Small Batches of Love and Life Can be Found at Beam Suntory

photos by Beth Burrows

April Elston was at work two years ago when she received an email that would change her life. Test results from an April 2022 biopsy revealed that she had cancer in her right breast, and a series of follow-up calls with her medical team presented a narrow range of treatment options. 

Elston could have just the sole affected breast removed, undergo a double mastectomy, or elect only to have the cancerous mass taken out, meaning that her breasts would remain otherwise intact. During these conversations, her mind was flooded with questions. She wondered: What if it’s in my lymph nodes? What if they’re not able to treat it? What is it going to do to me? What is it going to do to my family? 

A part of her, she says, was preparing to die.

For her entire life, Elston has been someone with a logical, scientific mind. As the senior manager for the whiskey research and innovation team at Beam Suntory, the world’s third-largest producer of alcoholic beverages, she likes to have all the facts before she moves ahead: whether that’s on a new work project or in raising the two children she shares with her wife. But now that she was barreling forward into the unknown, the uncertainties of what she was experiencing utterly terrified her. 

“I didn’t want to make the wrong decision,” she says. “Literally, my life was on the line.”

Ultimately, Elston opted to have a double mastectomy, which took place exactly 40 days after her initial diagnosis. Because her lymph nodes tested negative for cancer, she did not have to undergo chemotherapy treatment, which can be physically grueling. 

The most difficult part of adjusting to life after her surgery, Elston says, was navigating the myriad (and ongoing) changes in her body. She used to run 25 miles a week, including a half marathon each weekend. But during her convalescence, Elston says it was “humbling” to need her wife’s help to wash herself or even be able to climb into the shower. It took eight weeks before she went in for chest reconstruction surgery, during which time she had a chest expander to help make room for the implants.

“If you use expanders, they essentially will stitch onto your chest these metal expanders and then they slowly inflate them,” she explains. “It stretches your skin. I constantly felt it, and I couldn’t get back to myself. My wife and I called them waves: We’d just have to take on one wave at a time, whether it was doctor’s appointments, the cancer, or surgeries. Whatever life offered to us, we just took it one step at a time.”

Even two years later, Elston acknowledges that some facets of her existence are fundamentally different, and they may never go back to the way they were before. These days, Elston finds shopping for bathing suits to be a miserable experience, and she can no longer wear a typical, off-the-rack bra due to her implants, which her plastic surgeon compared to “two hamburgers.” (“They don’t have the mountaintops,” he had advised her.) 

She rarely ever went to the doctor prior to her diagnosis—aside from her annual physical exam—but she now has to make regular appointments to get infusions of calcium in her bones. Last year, she underwent a full hysterectomy to lessen the chances of breast cancer recurrence.

But despite her fears about what cancer would take from her, Elston says that, for the most part, her life today feels profoundly normal. She credits that, in no small way, to her employer. When she was finally able to return to work, Elston says that she was heartened that none of the other members of her team treated her with “kid gloves:” “It made me feel like I was my old self, like I wasn’t being treated any differently from before I had cancer,” she recalls. “I wanted to make sure that I could get back to it, and it was about proving to myself that I could.”

Although she didn’t want to be coddled at a job where she had worked for eight years, Elston notes that her fellow coworkers did go out of their way to show her that she was loved and supported: buying her gift cards, offering to pay for meals, and recommending books to read on cancer recovery. The master distiller at Beam Suntory’s Louisville office, Freddie Noe, even created a special edition of his whiskey brand, Little Book, to raise money for breast cancer treatment and prevention.

Elston was heartened to see her coworkers unanimously have her back—because when she first moved to Kentucky to work for Beam Suntory now 10 years ago, Elston admits that she wasn’t sure what to expect. 

While she says that her mother was a “huge Jim Beam drinker,” referencing the company’s flagship brand, Elston hadn’t yet developed the taste for bourbon. She has since come to appreciate the liquor’s richness, complexity, and its wide variety of flavors, Elston says. Whereas she describes the vodka as uniformly “colorless and odorless,” she enjoys the creativity of bourbon, searching for the notes of vanilla or caramel hidden deep within the batch.

And as an out queer woman, Elston wasn’t sure how she fit in with that world. She had never even visited Kentucky prior to the move and she was concerned that she wouldn’t be accepted; having her work family there to help find her new normal was just one more indication of how unfounded those old apprehensions were. 

Since they were very little, Elston says that she has regularly brought her children with her to the distillery to show them “what Mommy does” for a living, and she has never taken for granted—even for a moment—that she feels comfortable enough to do that.

“I didn’t know what I was going to walk into, but I came in and said, ‘This is me,’” she says. “I was given some advice back in college: ‘If you don’t make a big deal about things, other people don’t make a big deal about things.’ I love my life, and being gay doesn’t hinder me. It doesn’t negate anything that I bring to the table here at work. It’s just another piece of who I am.”