I can grow, I can learn, I can teach. Those are the three things in life that will always get you by! And here’s the thing about life, when you get stuck, any one of those three things, it will kick you ‘til you’re unstuck, whether you want to or not.
“I tell my friends all the time that what I do is look through the front of the windshield; I don’t look in the rearview mirror. You know what this is: you have to see the obstacles in front of you, and you go through them; they’re speed bumps. Some are bigger potholes; some are bigger bumps. You know, you gotta slow down a little bit more, from that standpoint, but there’s no use looking in the back. What’s behind you is behind you, and then look forward.”
“I got ready to go to school, I went to say goodbye to Mom, but she wouldn’t wake up to say goodbye to me. I left for school, and couldn’t think, couldn’t focus. I knew something wasn’t right. Whatever power you’d like to say was involved, my mom knew that I needed to know, and I needed to get to say goodbye. The doctors said that she should never have woken up that day, she should’ve been gone first thing in the morning, that when she went into the coma, she should’ve been gone at that point, but when I got home from school at 10 after 3, she opened her eyes and said goodbye to me. She was gone at quarter after 3. She waited for me, to say goodbye.”
“I am fortunate, it is a funny thing to say that you are fortunate when you have cancer but I mean I am fortunate I have seen people who are much worse off than I am, much sicker than I am. And I have seen people who are much younger than me much sicker than me, which I mean is just really a terrible thing to see.”
“In the Marine Corps, we’re taught this. When the enemy attacks, you don’t let the enemy attack. You assault the enemy. You press into them. So we got as much information as we could. He started eating right, started getting himself squared away and everything like that. He went through a nasty bout of chemo, lost a lot of weight. My brother…God bless him. My brother was a very vain man. He had long hair and he lost all of it. Well, he went into remission for a little while, got through the chemo. He just kept fighting.”
“I am fortunate, it is a funny thing to say that you are fortunate when you have cancer but I mean I am fortunate I have seen people who are much worse off than I am, much sicker than I am. And I have seen people who are much younger than me much sicker than me, which I mean is just really a terrible thing to see.”
“I think my husband [was the best support] because he was there all the time. We went in for consultation with the doctor after surgery. The doctor had asked Ron, “How do you feel about this?” And Ron said, “It wasn’t her fault. It’s no different than her losing an arm or a leg.” And the doctor said, “You two will be fine. You’d be surprised how many husbands will divorce their wives because they lost a breast.” This really surprised me because I thought: it can’t be love. I mean, how can you adore a part of the body like that, you know? So I felt very secure with my marriage.”
“When you go through something like this….the strength at the beginning you think I can’t do this. And then as you do you think wow and you become a stronger person and through that. And also sometimes I think that humor and just trying to find something light and something funny out of something that is just tragic. I think the one Christmas we sent out Christmas cards and we all put on red bandannas, all five of us, by our Christmas tree (because she had no hair) and so that was. And we got more people that said that was such a neat thing. Or pictures of my kids putting my wig on, or just stuff like that, just little things like that. You need them, you need to find them some humor and something lighter in the situation. It helps.”
“In the Marine Corps, we’re taught this. When the enemy attacks, you don’t let the enemy attack. You assault the enemy. You press into them. So we got as much information as we could. He started eating right, started getting himself squared away and everything like that. He went through a nasty bout of chemo, lost a lot of weight. My brother…God bless him. My brother was a very vain man. He had long hair and he lost all of it. Well, he went into remission for a little while, got through the chemo. He just kept fighting.”
“So I have already been the caregiver, I’ve been the recipient of cancer and I’ve been re-diagnosed with cancer. I understand the stress of being a caregiver, especially when you go from having a spouse to being a caregiver for that spouse. You know you’re a caregiver for your children, you’re a caregiver for your elderly parents; you don’t expect being a caregiver for your spouse, you expect to work together.”
“The day I was diagnosed, I had never felt better in my whole life. And then to be told you have cancer, you just spend a while just even comprehending what that means. In the 6 years, as merle said it, it really is a journey. It’s not journey you go through by yourself, the caregiver role is incredibly important. So it’s a journey that impacts and affects the whole family.”
“I think it’s very important to have things to look forward to. I really had a lot to look forward to, and I think it really helped. I live in a retirement center now, and when I watched the people there and the ones who were active were the ones who had something to do, some purpose for their life. I really think they need a purpose. If they have a purpose, they’re much more outgoing and active and everything. Right now, I travel, I travel a lot.”
“I think the hardest part for me of having her gone is that she is not here to enjoy my children. My husband and I feel really sad every day that she is not here. My mom used to love hot fudge sundaes, so as a memorial for her and because all of her friends were in Chicago and her funeral was here, I had a big party for her in Chicago at the North Shore Hilton up in the top, because she used to like it there. It’s really easy for all her friends to get to and we had ice cream sundaes. And everyone got to talk. And there were 100 people there… It was a nice goodbye for her.”
