Ten years ago, with no warning, Yvline Tanis’ mother began writhing in pain. She and her sister were playing quietly on their mother’s bed when she started screaming for anything to dull the pain. The two sprinted to the nearest drug store and returned with Tylenol in hand. But it didn’t help.

That night, doctors diagnosed Yvline Tanis’ mother, Yves Nodex Tanis, with ovarian cancer. She passed away seven years later on Sept. 19, 2010 at the age of 46.

“After her first operation, the doctors only gave her three months to live,” Yvline Tanis said. “But we prayed, and my mother was such a strong woman and had such a strong heart that she lived in and out of remission for several more years. I know people have different beliefs, but I think it shows that the doctors don’t always have the last say.”

Drawing motivation from her experience with her mother, Yvline Tanis, a junior mechanical engineering student and the Haitian American Student Association’s vice president, brought the national Turn The Towns Teal campaign to Syracuse University in honor of September being National Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month. The campaign, which ends Monday, involved hanging teal-colored ribbons around the Quad to raise money and to increase awareness about this form of cancer, often called the “silent killer” for its difficulty to diagnose, said Flose Boursiquot, the association’s president.

Monday night, the group is hosting a closing ceremony called “OVARcome the Silence,” during which the top donators will be recognized and various speakers will share their stories and connections with ovarian cancer.

“You should be able to trust your doctor,” said Boursiquot, a senior sociology and public relations student. “But they don’t always catch everything. That’s why we did this. We need to make people aware of their bodies.”

Eager to do something, but struggling to find a good cause to tackle, the association didn’t come up with the idea until Yvline Tanis went to this year’s New York State Fair and saw a booth dedicated to ovarian cancer. She said she was overcome with emotion and committed herself right then to raise awareness and do something in memory of her mother. But by that time, almost a week of the awareness month had passed.

The group struggled to get the campaign running and started questioning whether it was worth picking up so late into the month, said Quameiha Raymond-Ducheine, the group’s public relations director. Yvline Tanis was unwilling to quit. But her friends and group members didn’t know why.

At the time, none of them knew about her mother.

“We were up really late one night, sitting around the table in the library planning when she finally told us,” said Raymond-Ducheine, an undecided sophomore in the Whitman School of Management. “From that moment it became a priority to accomplish.”

The association reached out to all the clubs and organizations on campus, asking for donations. Boursiquot said they hoped to raise $2,000 by the end of the month, but as of Sunday they only raised an estimated $400. Though they fell short of their monetary goal, Raymond-Ducheine said the amount of awareness they raised exceeded expectations. 

Phedeline Tanis, the sister who was with Yvline Tanis the night their mother was sent to the hospital, will talk about her own experience at the “OVARcome the Silence” event. Though their mother lived for eight years after her original diagnosis, it was never easy for her or her family. No moment was harder than when a cashier at a Burlington Coat Factory mistook their mother for being pregnant, when in reality her tumor had grown so large that people often made that mistake.

“As I grew older, I became really protective of my mother,” Yvline Tanis said. “As a kid, it was one of those things where I told myself she would be OK, that there was no way she was going to die. As I grew up and watched my mother go through changes and go in an out of the hospital so much, I started noticing how people treated her.”

Overall the members said the campaign was a success and they hope to make it an annual event. In the future, they said they will start planning earlier so they have the entire month of September to raise money for the Turn The Towns Teal organization.

Publicizing her mother’s story to her friends for the first time, Yvline Tanis said she used this campaign as a healing process and an outline to help others.

Said Yvline Tanis: “I never would have talked about her publicly before. But on the anniversary, I finally felt comfortable telling people, and now I want to raise other people’s chance of survival.”

Published on September 30, 2013 at 1:02 am

Contact Joe: jtinfant@syr.edu | @joeinfantino