Hitting Cancer With Humor
ONHL Hospice Chaplain Drumright, Oklahoma
A few words can change your life, but on August 20th, 2006, M. E. Runner heard the words “multiple myeloma” as her doctor diagnosed the cause of her backache and anemia. It meant she was in for the fight of her life.
Until that day, she’d always been on the other side of healthcare as a supervising nurse on her floor with one of our local hospitals here in Tulsa. M. E. met often with doctors to go over written treatments, procedures, and infection control, but now being a patient with a dreadful disease was a whole new place for her. She never dreamed of being both a patient and a nurse at the same time.
Talking about IV therapy, chemotherapy, hair loss, and tests was a long way from experiencing them. M. E. tackled the treatment regimen much like managing her job as supervising nurse of her floor at the hospital—analyze it, keep a positive attitude, listen to good people, attack it, and get it done!
One thing she knew for sure: patients who maintain an up-beat, positive attitude have a better chance of recovery. With humor, she zeroed in on crazy, funny moments in her treatment and packed her Emails, Facebook and Blog with levity to prove that cancer isn’t so scary after all.
M. E. joined the third phase of clinical trial at the Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy in Little Rock, Arkansas—a trial that already was lengthening people’s lives. Since this meant long periods away from home, the Runners, longtime members of a Bible-Believing Church Family, asked their Sunday school class to pray about helping them, because Huge Henry, M. E.’s husband, couldn’t leave his job (vacation time & sick leave was depleted). The word filtered throughout the Church family: if anyone was willing to stay with Big M. E. during treatments, please come forward. Pretty Pattie and Woolly Williamson heard the plea given in another adult Sunday school class the following Sunday and felt that God was tapping them on the shoulder. They had seen Huge Henry and Big M. E. (who say, how could you miss us?) in Sunday morning worship, but did not know them well. When Pattie told M. E., “If you’ll have me, I’ll go with you,” she had no idea that she’d be away from home months at a time, that she’d miss some holidays, and evenher anniversary.
No one knew what was ahead when the two made the four4-hour trip to Little Rock. M. E. found a small two-bedroom parsonage that a local church rented out to patients. And so the journey began!
Big M. E. and pretty Pattie picked out wigs, tracked blood counts, flushed ports, cried, and laughed a lot together. They nicknamed the hard times to take away their power. M. E. called her chemo bag the “the little Red Devil” because it made her so sick. She would talk about her arms being like pincushions when she was covered with black-and-blue spots from needles. Together they made up choruses about M. E. 's bone marrow transplants, and through it all they laughed at the crazy things that happened during treatments.
One time, when the chemotherapy spilled all over M. E., she fashioned her sheet into a skirt and sashayed down the hall as a model in front of other patients and nurses who laughed at her shuffle and her creativity. Another morning, M. E. swallowed her contact lenses instead of a handful of pills when she got her right hand mixed up with her left. The women laughed and made fun of all the training and teaching tapes that the institution made them watch in the parsonage to prepare them for what was going to happen next. With humor they could face anything!
Probably their craziest new hobby was “dumpster diving.' When Pattie saw that many patients left perfectly good garbage bags of clothes behind when they moved, she began rescuing, washing and donating the clothes to the homeless in Little Rock. M. E. dubbed pretty Pattie the “Commander of the Clothes Rescue Society.” While M. E. rested from the various treatments, Pattie made colorful fleece hats for cancer patients who are often cold as the side effect of all the treatments.
Of course, there were tough days. Sometimes even water tasted “disgusting,” and M. E. stuck to a steady diet of ginger ale. But even on the hard days, M. E. believed God was in control, even if the situation didn’t feel that way. God was and is still in control! “I decide if I die and go to heaven, or stay alive. What’s not to like about that deal?” she said recently.
During the first round of chemotherapy, the sheets on M. E.’s bed felt like gritty sandpaper against her skin. Members of her Sunday school class made her a prayer blanket with 2nd Corinthians 4: 16 on it: “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day…” M. E. kept a chart to trace the twenty-three medications she took every day, and she carried copies of this and of her treatment schedule for new personnel at the hospital. She didn’t want any mix-ups while going through all the medicines and processes. In two years,she lost her hair four times. When it finally came in as new survival hair, it felt like a Brillo pad, dark and curly with cowlicks that stuck out in the most awkward places. In the last phase of her treatments, doctors harvested 29 million of M. E.’s own stem cells for a transplant in the future, if needed, which turned out to be one of the most painful procedures she experienced while in the hospital.
Three years later, M. E.’s favorite word is “remission.” The road was bumpy, painful, and sickening, but she made it! She’s back to work full-time in her old position, but writing about treatments, medications and procedures is not academic any more. She knows what the patient is going through or will be going through.
Recently she was one of the honored heroes at the Light the Night Walk for cancer survivors. She doesn’t see herself as much of a hero, but she is a strong survivor who loves to tell her story. These days, she uses the word “hope”a lot. She remembers how much it meant to her to meet other survivors, and she’s happy to return the favor.
“It’s not a journey I’d wish on anyone,” M. E. said. “But it’s one that packs a lot of lessons all along the way.”
John T. Catrett, III Scissortail Hospice Chaplain 306 North Main St., Suite E Bristow, OK 74010 918.352.3080