Support for LateToSchool

somemom · May 1, 2008, 7:19pm

Muhammad Ali’s quote is a little poignant given his current condition and the speculation that it was caused by all the blows to the head :(

epistrophy · May 2, 2008, 12:43am

and another

“The Climb
Cancer Survivors Bond Via Outward Bound”

(CBS) 60 Minutes II updates a story of 10 women who went to an Outward Bound camp in the woods of Maine in 1986. For four days and nights, these women from New York’s Westchester County lived in tents and endured physical challenges and obstacles more closely associated with soldiers than with middle-aged suburbanites.

What set them apart, what made them different from others who have gone to Outward Bound, is that each of them had a serious bout with cancer. Ed Bradley updates his report, which aired on 60 Minutes in February 1987.

1987 Report

For that first broadcast, Ed Bradley asked the women in the group what they found most frightening about learning that they had cancer.

“That you’re going to die,” one woman answered plainly.

“You don’t think of people who’ve gone through it and survived,” said Anne. “You just think of those who have gone before you. And, you know, it’s just really scary. And then, you know, you just build up this courage and just say, ‘I’m going to lick it.’”

These women were part of a small support group sponsored by the American Cancer Society to try to help each other get through the ordeal of cancer.

“A lot of people said we were crazy to do it,” Sally said.

The first challenge was the low ropes course.

“Concentrate. It’ll make it a little easier,” instructed Seran, who along with Andrea worked for Outward Bound as an instructor.

What Outward Bound tries to do is to build up confidence and the ability to trust others. The women are being prepared for much more difficult obstacles to come.

“Each person in this group has their own badge of courage, whether it is a physical badge,” Sally said. “The mastectomy…you hear people describe as this horrible, disfiguring operation and this and that and the other thing; on the other hand it’s something that’s happened to you; it’s part of you. It doesn’t make you an ugly person.”

That first day was tough, but that was just the beginning. The next morning, when they got to the top of the mountain, they were overwhelmed. The challenge was an 80-foot cliff. They had to rappel, go down the cliff on a rope and then climb back up.

“And there’s no skill to rappelling, no skill at all,” declared Seran, the instructor. “It just takes a little courage in the head.”

Anne was terrified but determined to go forward.

“All of us have felt that we’ve lost control of our lives to a degree, having had cancer,” Anne said. “This will kind of help us to get back into control. And it’s a big risk, and I have not taken many risks in my life.”

Everyone who rapelled down the ciff made it safely. Climbing back up was a lot harder.

“Try to use your feet rather than your knees,” Andrea advised. “You can go farther with your feet.”

“OK, but I’m going to make it,” Sally said.

“You are,” Andrea reassured.

Sally made it, but a few of the others couldn’t and had to be lowered back down to the ground.

Nancy, for one, didn’t think she could beat it. She said, “Oh, I saw everybody else this morning, I said, ‘No way!’ They said, ‘Are you ready to go now?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not going to do it.’”

“When you finished one task and you’ve been successful, it’s really the greatest feeling,” Margaret said. “It gives you so much confidence that you want to go on and try another thing. And each thing that we’ve tried and each thing that we’ve done has been a real challenge.”

The last day provided perhaps the greatest test of all, the high ropes, and a course similar to the one they did the first day. But these ropes were 40 feet in the air. Sally went first and finished first.

“I never want to do any of this again,” Sally said, laughing. “I want to get married once. Certain things, you want to - you know, it’s nice to do once, and that’s it; you’ve had it.”

How does such an experience help in dealing with the cancer and the battles they continue to face?

“I think it gives you courage,” Margaret said. “I know, in our group, we’re all afraid of recurrence, and that’s one reason we have the group.”

“This experience was about living, and I bet you (that) we thought very little about having cancer,” Sally said. “It was just so healthy and so wonderful for all of us. It’s kind of a putting behind for me and going ahead with life.”

So, they headed off in the afternoon for what they called their solos.

