Well Being: Golfer would not be stopped by breast cancer

In late June, Muffy McCabe won the women's golf tournament at the Philadelphia Country Club. There was a certain inevitability about it, truthfully, and it shouldn't come as a big surprise.

Her relatives have been members of the club for three generations. McCabe began playing golf when she was 6. When she was at Shipley School, she played in the third position on the boys' varsity (there was no girls' team). As an adult, in her mid-30s, she played golf every day and excelled in interclub contests. In 2010, she played 174 rounds in a year, and in a golf marathon to raise money for caddie scholarships she played 144 holes in one day.

Practicing is easy and convenient. In the backyard of her home in Glen Mills, Delaware County, McCabe, 41, has a small golf course. There's a tee box, a short fairway, and two bunkers on either side of a putting green. The distance from the tee to the pin is 101 yards and there are six pin positions on the green. The mini-golf course was a gift from her husband, Michael, an insurance agent and former plumbing contractor.

So it's not all that remarkable that Muffy McCabe's name will be engraved on the huge Stanley Cup-like trophy at the Philadelphia Country Club in Gladwyne, symbolizing her status as 2013 women's champion. What is amazing, though, is that she was able to play at all.

In 2009, McCabe, a former schoolteacher, began noticing that her bra strap on her left side was chafing against a marble-size lump. Alarmed, she had a mammogram. Initial results were negative. But McCabe felt the lump growing and didn't want to take any chances. (She had nursed her father as he was dying of colon cancer.) So she had a second mammogram and an ultrasound performed at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. A subsequent needle biopsy confirmed she had cancer.

"I was shocked and scared," says McCabe, who was then only 38 and had neither a family history of breast cancer nor the so-called breast cancer gene. "Breast cancer is becoming more and more common among young women. It's an epidemic."

In April 2011, she had surgery. The lump was removed as well as surrounding tissue and one lymph node in her left armpit. McCabe was worried about the removal of lymph nodes:

"I was nervous because of lymphedema. I knew that if I had significant swelling in my left arm, my golf would go right out the door."

Her cancer was not a type that responds well to chemotherapy; McCabe had eight rounds of radiation on her left breast followed by a culminating super blast. Her cancer is now in remission.

But it took its toll. McCabe lost a lot of strength. At 5-foot-7 and 120 pounds, she's a trim woman to begin with, so she can't drive the ball as far as other women with more heft. To fortify her stroke, she began swinging a golf swing fan, a club with four fanlike blades that provide resistance, 100 times a day. She also began lifting weights in her home gym.

At first, she was so weak she couldn't walk the course during practice rounds for the 2011 Women's Match Play Champion- ship at Sunnybrook Golf Club in Plymouth Meeting. Nevertheless, she did walk the course once competition began and even in her diminished state finished runner-up in the second flight.

Except for one female member, who chastised McCabe because during recovery she was unable to participate in team matches, everyone at Philadelphia Country Club has been "wonderfully helpful and encouraging," McCabe says. Two breast cancer survivors from other clubs against whom McCabe competes have also been "super- supportive," she says.

One happy consequence: While healing, McCabe spent so much time practicing chipping and putting that those parts of her game improved substantially. She continues to exercise and gain strength. She estimates that her drives to the green are about 15 to 20 yards shorter than they were before surgery.

"I don't know how much she told you," says her coach, Jason Hrynkiw, who met McCabe when he was an assistant pro at the club in 2007 and who continues to guide her from afar as head pro at Gleneagles Country Club in Del Ray Beach, Fla. "But she finished runner-up [for the women's championship] for 17 years. So that tells you a lot about her, and her devotion to the game, and to her club. She has such a passion for the game, and this a major, major hurdle for her to overcome and win the club title. She's a go-getter who just never gives up."

For her part, McCabe says, "I'm so grateful that I can play golf again, because it's such a big part of my life. You can't give up. You have to set goals and do everything in your power to persist and accomplish them."

Contact Art Carey at art.carey@ gmail.com. See recent columns at www.philly.com/wellbeing.