impacting people at a younger age. It’s impacting young, healthy people and we don’t have reasons for it and we don’t have great screening tests for it and people need to stop feeling guilty about getting something that possibly has underlying reasons that we don’t know enough about yet and the only way we’re going to figure this out is by putting money into research and the only way we’re going to be able to do that is to have people like you raising the money. It’s a very important thing you’ve done.
Jessica Jordan: Thank you very much. It’s been one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever been part of.
Lisa Belisle: I appreciate your coming in and sharing your story with us. I’ve been speaking with Jessica Jordan who was 34 when she was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer and her mother passed soon after she finished radiation. To honor her mother’s memory, she completed Tri for a Cure last July and was that year’s top fundraiser, breaking her goal by $44,000. Thank you for coming in and for all the good work you’re doing.
Jessica Jordan: Thank you very much. It was an honor.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is also brought to you by Aristelle, a lingerie boutique on Exchange Street in Portland’s old port where every body is seen as a work of art and beauty is celebrated from the inside out. Shop with us in person or online at aristelle.com.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 332. Our guests have included Matty Oates and Jessica Jordan. For more information on our guests in extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radios is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa and see our Love Maine Radio photos on Instagram. Please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have head about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, thank you for sharing this part of your day with me. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is brought to you by Maine Magazine, Aristelle, Portland Art Gallery and Art Collector Maine. Audio production and original music are by Spencer Albee. Our Editorial Producer is Brittany Cost. Our Assistant Producer is Shelbi Wassick. Our Community Development Manager is Casey Lovejoy and our Executive Producers are Andrea King, Kevin Thomas, Rebecca Falzano, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our production team, Maine Magazine or any of the guests featured here today, please visit us at lovemaineradio.com.