Said Nancy: “I’d like to be able to take this experience and in my solo think about how can I apply it to my daily life on an ongoing basis so I don’t forget, you know, what it is, in fact, you know what we went through. Because it’s too important, and there’s got to be some ways to bring it back and say, ‘What did I learn?’ And then, ‘How can I apply it to my everyday life?’”

Outsiders need to understand “how hard it is to cope with it,” Rosanne declared. “It’s the biggest obstacle I can think of,” she added. “And if you’ve never been through it before, you just don’t know how to cope with it. And you don’t have people cheering you on because they haven’t been there before. That’s what’s so great about a support group.”

So, five days after they got there, they left - each woman feeling she had regained something of herself, something she felt she had lost along the way.

“We did things we never ever thought we could do, never ever,” Rosanne said. “And I think it really puts the cancer behind. You never forget it. You never forget tht you had cancer; you never forget that it could recur. But you can know we really have some very tangible issues to focus on now when we’re anxious again. We can think of the time we jumped from the one step to the next.”

“And that is a very positive thought,” Rosanne concluded.

2000 Update

Keeping that positive thought has not been easy. Some experienced a recurrence of cancer. Two are no longer part of the group. Two others have died. But the six who remain say the courage they gained and the friendship they fostered during those four days and nights in Maine has helped sustain them through it all.

Recently they got together again - this time in Florida.

Fourteen years later, while they no longer live near each other, they still try to get together at least once a year to take trips that are a little tamer and remember the one trip that changed their lives.

What do they now think that first Outward Bound trip accomplished for them?

“Bonded us,” Margaret says.

They don’t think they would have become friends without it.

“If we hadn’t had cancer, we never would have met, never,” Nancy says. “'Cause we just come from different - social, economic backgrounds.”

“The Outward Bound trip is just - it’s so indescribable - what happens to you,” Anne says. “We had been through so much together over those four days.”

“Each of us learned a lot more about our own self and what we were capable of,” Rosanne says. “And at the end of it, it was very clear how each of us had grown and how we had all grown together as a group.”

“I was thinking about this last night - we’re like a really good marriage,” Sally says. “We know absolutely what’s wrong with everybody else,” she says, amid laughter. “We can laugh at it. But we have absolute loyalty and just an unceasing love for each other.”

“Unconditional love” is how Anne puts it.

“I think that we’re more of a sisterhood now,” Margaret says. “When we got off the plane the other day, we just hugged and started talking and laughing, as if - as if no time had passed at all. We’re so close, I think we’re almost like sisters.”

So when two in their group died - Fran in 1991 on the eve of her 42nd birthday and Phyllis in 1998 - they were with them until the end.

“It was very difficult,” Sally says. “But I think we all feel good about it in the way we were able to support them…That we came out of it, really, even stronger.”

**Sally needed this type of strength as she dealt with two new bouts of cancer. Eight years ago she had colon cancer, and less than a year ago she had a lung removed.

“I’m very good at getting cancer,” Sally quips. “But knock on wood, I seem to be very good at dealing with it.”**

But she says it’s her memoris of those four days in Maine that help her through endless hours of medical testing.

“Every time I have, say a PETscan, which you go through this machine for 45 minutes, I go through the whole Outward Bound trip,” Sally says. “I do the ropes, I do the…whole thing.”

“But the other thing is really - it taught me was to push myself and to challenge myself,” she adds. “And it gave me this group, and that’s been a tremendous help.”

“When I’m with these women, these women know what I’m going through, so that I’m not isolated sometimes,” Sally notes. “And I love my friends. But they can’t understand really what it is, and these people can. And especially Rosanne can.”

Rosanne had a recurrence of breast cancer in 1996, 15 years after her mastectomy.

She was not prepared. “You are for the first five years,” Rosanne says. “And then each time you go for a test, you worry about it. But it doesn’t become an overwhelming part of your life, because you’ve gone over the first milestone of the five-year period.”

“I was feeling great physically, very fit,…successful in my career. And that was the last thing in the world I thought about.”

