Battle Face
Tiffany Baumann Nelson remembers the first time she took off her wig and saw her bald head while undergoing stage 3 breast cancer treatment.
“I would always hide behind hair and makeup,” says the former Miss Ohio. “I actually felt more beautiful with my buzzed hair because I had overcome so much, I was so strong, deeper in my faith, had so much self-discovery. It was freeing.”
While beauty has helped the now-42-year-old Medina native find success as a professional singer, Ford Model, actress and songwriter since she was discovered at 16 by a Disney talent agent, her cancer battle gave her a new perspective.
“It taught me how to see the beauty from within,” Baumann says.
In a way, it’s given her confidence to embrace her most genuine self. When she’s not onstage or in front of cameras, very little makeup embellishes her fresh face, and her wardrobe skews toward jeans and T-shirts.
Despite a glamorous life that includes having a backstage moment with Sally Field while making the 2000 movie “Beautiful” and singing the national anthem at the U.S. Open, Indianapolis 500 and Cleveland Browns and Cleveland Cavaliers games, she’s still the competitive tomboy she was as a kid.
She has a middle school yearbook where a classmate named Mike wrote, “Tiffany, I like you even though you run faster than me.”
“It was always a competition — not just with others but within myself,” she says.
That instinct to fight for the win tempered her fear of death and helped get her through the cancer treatment. Although her 2012 diagnosis came just three months after ending her marriage to former Chicago Bears defensive back Jim Cantelupe and moving from Chicago to Ohio with her two young kids, Baumann remained strong as she fought through a year of chemotherapy and radiation, a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.
Shortly after completing her treatment, Baumann continued the battle against the disease by using her business and marketing education from Cleveland State University to organize a benefit concert at Society Lounge in Cleveland. That concert has grown into an annual event that benefits either University Hospitals — where she had her treatment — or the Susan G. Komen foundation and to date has raised about $50,000. This year’s event is July 11 at the Music Box Supper Club in Cleveland.
Now cancer-free for almost seven years, her life has a much different focus than it used to. In January, she married Methodist minister Jason J. Nelson and moved with her children to his home in Houston with his four kids, three dogs, two bunnies and some fish. And she’s enrolled in an online Liberty University graduate school program pursuing a Master of Arts in Christian Ministry. She still takes singing gigs but now also sings on a worship team at her husband’s church.
Amid all that, she returns to Ohio about once a month to visit her mom in Parma Heights and her dad and grandparents in Medina and to continue her work to raise funds and awareness about breast cancer by speaking at events at Western Reserve Hospital, University Hospitals and other area institutions. Those are where she connects with other women and helps them find fellowship in their shared trials.
“It’s not OK with me to just sit back and wait for somebody else to do something,” she says. “I made my mess my message.”
From working three jobs to be the first college graduate in her family to singing on national stages to beating cancer, her “mess” is more like a victory long fought for. And Baumann is grateful for all of it.
“I’m not the 20-year-old girl anymore,” she says. “I have wisdom. I have something interesting to say, which before I’m not quite sure I did.”
Buy benefit tickets at komenneohio.org/tiffanyconcert.