Connie Thompson, far right, listens as her daughter, Calyn Thompson, talks about how faith and family helped her through her breast cancer battle. She was the guest speaker at the Women's Lenten Luncheon Thursday at Asbury United Methodist Church. Daily Freeman-Journal photo by Jane Curtis

Two of the most important Christian holidays will forever hold even deeper meaning for Calyn Thompson.

At Christmastime in 2022, she learned she had breast cancer.

Now, she looks ahead to Easter and its promise of renewal. And survival.

“I was 28 years old when I got my diagnosis,” she said.

Thompson was a guest Thursday of the Women’s Lenten Luncheon at Asbury United Methodist Church where she talked about her cancer and the faith that is key to her personal journey.

“It did end up being invasive ductal carcinoma,” Thompson said in a special report she taped for her employer, WHOTV-13. It aired in October 2023. October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. “I did ask the radiologist, ‘Am I going to die?’ And that’s hard to think about because … I had (just) turned 28 years old.

“And then it was just like such a gut punch because I just never did expect it. And I remember I was so overwhelmed because I just knew everything would change.”

Her treatments, her efforts to stave off the hair loss that typically comes with chemotherapy, and her quest for a wig that would hide that hair loss, all were points along her cancer path that she shared with the other thing key to her survival: her family.

She was joined Thursday by her mother, Connie Thompson, of Norwalk, who listened as her daughter told a story both wished she didn’t have to tell.

“It was really hard to tell my parents something like that because I knew just everything would change. And no one wants to get that news, but also no one really wants to share that news either,” Calyn Thompson shared in her October special report.

“But we knew as a family, I was going to fight this.”

She adds, “there’s so much you don’t know when you’re diagnosed … and (then) you learn what the battle is.”

Team Thompson circled the wagons.

“I think in this job I was scared because everyone was inviting me into their home every morning and expected me to look and act a certain way and that was going to change.”

The hair loss, she learned, was inevitable. Her parents helped her with her cold caps, devices designed to reduce hair loss caused by the chemotherapy. Her father purchased the dry ice needed to apply to his daughter’s head.

Despite that, she lost some hair. She lost her eyebrows and eyelashes. “I tried to hang on to every strand I could,” she said. “But then you also have to remember what you’re going through and give yourself grace.”

That was a major lesson for Thompson, who anchors a morning show.

“When you work in the box of television, there’s a lot that people don’t see, don’t know that you’re going through and that just really hit home for me because there was so much people didn’t know.”

Her faith and her family got her through, she said.

“I turned to God, and I still had questions of why me?

“But I also think there was a reason I went through, I’m going through this and if I can help someone else then that’s my why.”