Chattanoogan: Becky Hansard – The Silver Lining

  • Thursday, August 1, 2013
  • Jen Jeffrey

Silverdale headmaster Becky Hansard found the silver lining around the daunting storm clouds that hovered over when her life was threatened – twice. Clinging to her faith, while being in charge of one of Chattanooga’s leading Christian schools, Becky had a tough decision to make as the breath was knocked out of her.

Chattanooga born and raised, Becky and her five siblings grew up attending Silverdale Baptist Church. Her father Cy owned a printing company, while her mother Frances was a stay-at-home mom and then worked for the TNT and later as a secretary in a nursing home.

Frances made her family her first priority despite her dream of going to nursing school, but did not ever regret her sacrifice. She encouraged Becky to go for a nursing degree and Becky pursued her mother’s dream and attended nursing school for three years before changing her major.

“I didn’t want to be a nurse - mom wanted me to be a nurse. I think I wanted to do it for her, but my heart wasn’t in it. I always wanted to be a teacher …I think it was because I was so bossy,” Becky jokes. “My brothers and sisters all had to be my students and my dad was always my student. He would be the unruly one who would stick his tongue out at me,” Becky laughs.

Becky married Rick Hansard during her last year in college. They had met on a blind date.

“After our date, Rick had told me, ‘Now just because I didn’t talk a lot, doesn’t mean I don’t like you - I just don’t talk a lot.’ I went home telling my roommate, ‘Well, I will never hear from him again,’ but a week later he called me and asked me out. I was just crazy about him, but we really are complete opposites. He is very reserved and does all the listening, while I do all the talking,” Becky chuckles.

Rick is the marketing director for Coca-Cola. Not long after the couple married, Becky began her teaching career at Ooltewah Middle School where she would teach for the next 11 years until accepting the position as president of the Hamilton County Teachers Association.

During her year with HCTA, Becky’s church had offered her a position as director of children’s ministries. The position did not offer insurance and would also be a decrease in income.

After years of trying to conceive, Becky felt they would not be blessed with a child until God had their obedience.

“Our pastor at the time, Dr. Bobby Atkins, had told us that there was a little girl up for adoption and we had planned on adopting her,” Becky states.

The couple prepared for their new daughter, painting the nursery pink and picking out a name. When the young mother had given birth, she had slipped out of the back of the hospital with her baby, leaving Rick and Becky devastated.

When the adoption of the baby girl did not take place, their pastor had told them he felt that was not where God was directing them and, after a year of being faithful, the Lord would give them the desires of their heart.

“The day the church had asked me for an answer about the position they were offering,  I was leading a Bible study and my verse for that day was Luke 6:46 ‘But why do you call Me Lord, Lord and not do the things which I say?’ That hit me right between the eyes,” Becky declares.

“Rick and I had met for dinner and I told him that I felt the Lord wanted me to take the job, so I quit the school system and took that position,” Becky says. “Samuel was brought to us exactly one year later to the day of me accepting the job with the church. God wants our obedience and that was a huge lesson for Rick and I – that God just wants our ‘yes’ and He takes care of the rest.”

In 1998, while Becky was working at the church, Dr. Atkins felt led to begin the academy and Dr. Tony Romans came to lead the first year of school with six kindergarten students and one teacher.

A year later, the senior pastor had left to take a church in Alabama and Dr. Romans went with him. Becky had approached Silverdale’s current pastor, Tony Walliser, with an offer to temporarily help him in keeping the newly formed school going until he could find someone. She did not expect to stay the headmaster for the next 14 years.

“That first year, we did our academic testing and scores went out of the roof. We had 275 students enrolled the year I became headmaster and now we are an accredited school with over 1,000 students. There are so many people who have poured their hearts and lives into it, I can’t even tell you…” Becky says.

Watching the school grow, Becky remembers when the athletic fields were built. “It was over a million dollars, but we were debt free. We had donors who believed in what we were doing and it was paid for when it was built,” Becky says.

Silverdale is deemed ‘Seahawk Nation’ with various sports offered, such as baseball, swim team, football, softball, track, basketball, volleyball and golf.

“We have had two teams recently go to state,” Becky says. “For years we only got beat and now they are incredible athletes.  Our boy’s baseball team went all the way to the state playoffs and came in second and the girls went to state last year.”

Having just built the new building for the high school, Becky is proud of how far the Academy has come over the last 15 years.

With her faith being challenged as to what direction to go in her career, the adoption of a child and uncertainties of the future, Becky sought God’s will and had learned to trust Him through it all.

The biggest challenge of all came three years ago during a routine mammogram when Becky stared at a small white spot that threatened her life as she viewed the results to her exam.

“Immediately when I saw it, I just knew,” Becky says.

Cancer had been growing in her breast for three years. Becky elected to have surgery to have the cancer removed and follow with radiation. That whole summer, she went to Memorial every day for treatments.

