Making A Difference
by Angela Knight


Delia and Ken Rightmier
Photo courtesy of the Rightmiers

Sometimes it's the little things that can make all the difference in the world.

For Delia Rightmier, it was the small sign that hangs outside the Mendocino Cancer Resource Center's office. She says she saw it while she was out walking one day and thought about volunteering, but first she had to "get up the nerve" to go in and ask if she could help. When she finally made it into the office, the first thing she said to the CRCMC office manager was something about not wanting to ask people for money, but she added, she would do just about anything else. And for the past two years she has. This former teacher and cancer survivor has done everything from driving people to Ukiah for radiation treatments on a regular basis to training to become a patient advocate for WeCAN! (Women's Cancer Advocacy Network).

Delia's family history of cancer, and her own bout with it, might explain some of the passion she feels for volunteering at the Center. A petite silver-haired woman with expressive brown eyes, Delia says she approached her treatment for breast cancer in the same way she trained to run 12 marathons, by focusing on the goal. In this case, the goal was getting better. Delia brings that same determination and spirit to her volunteering efforts, says Sara O'Donnell, CRCMC's executive director.

For Ken Rightmier, Delia's husband, his initial volunteer effort at CRCMC was due to his need to become involved in the community and keep busy. That involvement has grown from the occasional little project, to acting as a back-up driver for Delia, and completely rewiring the CRCMC office. "Whenever I call him," says Eva Brown, CRCMC's office manager, "Ken just puts on his overalls and comes on down." His latest endeavor, in between working on their two-story home and volunteering at the Botanical Gardens, involves building a much-needed set of bookshelves for the office.

Ken, who recently relocated to Mendocino with Delia from Plumas County, says he understands the need for a strong support network because of his experience dealing with his wife's cancer diagnosis and treatment. We "supported each other" during that time, he says, but access to a local cancer facility and a support group might have helped.

Joyce Gilbertson, recently elected to the CRCMC board of directors, says when she first moved to the coast two years ago, she assumed the community was too small for a cancer resource group. She explains her first inkling CRCMC existed came when she attended a lecture by Sandra Steingraber, which was sponsored by CRCMC. She recalls being introduced to an impressive woman with a mischievous smile. "There's something about Sara," Joyce laughs.

The Center and Joyce are a perfect match according to Sara. Joyce, a former oncology nurse who worked primarily in acute-care hospitals, has chosen not only to volunteer in the office one day a week, but also serves as a much-needed referral source. In her spare time, she is working on creating complete, concise and up-to-date cancer information binders for the CRCMC library.

Joyce was diagnosed with breast cancer four years ago. She says after the diagnosis she received five requests for volunteer help from breast cancer action groups; she couldn't imagine how all those groups got her name. Before she moved from the Bay Area, she became involved with the Community Breast Health Project in Palo Alto, she says, because it was a way to work on her own healing and use her nursing skills.

Like Ken and Delia, Joyce says she views her volunteer work at CRCMC as a way to get involved in the community. But she says she gets more out of volunteering than she gives. "It's a privilege to have this opportunity," she says.

Chuck Hinsch says he regards the recent opportunity to help his friend Tony Rose through the dying process as one of "the most beautiful experiences I've ever had." But it wasn't an experience that was reserved for Chuck alone. Many members of the coastal community came together to assist Tony in the last few weeks before he died. The involvement started as a trickle, Chuck explains, with only a couple of people bringing Tony food and checking on him during the day. However, before he died on December 14th, over 40 people, coordinated by Liz Helenchild and Chuck, had cooked for, comforted, nursed, laughed and cried with Tony in his small house in Mendocino. Some people brought soup. Some shared a meal with Tony. Some spent the night next to his bed. Some gave him morphine shots. It was an outpouring of love and commitment from the community that Chuck will never forget, he says.

CRCMC relies on the help of the community to accomplish the work it needs to do. Sara says she has called on Toni Lemos many times over the years to work on CRCMC's bulk mailings. Jill Stroup, after putting in a long week at the Cafe Beaujolais in Mendocino as a chef, has willingly come in and processed countless raffle orders for the last 3 years. There are many other volunteers who are willing to clean someone's house, drive people to the doctor, distribute Newsletterss or do whatever needs to be done.

Sometimes it is just takes a couple of people who are willing to commit to perform one seemingly small task or volunteering a few hours a week that can and does make all the difference to someone who has cancer, an organization like CRCMC, and ultimately, to the community we live in.

Many months ago when I was first asked to write this article I made a dumb joke to the person who asked me: "I don't know what to write about. Maybe I should write about cancer jokes." And she said, poker faced, "That sounds great." Being a bit of a connoisseur of silliness of every kind, I'm aware there are jokes and schtick about every human difficulty imaginable. So I was wondering if there are any "How many cancer patients does it take to change a light bulb?" jokes, not to mention jokes and stories that might actually be funny. I was thinking not only about light bulb jokes but also about the more private kind of joking around, things that people with cancer might laugh at with their friends and families and caregivers. I haven't heard any, and that itself is interesting to me. Actually I admire very much the will to survive that is often expressed in jokes, both the recountable kind and the idiosyncratic stories where "you just had to be there." I imagine there must be a treasure trove of cancer humor, because, for many people I know who are dealing with cancer, that spirit of resistance is so vivid. It just has to bubble up in the silly and irreverent now and then.