Can one become complacent with cancer?

“I’m finding it - today because of the recurrence, that it is, again, in the forefront of my thinking and my daily life,” Rosanne says. “And yet - I feel fabulous, and I’m not going to let the fact that I’ve had a recurrence hold me back.”

**“People hear about reoccurrence, or lung cancer, and they think - Uh-oh, she’s a goner,” Sally says. “Well, we’re not goners.”

After getting hit again and again, does she come close to saying, ‘That’s it?’

“No. I got depressed,” Sally says. “When I had lung cancer, I called together my support team…And it becomes like a project. You know, this is how I’m going to attack it. And this is what I’m going to do. And hopefully this is how I’m going to find a way to be happy and deal with it - and get around it.”**

And she has come to terms with her physical abilities.

“Well, I can play golf, and I can hike, and I’m not ever going to climb Everest,” Sally says, with laughter. “And I’m going to read about places that I would like to go and I’m not going to be able to go. But when I go for a walk in the morning, I say, ‘Nothing hurts me today. I seem to be cancer-free. I can enjoy this. And aren’t I lucky?’”

[The</a> Climb, Cancer Survivors Bond Via Outward Bound - CBS News](<a href=“http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/04/10/60II/main182458.shtml]The”>http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/04/10/60II/main182458.shtml)

latetoschool · May 2, 2008, 7:42am

Awesome, Epistrophy, thank you.

epistrophy · May 2, 2008, 2:25pm

and another

“Putnam circuit clerk candidates say job is more than ‘storing papers’”

A circuit clerk is the custodian of court and other legal records, but three candidates vying for the position in Putnam County see the role as more than just document-keeping.

Democrat James Withrow, 55, said he would bring his background as Putnam County Commissioner to the job.

He said his six-year stint on the commission gave him valuable experience in making a budget.

“I enjoy public service,” Withrow said. “I’ll bring my background in management and running businesses to the office. As circuit clerk, I would also like to see new and innovative ideas implemented.”

Withrow has served on the Putnam Board of Education, and is a director with the Rock Branch Bank.

He’s a Nitro High School graduate, attended West Virginia State University and is married with three children and five grandchildren. He lives in Nitro.

Another Democrat competing against Withrow in the May 13 primary is Darlene Smith, 48, of Winfield.

Smith has served as the chief deputy clerk in the office for 10 years.

She started in the circuit clerk’s office in Lincoln County where she worked for nine years and also worked in the Kanawha Circuit Clerk’s office for nine years.

She has supervised all aspects of the office from financial and budget matters to record-keeping.

“There’s not a function of this office that I have not done,” she said. “It’s a dream come true for me to be here and I want to continue in this office as clerk.”

Smith said she looks forward to working with the Supreme Court in implementing online access to public records.

Smith is a lung cancer survivor. She had part of her lung removed 16 years ago.

She is married and has two children and one grandchild.

Republican Ronnie W. Matthews is 55 and a graduate of Nitro High School. He attended West Virginia State College and owned Casto Hardware for 35 years. A U.S. Army veteran, he now works as an attendant for Chapman Funeral Home.

He and Withrow were first-grade classmates in Nitro.

Matthews is unopposed in the primary.

“I talked with Don Wright before he died and he told me he wanted me to have this job,” he said. “That’s why I’m running, to fulfill his wishes.”

Wright, the longtime circuit clerk and former sheriff, died Oct. 13, 2007.

All the candidates said they wanted to see the circuit clerk’s public records online as soon as possible.

