The past 18 months or so of my life have been a heart-stopping roller coaster — as I dealt with an aggressive melanoma cancer on my head:
Up and down. Joy and anxiety.
When I was diagnosed with cancer last year, I couldn’t believe it was happening to me. In my 83 years on Earth, the worst illness I had suffered until then was a sore throat and cold. Oh, I had a few stitches when I was 10, after my older brother, Tom, accidentally hit me with his hockey stick while we played on the ice on the DuPage River in Illinois.
But cancer? Nothing like that had ever happened to me. I thought I was invincible.
Fortunately, my cancer ordeal has a happy ending.
And on Saturday, June 3, I will be recognized along with several other “stars” who have been touched by cancer at the Long Beach Cancer League’s annual gala at the Museum of Latin American Art. I will tell my story in a video of how cancer turned my life upside down.
But first, let me tell it here.
When the doctors told me my cancer was Stage 3, was very aggressive and might spread, I had the usual reaction — fear.I thought the worst and worried I was going to die.
But then two things happened that brightened my outlook and gave me renewed optimism in my fight against cancer.
Strangely enough, the first came in an uplifting email from Carolyn Ruszkiewicz, a good friend and former managing editor of the Press-Telegram, who was a breast cancer survivor. When she first got her diagnosis nine years ago, Carolyn said, she read in a pamphlet that cancer “was not necessarily a bad thing.”
What? Cancer not a bad thing?
It was hard to imagine anything positive about cancer, one of the leading causes of death worldwide. The National Cancer Institute, in fact, reported that there were 9.5 million cancer-related deaths worldwide in 2018. The NCI estimated that 1.8 million cases of cancer were diagnosed in the United States in 2020, with an estimated 606,000 dying from the disease. The pamphlet from Carolyn…
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