Cancer Survivor Helps Others Find the Road to Recovery

I was born in Corcoran, which was a town of about 5,000 people in California’s San Joaquin Valley. My mother had been born there, and my father came when his family purchased a ranch in the valley. Pretty much the only industry in the valley was agriculture.

I was a competitive swimmer from a young age, and when I was in high school I worked during the summer as a lifeguard and water-safety instructor during the day. At night, I worked as a “flagger” in the cotton fields. Flaggers had flashlights that signaled to the planes where the rows of crops ended and where they should drop the pesticides. My friends and I did this for three summers. We were out there in our cutoffs and T-shirts and with absolutely no protection whatsoever.

At the time we didn’t have any idea of the danger. This was just the norm in this part of the country. Now the flaggers are completely covered in white paper suits, hoods, and gloves and dust masks.

After I graduated from high school, I went to Fresno State University, but I was miserable. It was

Sara O’Donnell Age: 59 First professional job: Coordinator, Alzheimer’s Resource Center, Ukiah, Calif. Current job: Executive director, Cancer Resource Center of Mendocino County, Mendocino, Calif.

all the same people I had grown up with, and I was aching to get out in the real world. During the summer of 1968, I remember watching the Democratic National Convention as the Chicago police were beating the war protesters. I just couldn’t pull myself away from the television. This was my first social-justice epiphany moment.

My mother had been a sort of community organizer when I was younger. Corcoran was very conservative and very Republican, but there were still children who didn’t have shoes to wear to school. My mother quietly started a program so that all children would have shoes. One of the things I learned from her was never to take no for an answer.

After I dropped out of college, I got married and had the first of my three children. I lived in Oregon with my husband, who ran a cabinetry business. After I got divorced, I moved back to Mendocino County, Calif., in the early 1980s.

In 1984, my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and in 1985, my then-40-year-old brother was diagnosed. My mother died in 1986 and my brother in 1987.

Then, in 1990, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I believe the crop dusting did play a role, but was it the only cause? Probably not.

Mendocino County is very rural: We’re a three-and-a-half-hour drive from San Francisco. This county has 3,500 square miles, 89,000 people, and the biggest town has only 15,000 residents. Of course, this was before the Internet, and there just was no central place to get information about the disease.

When I was halfway through my chemotherapy, I realized that things didn’t have to be this way and that if I got better, I was doing to do something to correct this situation — although I wasn’t sure what. My surgeon put me in contact with Jeremy Geffen, who was my oncologist and who was doing a fellowship at the University of California at San Francisco. When I was getting chemo, we would sit in this little room and talk about our dreams.

My dream was that no one in this county would ever have to go through this alone, as I had. Jeremy’s was to have a medical center that accounted for people’s emotional and spiritual needs.

I went home and continued healing, plus taking care of three small children. In 1992, I began working as an outreach coordinator at the Alzheimer’s Resource Center, which was great training for what I now do.

In 1994, I started planning for the Cancer Resource Center of Mendocino County. In 1995, we received $1,300 from a community member — Margaret Fox — and the people in the community were very supportive. We opened a small office in Mendocino, and I started writing little grants and holding community fund raisers. That first year our budget was $18,000. We got our first large grants from the California Endowment and the Avon Foundation in 2002, which made it possible for us to open a second office in Ukiah in 2003.

The $358,000 that we received from the California Endowment more than tripled our budget, and now our annual budget is $530,000. I have a full-time staff of three, including one bilingual, bicultural educator, as well as two part-time staff members and a couple of AmeriCorps people.

The people who come to us don’t know what they need or what different types of treatment are available — they’re like deer that are caught in the headlights. People have to make decisions after a diagnosis is made that will affect the quality of the rest of their lives.

Our staff brainstorms with the patients to determine their questions for their doctors. After brainstorming, we fax the questions to their doctor and then we like to go with them to their appointments. Half the battle is knowing what to ask, and the other half is getting the answers. We tape-record the meeting with the doctors, write down the answers as succinctly as possible, and give patients the audio recording and the written notes to share with their families. Furthermore, hospitals often request that we go visit patients when they are diagnosed, to offer our services.

Now we serve about 250 individuals a year, all at absolutely no cost to the patients. Our mission is to equalize access to quality health care for everyone. We also do surveys, but one thing we regularly hear is that, after working with us, the patients have fewer conflicts when it comes to making a decision. Of course, we often have to look deeper than the numbers to see what is really important to our clients.

I knew a woman who was diagnosed with breast cancer, whose dream was to take her elderly mother on a last trip to Italy to see her relatives. Instead of giving that up, she chose a mastectomy, which did not require follow-up radiation. Had she opted for a less invasive lumpectomy, she would have had to spend another six weeks getting radiation and would have risked having to give up the trip with her mother.

I was rediagnosed with cancer in November 2007. But that diagnosis certainly brought me back to exactly why I am doing this work. I’ve learned that if you see a need and if it is something you have a passion for, don’t let anyone tell you that whatever your goal is cannot be achieved.