Comes time to actually write, and I'm thinking about this more and more. Mostly I'm thinking, "Why did I ever sign up for something so ridiculous?" So I decide to do a little research. I call my friend Shelly, who is an oncology nurse at a big hospital in New York, and a person with a great laugh and a nice sense of the dark side besides. After explaining my basic question I ask Shelly: "Do you ever hear your patients making jokes about their situation?" There's silence on the other end of the phone. Finally she says, "Nope." Now I'm silent. So she says, "Let me think a little further. Um... nope." She goes on to tell me that there are laughter therapies. "You mean like you make an appointment and the laughter therapist comes into the room right after the occupational therapist?" "Well, not really," she says, and tells me that at Sloan Kettering, where she used to work, the halls were full of clowns. Usually the clowns were there for pediatric patients, but sometimes they'd come and see adults as well. A phenomenon that sounds rather un-funny, and in fact distinctly scary, to me.

It occurs to me that this is the computer age and I should do some research online. So I go to the Hotbot and type in "cancer+jokes." I have to admit, even as I'm typing, I'm hoping no one can see what I'm doing. It just feels profane to put the two words together. Apparently the search engine thinks so too, because I get joke sites and cancer sites but nothing that brings them together, but in the service of knowledge I forge ahead. Yahoo finally offers up a charming cancer humor page (with an apt disclaimer about how this might not be helpful if you've just learned you have cancer).

My husband Mickey is about the funniest person I know. When I first met him ten years ago, he was two years this side of having vocal cord cancer. In the first year of whatever it was we were doing that they used to call courtship, he developed another nodule. It was a terribly scary time, and frankly, I don't remember any laughter in those months at all. So the other day I was asking him whether he remembered anything funny about his cancer experience. He began to retell a story I've heard a number of times, from his first bout, his first day of radiation therapy: He goes to the radiation oncologist's office and sits in the waiting room. Finally someone opens the door and says, "Follow me, Ralph." (Mickey's name, as it happens, is "Mickey," but the radiation doctor's name is Ralph.) The nurse or receptionist or whatever he is sits Mickey down and begins to take a history. In the middle of the interview, with all its intimate questions, another worker comes into the room and says to the guy that's talking to Mickey, "You want to finish up or go to lunch?" And the first guy hands the second the clipboard, says, "Here, you do it," and walks out. The punch line of the story is that some minutes later, when Mickey is laying on a table, a metal prong with a piece of wax or something on the end is lowered into his mouth, pinning him to the table in terror. A day or two after he has angrily fired this doctor and is recounting this whole horror story to the new one, the new doctor exclaims, "Oh, my god, Dr. Jones still uses a bite block?" 

This story, like the cancer clowns, I actually find more scary than funny, but Mickey thinks it has some laughs in it. So, I asked him, how soon after it happened did you start seeing this experience as funny? As I suspected, not until he was well away from the clutches of Dr. Jones and feeling like he was going to survive the radiation, not to mention the cancer.

As it happens, the day Mickey and I were talking about cancer and humor, we had each recently spent a night with a man we know who is dying right now of cancer. Both of us have been moved by our time with this person, someone we like very much, though we don't know him well. Particularly as he moves closer and closer to his final passage, time in his company becomes more and more awesome. Thinking about him keeps us awake at night, and we open our eyes in the morning and mention his name. As friends and friends of friends and Home Health nurses move in and out of this man's home, caring for him, I've heard and spoken every kind of beautiful, loving, reassuring phrase. There has been little laughter that I can recall.

Which leads me to a theory, if you like, a bit of a conclusion from a tiny bit of very unscientific research. Jokes and schtick emerge not only from the will to survive but also from a kind of ironic distance from the center of events. What makes something funny is often looking from the outside at a situation and seeing it differently than do the people in the middle of everything. It's dual perspective, a word or an action taken out of its obvious context, is what makes it funny. Hence the Cancer Online folks advice to wait until you have some distance from the first shock of a cancer diagnosis before tuning in to their jokeline.

Cancer has a way of reaching out and including everyone. There is something so fundamental, so literally cellular, about the disease process of cancer that it is unusually hard to find ironic distance from it. It's hard to have a dual perspective. For one thing, you never really know that you don't have cancer. It could be in any of us at any moment, even if we won't find out for years. Even aside from this literal aspect, there is something about the unfolding of cancer within a person's body that is so awesome, as well as upsetting and dangerous, that it has a way of connecting soul to soul and making distance difficult.

I guess I've learned from this excursion into cancer humor something about another kind of beauty that emerges from this illness, a connective quality, an awe-inspiring aspect. Maybe it doesn't lead to a lot of joking around. But I still wonder. Maybe when I see you at the post office you'll come up and whisper to me, "Hey, I've got a really terrible one. You've just gotta hear it..."