Madison Fire and Rescue rallying around chief’s battle with breast cancer

MADISON – Madison Fire Chief Brandy Williams is highly trained to deal with a crisis, which prepared her for her own.

This summer, despite mandatory, regular checkups including mammograms, she was diagnosed with Triple Negative Breast Cancer.

“I think you go through the stages of grief all in a couple of hours. At first, it was, you know, not a great prognosis, and then things rapidly changed into a much better prognosis and hopefully better outcome,” Williams said.

Triple Negative Breast Cancer is normally a very aggressive Breast Cancer, but after more tests, the results showed Chief Williams’ breast cancer was a very rare subtype- that’s not.

“There are days that I think that the rare subtype is a blessing, and then there’s definitely days where it’s a curse and it’s called adenoid cystic carcinoma.

Only 0.1%, a fraction, of Triple Negative Breast Cancer patients are diagnosed with this rare subtype. So, Chief Williams’ case is an enigma, one that’s frustrating and has her drinking medical information from a firehose.

“Solutions is what we do, you know. Finding solutions and fixing the problem. And some days there’s not a lot of solutions in my situation,” she said.

Williams says there are no clear-cut directions for treating her cancer.

She recently had a double mastectomy as a first step and is back to work, deciding on what’s next, and knowing Madison Firefighters are carrying her on their backs “This is just our way of supporting her when she’s going through a hard time right now,” said Madison Firefighter Jon Parsons about wearing authorized work t-shirts with the Chief’s Badge Number-501.

“She’s been with us a lot of steps of the way through our career, so this is just our way of supporting her when she’s going through a hard time,” Parsons said.

“This is something I have to deal with. I have no choice but to deal with it and just focus on the end goal and focus on getting better,” Williams said.