For Susan as She Starts Chemo

A couple of months ago I found out that I didn’t have cancer. It was a huge relief. Not two weeks later I found out that a dear friend of mine has stage 3 lung cancer.

Her name is Susan.

Susan lives in Texas. She is an email buddy. We were introduced, electronically, by David and Jane Shepherd, who used to live down south of Houston and whose daughter Laurie worked with Susan on a few newspapers. A few years ago David told me to check out Susan’s column. She wrote a column, usually funny, for an online newspaper, the Angleton Journal, that she and her husband ran (the Journal is gone now – Susan and her husband retired it in June). I did go online and read her column, wrote to tell her I enjoyed it, and she replied, "Let’s be friends." We’ve been email friends ever since.

We have a lot in common. We’re both smart aleck writers, we both have two adult sons, we both have grand children we adore, for starters.

Susan had quit her high pressure job as a reporter on the police beat in Houston a few years ago, and was enjoying not being a working stiff. She wasn’t going to the doctor, though, because without a job she didn’t have insurance.

A little over a year ago, she died. "Just a little bit," as she said afterward. She had a heart attack one day, and one of her sons found her passed out on the kitchen floor. The EMTs managed to resuscitate her in the ambulance. No, she did not "see the light," and no angels spoke to her sending her back, but she came back all the same.

Following that experience she applied for disability status and got it, which meant she started receiving a monthly income and that she received Medicare. She was over the moon about that. "I finally have insurance!"

She began going to doctors to catch up on all her neglected health conditions. Her heart, her cataract, and so on. She’d been having difficulty breathing, and that led to a series of tests which showed a tumor in her lung, a tumor which had grown around her heart. Inoperable cancer.

This next Monday (last Monday by the time you read this) she starts chemo and radiation. She knows, we all know, the odds are not great, but as I told her, I don’t know any statistics, I only know people. I know people who have been diagnosed with cancer, had treatment, and lived: my cousin Nancy; my friend Alice; my father-in-law Mark(twice); my husband Rick (twice). For starters.

As Alice said recently, I’m pretty fed up with this cancer crap.

I can’t do much but pray, and send white light and energy to my friend who is facing cancer. Though words seem awfully puny in the face of this plague, this poem came through last night, and I dedicate it to Susan, and to everyone facing cancer, surgery, chemo, radiation, and whatever else as they fight for their lives:

Here’s what I want you to do:

I want you always to remember
That you have a heart that a lion would envy
And we all love you
You have shown us the way, times past
Now it’s between you and this disease
All we can do is cheer you on
And we do
And we all love you
You made us laugh at our pain
And spit in the eyes of our enemies
You cut our troubles down to size
And flicked them away
And we all love you
If the outcome of this war
Depends on your greatness of spirit
If it depends on how much you are loved
If it depends on how much you and we want you to win
You shall win
You have all of us fighting for you however we can
Always remember:

We all love you.