Breast cancer runs in Jill Martin’s, ’97, family. Her grandmother died early because of it. Her mother caught it early and is healthy today.
So Martin, who is a contributor to the Today show and is an entrepreneur with her own fashion line, kept up-to-date on her mammograms and sonograms. After a clean scan in January 2023, Martin’s doctor asked her about doing genetic testing for the BRCA gene which can be predictive of breast cancer.
Between Zoom calls, Martin spit into a test tube for the testing and didn’t think about it again until her doctor called with the news: she was positive for the BRCA gene.
“The day I got diagnosed, my mammogram was perfect. It’s the best test we have, but no test is perfect,” Martin says.
According to the National Cancer Institute, more than 60 percent of women who inherit a harmful change in the BRCA gene will develop breast cancer during their lifetime. That compares with about 13 percent of women in the general population who will develop breast cancer.
For Martin, an MRI test found a tumor the mammogram had missed and she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Martin immediately scheduled a double mastectomy, and she came out of the surgery to the news that the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes and she would need chemotherapy.
More than a year later, Martin says she’s cancer-free and is encouraging others to get screened for the BRCA gene.
“I’m shouting from the rooftops, if you have cancer in your family, ask your doctor if genetic testing is right for you,” she said. “I think that my mission on this earth is to spread awareness about this gene.”
One person who got that message was Martin’s former U-M roommate, Melissa Witczyk, ’98. As she recalled in a segment on the Today show, Witczyk got gene testing done after seeing Martin’s story, and she too was positive for the BRCA gene. Witczyk decided to undergo preventative surgery, having a double mastectomy as well as her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed. Witczyk credits the test with saving her life.
The two met in Ann Arbor where Martin studied communications and began her dual career in broadcasting and entrepreneurship. As part of Martin’s latest clothing line, which was developed while she was recovering from surgeries, she is donating a portion of proceeds of select pink edition items to support breast cancer research, including to U-M’s Rogel Cancer Center.
Martin encourages both men and women to ask their doctors about genetic testing.
“I cannot watch one more person go through this unnecessarily,” she says. “Some forms of cancer cannot be avoided, but this most likely would’ve been had I caught it and had the preventive surgery.”