[Charleston</a> Daily Mail - Putnam County - Putnam circuit clerk candidates say job is more than ‘storing papers’*](<a href=“http://www.dailymail.com/News/PutnamCounty/200805020219]Charleston”>http://www.dailymail.com/News/PutnamCounty/200805020219)

ADad · May 2, 2008, 2:39pm

–Ulysses S. Grant

latetoschool · May 2, 2008, 2:44pm

ADad I just love that. I liked Mohammad Ali, too; I remember watching him light the Olympic Torch (was that Australia?); what an inspiration. Such poise and grace.

jym626 · May 2, 2008, 2:47pm

LTS-
Muhammed Ali lit the 1996 cauldron right here in Atlanta. Quite a sight.

latetoschool · May 2, 2008, 3:01pm

So, this morning was chemo, and, they give me Benedryl, which makes me higher than a kite. I have begged my doctors to not give it to me but they said they won’t take the risk. The best I can do is talk my nurse into cutting the dose in half, which he does. But still I get high, as in totally stoned.

Anyway, doctor’s branch office where I go is in the main hospital building, so, daughter and I are walking through the corridors enroute to the parking garage, and, we come upon some indoor plastic barricades - the sort typically used for “wet floor” cautionary announcements etc.

Daughter challenges me with “I bet you cannot hurdle over those barricades”. All of the normal people in the hallway were simply walking around the barricades. I couldn’t resist D’s challenge, so, I told her I was certain I could hurdle them. So I hand her my stuff, purse, laptop, etc., and, realized I needed a running start, so I backed up twenty feet, then took off running (well sort of turtle-like jogging actually, was wearing high heels), and easily cleared the barricades.

Then D yells out - “mom - you split your pants wide open!!!”.

Horrified, I immediately put my hands over the area where the split might have happened, and she burst out laughing; she was teasing me and thankfully no splitting of pants actually happened.

But the funny part is that we didn’t realize that the exact place where the barricades were placed was in front of the patient waiting area for radiation, and the room was full, and everyone saw and heard everything, and when I heard other people laughing I looked over and there were like 20 people staring and mostly laughing. The few people who weren’t laughing just sort of looked at me like I had problems. LOL.

dmd77 · May 2, 2008, 3:17pm

Anyone who can jump over warning signs is setting a GOOD EXAMPLE.

Having seen the side effects when my husband didn’t take the benedryl during his chemo… go with the benedryl. Really. From when I first noticed the hives breaking out to difficulty breathing was about two minutes, if that. It took another minute for the benedryl to go in the IV, but much longer would not have been a good thing.

jym626 · May 2, 2008, 3:18pm

That’s the attitude we love to hear!! LOL!

latetoschool · May 2, 2008, 3:29pm

dmd77 my doctors won’t even consider letting me not have it. I tried to tell them I do not have any allergies at all and they still won’t hear it. But the stuff makes me miserable. I hate being high. I am sitting at my desk, working in a chemical haze. Well actually playing on CC punctuated by work. My friends tell me go with it -oh, whatever. I am not on any meds at all, no pain, no nausea, no need. So I am going to just count my blessings and be thankful that for today, this is my biggest complaint.

soozievt · May 2, 2008, 3:44pm

LTS…I think you are great at jumping hurdles both literally and figuratively.

lorelei2702 · May 2, 2008, 4:30pm

Interesting about the Benadryl…did not know it was part of the chemo process. Is this for all chemo, or just specific drugs? Is it to keep allergic reactions, swellings, etc., under control? It is also the ingredient in Sominex, as a sleeping medicine…quite a wonder drug all in all. And it makes one agile and adventuresome, apparently! You go, girl!

epistrophy · May 2, 2008, 5:22pm

and another

“Odds of survival going up”

A diagnosis of cancer once was the virtual equivalent of a death sentence. But now, some 8 million Americans are surviving the disease.

“When somebody has a diagnosis of cancer, it’s not necessarily a death sentence,” said Dr. Claudine Isaacs of Georgetown University.

**Neil Brennan is one cancer survivor. At age 44, he has been working hard to patch up his life since he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1993.

“The literature I could find at the time showed that the average was 32 weeks from diagnosis to death,” he said.

