Fighting fires, battling cancer: Honoree lauded for ‘leadership, resilience’
Lindsay McGloughlin says her most terrifying challenge has not been on the job, but during her battles with breast cancer.
She has dashed into burning buildings and rushed injured and critically ill patients by ambulance to the hospital.
Despite her many years of service as a Acton firefighter, Lindsay McGloughlin says the most terrifying challenge she’s faced hasn’t come on the job. It has been her two battles with breast cancer.
Over a dozen years, McGloughlin, 41, endured multiple surgeries, chemotherapy, rounds of cancer medications, and the loss of her hair. There were days when she felt so sick she could barely function.
“It was super-scary,” McGloughlin, now a lieutenant in the department, says. “At times I felt alone and lost.”
All of this began only months after McGloughlin joined the Acton department in 2013 as its first female member — there are five now — having served as a firefighter in Littleton for seven years.
Her son, Charlie, was just 18 months old when she was first diagnosed at 28. Her second diagnosis came less than five years later.
McGloughlin talks openly about her experience and the gratitude she feels for the support she has received from her department and from Runway to Recovery, a non-profit that supports families as they deal with breast cancer. She will receive the Ilene Beal Legacy of Leadership Award at the 19th annual Runway to Recovery show on October 3 at the Westin Seaport Hotel in Boston.
“Lindsay lives the values that Ilene Beal championed: visionary leadership, resilience, community, and compassion,” says Olivia Achtmeyer Boger, a former Acton resident and Runway’s founder and executive director. “She is a supporter behind the curtain for those walking their own path through breast cancer.”
Beal was a pioneer in the Boston banking world who died of cancer at age 69 and was the inspiration for a charitable foundation in her name.
Roots in Acton
Though an Ayer resident, McGloughlin has deep roots here. Her parents are from West Acton, and her dad, Peter Myette, and sister, Abby, are members of the Acton Independent Battery. Her grandfather, Charles, was a town tree warden.
Presented with options after her first diagnosis, McGloughlin chose a bilateral mastectomy with reconstruction, wanting “to be done with this.”
But less than five years later, she discovered a lump in nearly the exact same place. After surgery, she underwent chemotherapy and radiation; the latter caused a rupture in one of her implants, requiring yet more surgery.
This summer is the first time in 12 years she has not been on cancer medication.
Celebrating life
A cancer diagnosis can be isolating and frightening, McGloughlin says. When a concerned friend told her, “You need to walk,” she didn’t mean around the block. It meant she should model for Runway.
Her first time modeling filled McGloughlin with “positive energy,” she says, particularly due to the wildly enthusiastic audiences. It was also the first time she “felt I could celebrate being alive.”
The next year, she walked again, as did her mother, also a breast cancer survivor, and Charlie.
McGloughlin’s “communities” — her work colleagues who covered her shifts and held a fundraiser and her “Runway family” — are what “got me through this,” she says. She still has “tough days,” such as when she learns of others who have battled cancer and when memories of her ordeal wash over her. And then there’s the “scanxiety” that cancer patients endure while undergoing medical tests and waiting for the results.
“But I feel incredibly lucky,” McGloughlin says. “If I can share my story and help even just one person, I will have made a difference. I never want anyone to feel alone in this.”
