Your Life with Cancer by Kay Marshall Strom

Author:Kay Marshall Strom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Nazarene Publishing House
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Be Yourself!

When Lou started chemo, the doctor told her that within two weeks she could expect to lose her hair. Well into the second week, when nothing happened, she cautiously congratulated herself about being the exception. But then two weeks to the day after she started treatment, her hair all fell out at once.

Lou decided, “If I must wear a wig, I might as well have a good time.” So she sat down and ordered six cute wigs. One was blonde and another white blond—a huge change for a natural brunette! Another was golden blond. She also got a red one with long, flowing tresses and a natural one that matched her true hair color. And she had a frosted one. She never really cared for the frosted one, though. She said it looked like gray hair.

Her husband joked, “Every night I come home to a new woman!”

Even though Lou had fun with her wigs, most of the time she preferred to wear a baseball cap. “It was August and terribly hot,” she said. “It felt so good not to have hair.”

Marlene said of her last round of chemo, “I gave up my wig after the first couple scratchy days. In time, I gave up my hats too. I really do look awful in hats! Yes, I got funny looks and embarrassing stares, what with my bald head and all, but who cares? With what I was going through, with all I had gone through already, what were a few stares?”

Marlene and Lou don’t let anyone tell them who and what they ought to be. They would love to know Leslie Mouton. At the age of thirty-five, this attractive San Antonio news anchorwoman discovered a lump in her left breast that turned out to be cancer. She did a most unexpected and courageous thing: she went public.

One evening Leslie sat perched atop her swivel chair and smiled into the television camera the same as she did every weekday evening. As always, her makeup was done to a T and finished off with shiny red lipstick. She wore a snappy outfit and gold earrings that glittered in the bright lights of the television studio. But that evening was not like every other one. Leslie was completely bald. Yes, viewers may have been shocked to see her shiny pate, but few asked why. Certainly not those who tuned into KSAT-TV on even a semi-regular basis. This was Leslie’s third report on her very personal battle with cancer.

The first evening, viewers saw her on the operating table. On the second evening, they bore witness to the tears that filled her eyes as the first chemotherapy drugs were pumped into her chest. And now they saw her unashamedly anchoring the news without her wig.

A tear-jerker ploy during rating sweeps week?

“Not at all!” insisted Leslie, who describes herself as a born-again Christian. “This was God’s timing, not mine.”

Leslie fought her cancer battle with a camera following her everywhere. Surgery, chemotherapy appointments, hair loss, radiation—she made her private battle public in the hope of helping other women.

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