HI, my name is Mary and I have started this site to help with the fight against cancer. I am a cancer survivor. October 2007, I will be cancer free for 20 years. I was 23 years old when I found out I had cancer. I couldn’t believe that was happening to me. I had been married for 2 years, my husband joined the army and we had a two year old daughter. I was staying with my parents in Cheyenne, Wyo., because my husband got orders for Panama. I was waiting on him to get base housing when I found the lump in my arm. The doctors decided to remove the lump because my mother had a history of fatty tumors and the doctor said that what it felt like. I will never forget the day when the doctor made a small cut in my arm and said "this is not a fatty tumor". He told me he had to send it off and have it tested. That took a month. And what a long month that was. Thank goodness for my parents, they kept me going and not let me dwell on it. The end of October 1987 the bad news came, it was cancer and when the doctor removed the lump, he did not get it all. Since Cheyenne Air Force Base was a small base and had a small hospital, they sent me to Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Denver, Colorado. The doctors there decided that even with a cat scan, they would have to remove a part of the triceps muscle in my left arm. That way the muscle could be tested to see if the cancer had gone into the tissue. November 1987, I went in and had 1/3 of my triceps muscle removed. At first I didn’t even think of the way it would look, I mean I was more concerned with the cancer. Well let me tell you, I was shocked when I got look at my arm for the first time. It actually looked liked something had taken a bite out of my arm. Well again my parents were there for me, making jokes and teasing me, which made it easier. One big problem I had was since they has cut the muscle, they also cut the nerves and ten dents and when I raised my arm up to eat, it would snap back at me. My parents would laugh so hard, which made me laugh. I did get control of arm as time when on. I was released from the hospital the beginning of December so that I could spent a few days with my husband, who was ship home because of this. He had to return to panama. So the doctors removed the stitches and home I went. I got a call from the hospital and was told that the surgery has gotten all the cancer, but the doctors wanted me to do 6 weeks of radiation treatments as a precaution because the research had shown the type of cancer I had if it came back, it came back in the lungs. So my husband went back to Panama and I started treatments. One week into the treatments, they stopped them. The cut on my arm had opened up because the treatment was not allowing it to heal right. So I then went though a skin graft to cover what had opened. I left the hospital a second time and returned in January 1988 and started the 6 weeks of radiation treatments. I stayed at the hospital during the week and went home on weekends, see the hospital was 2 hours from my parents house and my dad was in the Air Force and my mother worked, so there was no one there to drive me two hours there and two hours back. Not only did my parents take care of my daughter during the week, they supported me though it all. I can never repay them for what they had done for me. I am grateful to them and always will be.

    Because of this I am a member of the Tumor list. It’s a list of people (when I signed up anyway) who would be willing to take experimental drugs for cancer. I agree to it because if the cancer I had was to come back, they say it would come back in my lungs and if I could test drugs to see if they help in the fight against cancer, then in the end I may help save someone life.

     There have been people in my life that had the same fight. My mother is a breast cancer survivor now for 2 years. Now she too helps others with this fight. My ex father in law, who was a wonderful man (yes even though I divorced his son). Army retired and fought the hardest fight of his life for five years before lungs cancer won. My uncle, a navy man for 36 years fought hard with lung cancer for 3 years before it took him away from us. My grandmother also passed because cancer invaded her body. And just last year my step kids (16 years and 14 years old) suffered when they lost their mother to cancer, she was 43.

    Cancer not only efforts the person who has it, it also affects the whole family and friends. I watched my step kid’s mother fight so hard to hold on, just for more time with her kids. She was too young to leave them. There was not much I or my husband could do, but be there for them and that included her too. We need to fight this disease harder and get the money where it needs to go. To the researchers fighting all types of cancer.