Becky's Story

The South Dakota Coyote women’s basketball team is wearing pink uniforms on Saturday vs. Denver in conjunction with an effort throughout the sport to increase awareness of breast cancer.

At the request of Coach Dawn Plitzuweit, on Wednesday night the Coyotes listened to Becky Jensen, their academic advisor and a former assistant women’s basketball coach at USD, tell them about this disease in a way that could only come from somebody who had personal experience.

Jensen, who as Becky Flynn set the all-time South Dakota high school scoring record at Wakonda and went on to a Hall of Fame career at Creighton University, told the team about her own fight with breast cancer.

This particular fight included a double mastectomy, six weeks recovery time and another six weeks of radiation.

Most importantly, two years later, the fight includes Jensen. She’s able to tell people about it. She’s a healthy wife and mother, in addition to being a member of the South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame. She didn’t slow down much while she was recovering and then quickly got back to not slowing down at all.

In her case, the diagnostic process for the kind of cancer she was dealing with kept veering toward the unlikelier option. This pattern began with her age. As a 1992 Wakonda High School graduate, she was too young to get breast cancer in 2020, right?

Because her grandmother had breast cancer in her mid-40s, Jensen had been vigilant with her own cancer screenings. Even so, when it became apparent there was a problem, she didn’t see it coming.

“It was just a routine mammogram – I was not a bit worried because I felt fine and I’d never had an irregular mammogram,” Jensen said. “I’ve had friends who have had biopsies and had no problems. I’d never even reached the point I’d had a biopsy so there were no worries at all.”

In hindsight she would occasionally feel a “zinger” in her chest, she said, that she attributed to overdoing it with her workouts at the time. She was her normal self, though, the day she learned this might not be another routine screening.

She’d been going to the same doctor for years and this time he said he noticed something.

“He says ‘Do you feel anything here?’ and I’m like ‘no,’” Jensen remembered. “And even when he was trying to get me to feel it, I couldn’t feel it.”

She had her mammogram, followed by an ultrasound and a biopsy, all on the same day. While waiting around between this series of screenings she looked up medical information on her phone. She learned that only a small percentage of biopsies end up revealing cancer. Definitely good news, right?

So she asked the radiologists for a very quick prognosis. “It’s not cancer, right?” she asked. Jensen gauged his response closely. “Well, it could be,” he said.

It was not exactly what she wanted to hear. This was followed by a week of waiting for a call. Then it came.

“Yes, you have cancer,” she heard.

“I’m like – seriously?” Jensen said. “I’d been hearing from my friends that it would be nothing.  I’d had a week to prepare for the news, though, so I’d run the scenarios through in my head: ‘If I hear this, then this is what I’m going to do. If I hear that, I’m going to do this.’ That’s how I was preparing for whatever I was going to hear.”

Her options were a lumpectomy with radiation, a procedure that would treat the cancer but allow her to keep her breast, or opt for a mastectomy.

As those who know her well could have predicted, Jensen decided on the more robust treatment. Those same people would not have been surprised, either, at the unique way she relayed her decision to her doctor. 

“’Just whack them off,’ were my exact words,” Jensen said, laughing at the memory. “I kept thinking ‘Well, they were never that great to begin with.’ It was like a cruel joke to give me these and then fill them with cancer besides.”

She had the surgery at Sanford in Sioux Falls on March 10, 2020. Jensen said her doctors indicated there was a 99% chance it had not advanced to her lymph nodes. During the procedure, however, they learned that it had advanced more than they’d anticipated.

It meant she’d have 25 rounds of radiation waiting for her in addition to her recovery from a single procedure that included two mastectomies and reconstructive surgery.

“I expected the best part of it was that I was going to get six weeks to sit and watch March Madness while my kids were in school all day,” Jensen said. “So they came home from school the next day and they couldn’t go back because everything was closing down because of the pandemic. There were a lot of kick-the-gal-while-she’s-down type of things going on there for a while.”

She’d been diagnosed at the end of February and had completed her treatments by the end of May. She had avoided chemotherapy. There were indeed bright spots beyond the fact that she’s doing great these days.

“I’m so glad there are preventive screenings for this,” she said. “If you only went in when you have problems, I think a lot of cancer would go undetected until it’s too late. I was very happy with the care I received, starting with the Yankton Medical Clinic and then at Sanford. It’s so nice that they treat people for things like this on a daily basis. I felt very good about my care team.”

Jensen had originally arrived at USD in 1998 when former Coyote women’s coach Chad Lavin talked her out of moving to California a few years after she graduated from Creighton.

 Instead, she became an assistant for Lavin, a former Coyote himself, who with plenty of help from Jensen, successfully rebuilt a women’s program that had been in decline when he took it on.

When Lavin retired after a national runner-up finish in 2008, Jensen decided it was time for a career move. She has since been helping student-athletes as an academic counselor for the men’s and women’s track teams and men’s and women’s basketball teams. As such, she’s built up an excellent rapport with many at USD over the years. She is a friend, occasionally a coach, and sometimes a shoulder to cry on. They’re all roles she has embraced.

When talking to the Coyotes this week, she said the things she’d tell her own daughter.

“Self-checks are super important,” Jensen said. “Getting regular mammograms are very important, too, after the age of 40. That’s true even if you don’t have a history. I know a lot of people who have gotten breast cancer who had no family history with it.”

Jensen gave a pitch for genetic testing as an additional means to detect vulnerability to breast cancer to the Coyotes, many of whom were well aware of her health issues from the beginning.

She also offered encouragement to players. She did that specifically with sound preventive measures they can take. She also did it by standing up and telling the group about her own healthy future.

“You can get through it,” she said. “I’m so lucky I had the support system around me. The coaches here and the athletes were so wonderful. Hopefully this never affects them but if it does, they can remember that Becky went through the same thing and she came out of it fine.”