On May 14, 2005, 41-year-old Kathy Haselton went skydiving. It wasn’t a mid-life crisis impulse nor an adventurous soul taking up a new weekend activity but rather a celebration of life, for that spring day marked Haselton’s first anniversary of a cancer-free existence.
In September 2003, Haselton obeyed the general recommendation that women her age receive a mammogram. That routine experience, however, turned into shock when doctors asked her to return for more tests and eventually diagnosed her with breast cancer. The ensuing months forced Haselton out of her first grade classroom and into chemotherapy and radiation treatments and, ultimately, into a new role as cancer survivor.
Haselton represents one of many stricken with breast cancer, a disease affecting over 210,000 Americans each year and sending the realities of cancer through homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods. Increasingly, however, women are turning the negative prognosis into a positive life experience, battling the cancer with equal doses of medicine, spirit, and attitude.
Naperville’s Darleen McFarlan learned of her breast cancer two decades ago, a time in which she had an upstart business as well as five children ranging in age from 3-20.
“I really didn’t think it was possible,” said McFarlan. “You have challenges in life and this certainly wasn’t something I was prepared for.”
Complicating matters yet further, however, was the bleak forecast laid before cancer patients in the mid-1980s.
“They pretty much pronounced me dead and gave me no hope,” says McFarlan, now the 62-year-old business owner of Naperville-based Darleen’s Interiors and a grandmother of seven.
Still, McFarlan overcame the dim prospects. After her diagnosis, she faced amputation, plastic surgery, and chemotherapy. In addition to traditional medicine, she enlisted the help of holistic doctors, a relationship that helped her release the fear of the situation and look toward a positive future. During her recovery, she rejected people who couldn’t see her as whole and complete, including her church pastor.
“If you can see yourself well, then that’s the best hope you can have,” McFarlan said. “I didn’t want to be around people that saw me as somebody different than who I was.”
Now, a 20-year survivor of breast cancer, McFarlan coaches others faced with similarly unpromising health prospects. She urges them to take advantage of the opportunity cancer allows—to check in to what’s going on with life and family and define a new perspective. Yet more, she says the path to recovery provides life altering lessons if people open themselves up to the experience.
“Cancer was just a chapter in what it takes to be successful in life,” she said. “Others may want to hold onto it, but it’s in the past. The stand I took then is the same one I urge others to take: what did I learn through this and how can I apply such lessons to my life?
“And each birthday,” McFarlan adds, “I tell myself I’m going to live to be 104.”
For Haselton, who endured a second cancer scare one year after her original breast cancer diagnosis, her new outlook remains under construction. The mother of two teenage boys, she admits her battle with cancer has strengthened their lives as well as hers.
“I used to think about it all the time, but now I realize that some of these aches and pains and more a process of getting old,” she said. “You cannot go through this experience and not arrive on the other end with a new outlook. It’s cliché, of course, but the lesson is not to take life for granted and to recognize that when you have your health you have a lot. But I suppose it’s cliché for a good reason.”
While she participates in a cancer support group at her local church, a gathering of those with a shared knowledge of the mental and physical processes one must endure when facing cancer, Haselton says her annual trip to the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure in downtown Chicago provides her one of life’s strongest lifts.
“You see these people at all different stages—some women with no hair because they’ve just begun chemo to the women who’ve been cancer free for decades, the ones who went through the cancer when there was no hope given,” she said. “And it’s so empowering to be at such an event, to be with all of these women who have a positive attitude to share.”
And at least one with an attitude strong enough to leap out of an airplane in celebration.
