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.”
“You need some distraction so you’re not sitting at home going “Oh, that next treatment’s coming up. I don’t wanna do this” or “The last one was horrible” or “Nothing tastes good.” Beyond that, the hard ones are the people that don’t have a lot of family. We have a few people who will sometimes meet and go and sit with them while they’re going through chemo. It’s a mental game. You just remind them, it does get better.”
“Coming to a support group –I think you can get a lot of information networking with people who have already gone down the path that you’re about to go down. Cancer education centers, the American Cancer society is really great. They have a 1-800 number even if you need to call someone to talk to someone at 3 AM they will be there to answer the phone.”
“The story, as with all of ours who have had cancer, is that, sometimes, the cancer is not the defining point. It is maybe the element that gets our story told, but, truthfully, the story is about the lives that surround us and the lives we can touch through it.
For me, the cancer brought things out about myself that I never knew, and never would have. There was a purpose, and I believe that things do happen for a purpose. And I believe that sometimes the journey at night is through a dark, horrible forest, but during the day it is a gorgeous, beautiful wooded area that has a clear lake with a reflection. Perspective is a marvelous thing.”
“It looked like they were going to be passing away at the same time, but it didn’t turn out that way. I was able to gain strength and know that this was my place. I needed to be able to help them and do the best that I could to love them, get them the medical care, and take care of them the best I could. This was to give them a fighting chance.”
“We really need to help those who can’t afford cancer treatment because cancer is very expensive and it can financially drain you if you’re not prepared for it. Which we weren’t prepared, but thank goodness I had wonderful medical coverage. Because that’s what got me through. So I was very fortunate, too, that I was able to have sick time that I had on my own that I could rely upon to be out. And I almost had enough to cover me from June of last year until March of this year.”
“Talking with fellow workers and other people in the community, towards the end of life or retirement, there are two biggest things that affect your life. One is retirement and the other is the loss of your spouse. And that hit me really hard. That’s when I hit the realization that things were as dire as they were. The cancer had progressed so rapidly through her body that it was going to be a real challenge and a good possibility that it wasn’t going to be a winning challenge, that anything was going to work for it. And that was a very difficult thing to overcome. But we did. She took the drugs well; she responded to the drugs. And six years later, we’re still here. We’re still here, and we’re here together. And that’s where I keep saying, the hope, the faith, and the love are the key factors.”
“I think I stay positive because of the philosophy that I hold. Things just get rolling when you die. Some of my good friends – two of my good golf buddies – have died in the last two years and I’d kind of like to see them again, those assholes. They’re up there playing golf every day and I’m down here. And everybody is going to die. As we all know, everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. So that’s a problem. At this stage of the game, I’m not as afraid of dying; I mean, that’s the least of things.”
“Sue called me at 3 o’clock in the morning and said, “I wanna go home. I wanna be with my husband.” He passed away before she did. And I said, “Well, you’ll go home. You’ll see him again someday.” Little did we know that she stopped taking her medicine and she wanted to go home. And that’s really hard, with somebody close – it just really, really hurts, you know. She mourned her husband. He had Alzheimer’s. And now she’s with him. I know they’re all together now.”
“It’s perfectly okay to sit down with a cancer patient at any age and if they feel like crying, just cry with them. On the other hand, if they want to do something to completely avoid thinking about what’s going on, do it with them. Arrange anything you can that will be joyful to them, any wishes they had – I always wish I could have done this or that – make it happen.”
“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.”
“We have always been close. My sisters and brothers and children all live close here. We have always been a close-knit family. So we got a lot of support from everybody.
Everybody was very kind to us. And when you live in a smaller community you get a lot more support because you know a lot of people. Even the doctors and nurses were kind, and then the contributions – they gave us gas money to go to Rochester. So that was a great help because it was very expensive, all those trips.”
“They don’t want to be treated like they have cancer, because it’s not something they want to identify themselves… I mean maybe I’m just speaking from a personal stance, but it’s important to realize they’re still just the same as you. And while they have all this fundraising for them, it’s for the greater cause. You don’t want to be singled out as like the bald kid and all that other stuff.”
“Be positive, because your mind is really powerful and it can help you. I also really believe that Eastern medicine is just as important as Western and all the things like acupuncture and massage and yoga and meditation are super important because they help your spirit as well as your body. And I think it helps you stay strong because you need to eat really well and work out and you know, stay as healthy as you can. I think…a lot of those things help with the side effects of the western medicine to not be as bad.”
“Cancer doesn’t discriminate between religions, sexual orientation, anything like that. The one thing none of us can afford to do is to hang on to any preconceived prejudices. You love everybody for who they are and it doesn’t matter, because we all share the fear of an uncertain future. So it brings out the realness in people. It brings out the thing that is most important to people. You don’t have the luxury of the petty thoughts. In that way, some people are actually blessed to have cancer come into their lives because they can cut through and can learn some lessons as they search deep inside themselves.”
The Illini 4000 • PO Box 2431 Champaign, IL 61825 • The Illini 4000 is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
