How the Cancer Care Team Brings Help & Hope Transcript:

The Cancer Care team was asked how they have provided help and hope to our clients. Here is what they said…

Carlene:

I was able to assist by making sure that our client was able to reach all of his treatment and doctor’s appointments through transportation assistance. And after six weeks he was able to ring that bell for the last time.

Christi:

I had a cancer patient who canceled all his appointments after finding out what his total cost was going to be. And so I was able to help find a lot of resources to cover those medical expenses so that he was comfortable rescheduling his cancer treatment and without accumulating as much debt as he would have had.

Megan H:

Last week when I got to sit with a father who had just lost his wife and he got to honor her memory by really conveying to the team how important she was.

Shawn:

This week I helped a caregiver who lives out of state get their elderly father to Multiple Myeloma treatments at a dialysis center here in Fort Worth.

Kelly:

It’s a pleasure to help Hispanic families affected with cancer with our services.

Megan C:

Getting to be the Camp Director and share these special memories with these kids and help them reduce their fear and anxiety of cancer is very impactful and very special.

James:

I was in a grocery store recently and overheard a conversation with someone that was recently impacted by cancer and I was able to provide the referral form and get them signed up and get them connected with Cancer Care.

Tamika:

A client reached out to me because he was having a hard time navigating his insurance. I stood in as a Financial Navigator and made sure that he was able to maintain his insurance so he could continue his cancer treatments.

Caryn:

I strive to calm our patients’ fears about eating and nutrition which empowers that patient to look at food as a way to deal with symptoms from cancer treatment or even as a way to reduce the risk of future disease.

Joy:

I’m grateful to offer a different perspective to clients who may otherwise not see a different alternative to their situation such as offering car payment assistance resources or rent assistance resources when they may not know where else to turn to.

Transcribed by: Marilyn Kepner

Darion’s Story of Hope Transcript:

My diagnosis with cancer was a big shock cause actually I was preparing to go on a cruise. So, I went on and went to this health club and they did a lab work on me. And they took three samples, and the first two came out really good. Then that third one, my doctor just said, “Your white blood cells are going off the chart here. We need to go and look at this further.” And that was pretty much when that happened with the cancer.

The young lady that I took to my 1978 prom, we were at Texas Oncology and we kept staring at each other, but not staring at each other cause we kinda knew who we were, but we didn’t know. And come find out, that was my friend, Ms. Eunice Baker. She introduced me to the Cancer Care, and it was so many other areas of that–that– that really just reached out with me.

Cancer Care has a Perry Mason, it’s in the body of Ms. Tamika. And she would sit back there and just dissect everything. She’d say, “Mr. Fields let me see your bills and this right here.” And it comes up that she navigated this whole system to where they actually found faults, the insurance. And I was actually almost like paying three policies.

She said, “Well this needs to be taken care of immediately. He’s not being able to get his insurance. He’s not being able to get prescriptions. And he has a daughter that is not covered because of the, you know, the neglect of what’s going on here.” But she was really great and looking at what I was going through personally with finances, something that I could get and have that would be affordable.

Everybody is friendly, and the first thing they say is, “How are you doing Mr. Fields? How was that weekend, or how was the holiday?” There was a couple of times I had to say I was pretty much homeless, and they went to bat. I mean, they came up and got me shelter and lots of things like that. I mean, things that you don’t even think about asking, they seemed like well, we need to check because if he–does he have food? Is he okay? What’s going on with his doctors? Are you staying in contact?

I really think it’s more than medicine when you’re on the road to recovering from cancer, and Cancer Care is a big part of that.

Hope, in my opinion, is when you have a great family, and I call Cancer Care my family.

Transcribed by: Christina R.

Arvella’s Story of Hope Transcript:

Casey Hill is the love of my life. We’ve been married for 31 years. Life was awesome. The last son was getting out of college. We thought we get to travel, we get to live, we get to do what we wanna do now. That semester he was to graduate, we found out Casey had cancer, and it totally flipped everything upside down in our lives.

I noticed him trying to get up he was gripping his chest and could barely move. So, we go to the emergency room, and the doctor comes out after they run the CT and says, “Well, the malignant tumor that is in your husband’s spine. We’re gonna go ahead and get him admitted and have oncology come down.” And I said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. We’re just in the emergency room for chest pain.” But it wasn’t a chest pain problem at all, it was the pain that was radiating from the malignant tumor that was in his spine. And we had no idea.

My struggle was trying to find someone to talk to and trying to find some help for my family. You feel desolate. You feel alone when you are having to deal with being a caregiver and everything that’s around it. So, when a person is diagnosed with cancer, their fight is with cancer. But the people who care for them, their fight is everything around the cancer. And it is difficult.

When my husband was diagnosed with cancer, about three months later, my sister was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. And she passed away in June of 2013. During that weekend, because she died on my granddaughter’s birthday, then I had to go into I gotta drive my husband to Little Rock for a stem cell transplant. As well as plan funeral services, as well as still try to celebrate my grandbaby and make her smile. It was tough.

There’s a lady, Carlene King, and I called her, and I said, “Carlene, I don’t wanna do this. It’s too much for one human being,” and she said, “You can do this.” She said, “I’ve seen you fight through some things in this life that this is nothing. You and God got this.” The strength of listening to someone say, ‘You can do this’ helped. And I know I can get that here at Cancer Care Services.

Transcribed by: Christina R.