May 13--For Melissa Robinson, cancer started with a cat scratch.
The Trenton, Mo., woman diagnosed herself after the scratch drew her attention to a lump in her left breast. Her doctor confirmed her suspicion, and the next day, she underwent surgery. The first of eight rounds of chemotherapy came the next month.
It all happened so fast, and like anyone else in her situation, she was scared.
"I never thought about the word cancer," she says. "You never think about it coming home to you."
But as overwhelmed as she was, Mrs. Robinson wasn't alone. In addition to support from her family and church, she had the support of someone she'd never before met -- someone who, despite this, understood better than anyone exactly what she was going through.
This woman, Carolyn Smith, was a breast cancer survivor and a volunteer with Reach to Recovery, an American Cancer Society program that pairs survivors with people undergoing treatment for breast cancer. The program has about 75 volunteers in the Kansas City area, including about 15 in and around St. Joseph, but it's seeking more.
"We know there are a lot of breast cancer survivors in the St. Joe area," says Carla Kash, the society's communications director for the northern Missouri region. "But many of them don't know about Reach to Recovery."
In her Reach to Recovery volunteer, Mrs. Robinson knew she had someone she could call when she was distressed. She had someone who could tell her what to expect during her treatment. She had a survivor -- someone who had been where she was and had gone on to live a normal, productive life.
At the same time, she was experiencing her own life differently.
At night, she would sit outside and stare at the stars, wondering what was going to happen to her.
At the barber shop, she cried with the man who shaved off her hair -- but then declared she didn't look so bad as a skinhead.
She took notice of the ridges forming in her nails, one for each round of chemo.
And as the number of those ridges neared eight -- signaling her eight months of treatment were almost over -- she attended a Relay for Life, too sick to walk but well enough to watch candle flames dance in the night.
The day of her last treatment, she took off her shoes to walk barefoot through grass. Almost a year after her cancer diagnosis, she was alive, and she appreciated every aspect of her life in a way she hadn't before.
"Your faith becomes much stronger when you're touched with something like this," she says. "With the strength of my family and God, I believed I could make it."
Providing people with this kind of encouragement and strength during their treatment is one of the main objectives of Reach to Recovery, which has been in operation for more than 30 years, says Sara French, an American Cancer Society community manager for health initiatives.
"It helps tame their fears, because they know someone who's made it through this," she says.
Volunteers don't provide medical advice, she adds, but they do comfort cancer patients and their families and help them come to a place where they can make level-headed decisions about their care. Before entering into relationships like this, all volunteers must be cancer-free for at least a year and must undergo training that typically takes about half a day.
Mrs. Robinson went through this training herself, a year after learning on Aug. 24, 2001 -- her birthday -- that her cancer was gone. Since then, she's served as a Reach to Recovery volunteer for about a dozen women -- listening to them, crying with them and letting them know they're not alone.
"You've got to have a lot of faith, laughter and courage with this," she says. "It's so rewarding to know you can share your story with someone else, and I'm just so proud to be a survivor and to be able to relate to other people."
Lifestyles reporter Erin Wisdom can be reached at ewisdom@npgco.com.
Reach to Recovery
For more information about Reach to Recovery or to become a volunteer, contact the American Cancer Society's Kansas City office at (913) 432-3277.
-----
To see more of the St. Joseph News-Press or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.stjoenews-press.com/.
Copyright (c) 2008, St. Joseph News-Press, Mo.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.