“I can say the best thing that I did was, my wife started a care pages blog for me. I update my blog everyday on what goes on. I've got over 150 people that follow it every day. They can write messages back to me on the blog so I don't get the 50 phone calls a day anymore. … When you're feeling down and out, or lack of energy cause of your chemo, that's a huge emotional tool, a great tool so I recommend that to anybody, start a care pages blog.”
“I can say the best thing that I did was, my wife started a care pages blog for me. I update my blog everyday on what goes on. I've got over 150 people that follow it every day. They can write messages back to me on the blog so I don't get the 50 phone calls a day anymore. … When you're feeling down and out, or lack of energy cause of your chemo, that's a huge emotional tool, a great tool so I recommend that to anybody, start a care pages blog.”
“A lot of people tell me I’m lucky. But I think that’s a shame that people have that mindset that if you survive cancer, you’re lucky. We need to change that perception. Let’s make it to where a cancer diagnosis isn’t such a dire thing. We need to help more people get better treatments, so that someday if someone says, ‘I had cancer but I don’t anymore,’ it’s going to be just as common as someone saying, ‘I broke my leg when I was a kid.’ One day I hope we see that in the future. Maybe not in my lifetime, but hopefully in my daughter’s.”
“You know, my daughter, I'm very concerned for her. Her doctor would not give her a mammogram until she was 40. I think this is something that needs to stop. People younger than you girls are coming down with breast cancer or some form of cancer. And they will find a cure to this, I'm sure they will. But until then, I cannot stress a mammogram enough. The doctor that found mine was very young. After I went through my surgeries, I went back and I looked at him and said, “thank you.” He said, “you're the first one that has ever said thank you.” So I felt good, I felt good about that. But your family doctor, you know, they are just that - family doctors. They are not specialists and I can't stress enough to look for a breast cancer specialist.”
“She was not afraid, but still didn't want to die. I don’t think anybody does. Still, she fought until the last minute. In fact, most days she’d say: I’m ready to die, but not today… but she was certain that there was something more. And I’ve said to many people that [as a pastor] I have buried so many wonderful people, that I have to believe that they haven’t just ceased to be; that their spirits are somewhere.”
“It just hits a spot. Our family has had vast experience with the dreaded disease… I hear the word cancer and I cringe. Every time we’ve been hit with one of these things it’s been out of the blue. I’ve been an EMT ... and I’ve been at the scene of many fatal accidents. I don’t know how many people expected someone in their life to leave that morning and never come back.”
“I am a twice survivor of cancer... November 1999 I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I was the first recorded patient that has an Hodgkin’s Lymphoma started in brain tumor. I ended up going to 6 months of radiation and they only gave me about a 20% chance of living. After 5 years, they found that the cancer came back. So in January 2006, it came back and it was pretty aggressive. I did 15 months of chemotherapy and I was not doing any good. I was on the hardest chemo treatment the hospital had.”
“You’re changed. The thing is, when you’re told you have cancer, you don’t have any choice in the matter. You have to accept it. You can’t say, “Nah, I don’t think I want cancer.” You’re told you have it and you just have to accept it and you have to start moving. Things that were important to me before diagnosis, I don’t even really care about them. In the overall scheme of things it’s not that big of a deal. It helps you to re-prioritize your life.”
“When working with cancer patients at the medical clinic, you’re definitely forming relationships with them. You see them all the time, so you can start to interact with them on a much deeper level. You’re sharing something very personal with them and I consider that an opportunity to be encouraging and to help spread cheer because what they are doing is hard. My job is to be the best friend to them that I can be.”
“I don’t want to say [cancer] was a good thing, but honestly I think cancer was the best thing that happened to me in my life. Now I have so many dreams and they’re so much bigger than [the dreams] I had before. I’d like to do a lot of things. I want to travel, and I want to write a book and I want to run another marathon. I have a bucket list, I want to fulfill it. I think that when you beat something like cancer, then it propels you forward and it makes you think that you can do anything… I’m just grateful for everything and for everyday… I think it’s changed me a lot, but that’s just a little glimmer.”
“I went through that, and it was painful. I ended up wearing a colostomy pouch, and they said that it was bad enough to wear, that they can’t turn around and get rid of it, so I have to wear it the rest of my life. At that time, I felt bad for myself that this happened. It was a change in my life, to feel strange of what I have to go through. I felt so bad that I wanted to leave this world. It wasn’t too long, a year and a half or so after that, I had to have open heart surgery, where I ended up having to have open heart surgery, which made it even worse. I was feeling so bad, that I didn’t want to be here anymore. I felt like this isn’t… it’s time for me to leave. I was praying in that way. That’s when I asked the lord, and said, “I’m ready.””
The Illini 4000 • PO Box 2431 Champaign, IL 61825 • The Illini 4000 is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
