Walkers reflect on cancer journey at Austintown Relay

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

AUSTINTOWN

If the people attending Relay for Life at Austintown Fitch High School needed a reminder that those stricken with cancer sometimes have to endure dark and gloomy times, they got it Friday.

During the first half-hour of the annual American Cancer Society fundraising event, as survivors and supporters lined up around the track to begin the survivors’ lap, the rain came down hard, bringing with it dark clouds and cold winds.

Making matters worse was that many hadn’t come prepared, most likely not expecting such a chill after weeks of warm weather.

Marilyn Sees of Girard, a breast-cancer survivor, agreed that her cancer diagnosis did give her a dark mood.

“In the beginning, it’s really gloomy, but in time you trust in God, and it gets better,” she said.

In the same way, the rain and cold blew over after the first half-hour, followed by mild comfortable weather.

Sees said her cancer was diagnosed in 2009, and her treatment has been very successful.

“I’ve had lot of faith and a lot of friends and family get me through this,” she said as she walked with a friend more than an hour after the relay had started.

The Relay is a celebration for the survivors, an opportunity to share the challenges of cancer with others and to spread the hope that cancer research will some day wipe out the disease.

But it also serves as a reminder that cancer can have an unhappy ending.

Sue Johnson of Austintown and her sister, Judy Port of Ashtabula, walked together in the survivors’ lap because they were both diagnosed with breast cancer — Johnson in 1997 and Port in 1998.

Port said they laughed that Johnson, younger than Port by one year, got cancer a year before Port.

“She always wanted to do things first, like wear lipstick, and she did cancer first too,” Port said.

But as they walked Friday, it was hard not to reflect on last year’s Relay, when the women walked the survivor’s lap with Judy’s son-in-law, Jeff Schrum of Canfield, who was in the late stages of a rare type of cancer of the bile duct.

“He was on oxygen. He walked one lap,” Johnson said of Schrum, who died about six weeks later.

“He wanted to live long enough to see his youngest daughter graduate from high school,” Port said. “She graduated in June, and he died in July.”

When Schrum was diagnosed with the disease, doctors gave him only six months to live. He lasted 21/2.

By comparison, Port and Johnson both came through their cancer scare OK, they said.

“When I think of Jeff, it was a snap compared to what he went through,” Johnson said.

Robert Miller of Youngstown’s South Side said finding out in February that he had cancer of the kidney was a real shock. Doctors found a softball-sized tumor but couldn’t operate right away to remove it because he had a seizure, which indicated he also had a tumor in his brain.

Miller was working as a detailer at Spitzer Chevrolet at the time but hasn’t been able to work since then. Doctors also found small tumors in an artery in his chest.

“I’ve had CAT scans, been shot full of dyes and everything,” said Miller, 53. “This bit me in the [butt]. It just happened out of nowhere,” he said.

Miller said he doesn’t plan to let the cancer stop him. “I don’t plan to go nowhere. I ain’t taking no dirt nap.”

Miller’s sister, Patty Miller, said she also thought about the symbolism of the gloomy weather as the survivors’ lap got started, but the rain made her think of her father, Frederick Miller, who died last year of cancer at age 91.

“They say the rain is him looking down.”