It’s estimated that one out of three Americans alive today will be diagnosed with cancer. But there are some success stories, such as a 10 percent decline in breast cancer cases and the rising number of cancer survivors. “Basically, a cancer survivor is anybody who has been diagnosed with cancer and is still alive,” Brennan said.**

If there is a “survivor movement,” Peter Boonisar is in the vanguard. In 1987, while in his early 40s, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Boonisar said that in the time immediately after the diagnosis he found he couldn’t think very far ahead.

But within months, he was on a trek across Australia. “More people have walked on the moon than have walked across Australia with camels,” Boonisar said. “It was a unique opportunity, and I was in the right place at the right time except for leukemia. I wasn’t going to let that stop me.”

Breakthroughs that start in labs are changing the picture for cancer patients. The odds are that a person with the disease will survive five years or longer. Only 25 years ago, just one-third survived that long.

“One of the most striking areas is childhood cancers,” said the National Cancer Institute’s Dr. Richard Klausner. “With a majority of all children that are stricken with cancer, they now can be cured.”

Klausner points out that the way people approach their cancer makes a profound difference. “One of the great advances in medicine over the last 25 years is that the patient is no longer a passive recipient of treatment, but is now an active participant in all aspects,” he said.

That attitude was obvious at the first National Congress of Cancer Survivorship in Washington this week.

The conference took its marching orders from retired Desert Storm commander Norman Schwarzkopf, 61, who was treated for prostate cancer last year. “It is so stupid that anybody should die of prostate cancer, because it can be detected,” Schwarzkopf told the crowd. He ordered every man over 50 to get a yearly check-up. 

Whether the survivors are famous or obscure, their message is nonetheless compelling. Survival is sweet, but winning the war against cancer is the ultimate quest. “My mother died of breast cancer, five years after I was diagnosed,” said cancer survivor Kathy LaTour. “So we’re not winning it fast enough for me, because I have a 10-year-old, and my concern is what’s going to happen to her?”

[CNN</a> - Odds of cancer survival going up - Nov. 14, 1995](<a href=“http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9511/conquer_cancer/survivors/index.html]CNN”>http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9511/conquer_cancer/survivors/index.html)

keymom · May 2, 2008, 5:27pm

I hate the Benadryl too!! It is only used with certain chemos. My first set I didn’t need it, but this second set I do. The Benadryl makes me feel first drowsy and then agitated. I have a hard time sitting there for three hours with the Benadryl. But I too wouldn’t chance it. I recently had an allergic reaction to CT dye where it went from hives to difficulty breathing in what seemed like seconds. It seemed to take forever for the Benadryl and Epinephrine to work though, it really is a horrible feeling not being able to breathe.

latetoschool · May 2, 2008, 5:58pm

^^ Keymom, I hate it too. I really do. I am stoned out of my mind. You hit it precisely - it’s like being exhausted, drowsy yet agitated at the same time. I am sorry that you had an allergic reaction to the CT dye. That sounds horrible, I am sorry.

Lorelei, I don’t know what’s up with why they make me take the stuff on chemo days. I have asked and asked and they will just say that it’s very necessary to head off any potential allergic reaction. My Miami doctors never gave it to me, but then they gave me steroids and my new team doesn’t give me steroids with chemo. In my entire life I have only ever taken medicines such as Tylenol a few times, so any of these weird drugs that are new to my system just seem to hit me so hard. But I am not going to complain; it is awesome to be medicine free and not in need of any drugs, except on chemo days, at seven months past diagnosis and counting.

Alumother · May 2, 2008, 6:02pm

OMG I love the jumping hurdles image…

Since I am trying to model you LTS, growing hair longer, wearing red shoes to work, I will have to look for something to jump over.

CountingDown · May 2, 2008, 6:13pm

LTS, you just keep sailing over these hurdles – and in heels, no less! It’s a marvelous metaphor.

momnipotent · May 2, 2008, 8:46pm

Late to school…keep fighting the good fight…I am always so amazed at the Cancerfighters that I care for in my E.D. They humble me. I will pray for you…

ADad · May 2, 2008, 10:10pm

Rats! No hurdle movie on YouTube yet.

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