Becky closes her eyes, going back to that vivid memory as she describes the room and the cold metal table she would lie on.

“The door to the room was at least 12 inches thick. It was the most unfriendly room. I was told that even the cleaning lady hated to go in after the door had closed, scaring her. If you don’t understand it – you think there is radiation coming out of the walls all of the time - it just scares you. Everyone was so loving to me, but nobody wanted to go in that room,” Becky insists.

“I just lay on the table during my treatments, while radiation came out of the walls and into my breast. It was the most unnatural thing. They would close that door and it was just me, lying there with radiation shooting into me,” Becky illustrates.

Though she never lost her hair, she did lose her eyelashes and her eyebrows had thinned. It was important for Becky to think of positive things while lying on the cold metal table. 

“I would just lay there and think of whatever I could that was happy. Things about me and my dad when I was growing up and when Samuel was born and when I came to know the Lord… just positive things because you know that whenever you hear the word cancer… there is a chance you are not going to live,” she expresses. 

On the last radiation treatment, patients get to ‘ring the bell’ to celebrate that they had made it through. Becky was so enthusiastic, she actually broke the bell. This did not surprise anyone who knew her. Becky had always done everything with 110 percent effort. 

Becky has been involved in events for breast cancer awareness as well as having the Mary Ellen Locher Mobile Coach come on the campus at the academy for the community to have mammograms close by.

Becky had the prayers and support of her family and friends and, though it was an ordeal to go through, she had not been really shaken until this summer when she feared once again for her life.

After having the cancer surgically removed, undergoing radiation treatments and still on chemo medication, Becky had high hopes that she had survived breast cancer and God had answered the many prayers lifted up for her. When she became ill again three years later, she had noticed alarming symptoms that fell in perfect sync with inflammatory breast cancer. Becky felt defeated.

It is unlike her personality to give up or think the worst, but Becky had an urgent sense that she was definitely stricken with IBC which is an aggressive cancer that grows quickly and is more likely to come back after treatment than most other types of breast cancer.

“An ultra sound confirmed that it was IBC and even my oncologist told us that it was,” Becky affirms.

The only test to completely rule out IBC and to give Becky even an ounce of hope was to have a biopsy, but by this time she knew in her spirit that she had it.

“I was talking to a friend and I said, ‘I think God is going to have me walk through this… that it is cancer, but that it is going to be okay’,” Becky says.

Becky went through the longest four weeks of her life while the dark cloud of cancer loomed over her with no definitive answers. It was as though she were watching each grain of sand trickle through an hourglass as she contemplated how long she may have to live.

During the moment when Becky had seen the spot of cancer the first time, she had answers and she had hope. There was a prognosis and a plan. This time, facing a deadly cancer with no answers and no hope was like death in itself.

“I cried, telling my oncologist, ‘I have a 16-year-old… I have to know’,” Becky says.

“A week before the biopsy, I had asked everyone to pray. I was in the hospital for six days and they gave me antibiotics while I was going through this. I went home with no change and continued to take antibiotics. I thought I was going to die.

Becky kept her ordeal private within the family, but she had sent an urgent request for prayer on Facebook to all her friends just before going in the hospital. The biopsy results showed that she had cellulitis. It was an answer to prayer that it wasn’t cancer, but Becky feels strongly that it had been cancer and the fervent prayers of those who loved her made a difference.

“If it was cellulitis, the antibiotics would have taken care of it immediately. For six days I was in the hospital with no change and the ultrasound had showed cancer. There is a thickening of the skin with IBC and where it should only be three inches, mine was seven,” Becky says.

During the bleakest time in her life, Becky learned a powerful lesson. Being the organized person she was and, with what she calls a ‘bossy personality’, she had to let go of all control. Being one who would always make all the wheels turn, Becky had to make the decision to let go of certain things. Her ill-health had caused her to cancel anything that was not most important. Becky’s job was always important to her, but she realized that others could step in.

“In my priorities, everything that I cancelled, were things that I thought were imperative… but the only thing I focused on then, was my family…” Becky’s eyes fill with tears, “being with my family was the only thing I wanted to do.”

Becky began recovering and recently went back to work. She hosts a Bible study in her home with her high school students and has a prayer room with a wall dedicated them. 

“My students will trace their hand on the wall and write their favorite verse on it and I will come down here in my prayer time and place my hand on it praying that verse over them. When the large paper on the wall gets covered up, Rick will just attach another one on top of it so I always have them,” Becky says.

When Silverdale student Allison Meadows was stabbed in Pittsburgh, Becky went to her prayer room and placed her hand over Allison’s handprint with her favorite verse Proverbs 3:5-6 and prayed for her.

“It’s funny… I told Rick before we got married that I wanted 12 kids and he still married me anyway,” Becky jokes. “I may have always wanted 12 kids, but now I have over a thousand.”

jen@jenjeffrey.com
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