Photography by Donovan Roberts Witmer
With a breast cancer diagnosis, life snaps into focus. Unimportant things diminish. The consequential things take priority. True friends emerge and false ones fade away. Two Susquehanna Valley women wouldn’t allow breast cancer to define them. Instead, the experience helped them find the courage and strength to persevere and to give back in deeply personal ways.
Jean Ripple
Hummelstown
Tears stain the journal entry Jean Ripple wrote the day she looked at her mastectomy incision for the first time. The scar was long and misshapen, but Ripple looked and thought, “That’s my life preserver.”
“It was my life preserver and my resurrection and my moving forward with life and not looking back, and knowing that I’m going to be fine because I was rebirthed during that surgery,” she says now. “I was looking forward to the rest of the healing and the rest of the medical procedures, and thanks be to God and thanks be to Jesus.”
Since her diagnosis with breast cancer in early 2013, Ripple has faced her life “with joy and faith and courage. I live my life with effervescence. I am just filled with bubbles of joy.”
Of course, there have been trials along the way. Ripple started her journal on the day she learned she had cancer. The first entry recounts that “a combination of emotions and physical reactions took over. Nausea, sadness, anger, wanting to throw up, wanting to collapse to the floor in a fetal position and sob uncontrollably, wanting to scream obscenities and do physical damage. But I only cried, silent tears with a few gasps as the ugliness of the word ‘cancer’ reverberated.”
Ripple started the journal to avoid repeating the mistakes made during another trying time in her life, a period of death and divorce. Back then, she shoved away the pain and disappointment. With the cancer diagnosis, she vowed not to repeat “that unhealthy behavior. I realized my emotions were so raw that I didn’t ever want to forget. There are some things you want to forget, but I knew that for some reason I needed to remember all these emotions.”
During the first meeting with the doctor to review her options, Ripple’s son took notes on the medical points. He also wrote down some statements his mother made.
“I’ve rediscovered who I am,” she said. And, “This will not defeat me.” And finally, “I am fearless.”
“Fear paralyzes,” she says. “It’s different to be cautious, to be aware, to be nervous. Those are healthy acknowledgements that something isn’t right, but fear paralyzes me and prevents me from thinking what I need to do to get out of the situation.”
Even when she was done with chemo, she insisted that the chemical-delivery port, normally kept in the chest in case of the cancer’s return, be removed.
“There is no ‘in case,’ because I am not letting cancer back in my body,” she says. “The port gives it permission to find its way back. I’m done with it.”
Friends and family helped after surgery and during chemo, but Ripple also enjoyed solitude, finding peace in the rhythms of knitting in the cheery sunroom of her Hummelstown home. Through counseling, she recognized the people who were good for her and those whom she was “healthier for not being in contact with.”
“Some people have a very difficult time dealing with someone else’s cancer,” she says. “Some people were so curious about everything that was going on, but not because they were interested in me as much as they were interested in what they could run and tell other people.”
Taught by her parents to respect all others, Ripple vowed to “live life in a kind and loving way.” She believes that all cancer patients can give back by helping others know that they’re not alone. She teaches chemo patients the attention-getting head scarf-wrapping techniques she designed during her own chemo treatments. She also teaches knitting and crocheting to caregivers at the American Cancer Society’s Hope Lodge, a home-away-from-home for cancer patients undergoing daily treatments at Hershey Medical Center.
Ripple also gives back to PinnacleHealth, the provider of her diagnosis and treatment. Speaking at a fundraiser for Pinnacle’s VOUCHER PROGRAM, she told donors that she was “one of the lucky ones.”
“Yes, I had cancer,” she told them. “How could that be lucky? But I had the means to have the diagnosis. I had the means to be ensured that I could get care that I needed. The money contributed today gives a woman the same chance that I had to be healed. No woman should be denied that care.”
Like many cancer survivors, Ripple speaks of her journey. A journey is not the same as a vacation, she says. Explorers journeyed to find new pathways, finding their way without maps. Sitting in her beloved sunroom, Ripple says that she would “discover as the day unfolded where it took me.”
“Some days, I didn’t like where it took me. Then there were other days I would come out here and think, ‘Yeah, I know I’m going through chemo, I have no hair, I’ve lost a breast, but isn’t this a magnificent day?’”
Kathy Morgan
Mount Joy
The year was 1999, but Kathy Morgan still cries at the memory. After her recent breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, she joined a team of co-workers for a lap during the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. She looked at the other teams around her and realized that she was surrounded by cancer survivors.
“I saw people that were alive, that were living the disease,” she says now. “They had signs that said they were five years out or 10 years out or three years out or two months out, and it was just hope.”
Since then, Kathy Morgan has made a cause of Relay for Life. The team she formed in 2001, “Captain Morgan’s Crusaders,” has raised a total treasure of $811,874, making it the top non-corporation Relay team in the East Central Division that covers Pennsylvania and Ohio.
And that doesn’t count the funds Morgan, a realtor, has helped raise as a co-chair for the Lancaster County Relay and as a Relay advisory team member for ACS divisionally and nationwide.
When Morgan joined her first Relay for Life, she wondered why she hadn’t done it sooner to honor the long line of relatives— father, grandmother, aunts, uncles— who had died from cancer.
“I never really saw anybody survive it,” she says from the Mount Joy home she shares with her husband.
But at her diagnosis, she remembered something she had heard a motivational speaker say just weeks before. “You are what you focus on. It’s totally up to you to make that decision as to mentally where you want to be.”
Even with a cancer diagnosis, she went on a planned vacation to Hawaii. She returned home to surgeries, chemo and radiation. She cried, but then she actually slapped herself in the face and proclaimed, “Enough of that.” She pledged to be the first in her family to survive, “bound and determined to be the best cancer survivor anybody ever ran into.”
As soon as she was able, she volunteered for ACS’ Reach to Recovery, helping guide other cancer patients through their trials. In 2006, her final year co-chairing the Lancaster County Relay for Life, the event reached its goal of raising $1 million.
“Everybody believed that we could do it,” she says. “The teams believed. The participants believed. Those involved in any way just believed in it.”
Morgan’s own Captain Morgan’s Crusaders has attracted team members from all walks of life who share a commitment to raising $1,500 each. Fundraisers run throughout the year, including winery events, bus trips to Baltimore’s Fells Point, a car wash, a dance jam, sub sales, silent auctions and “pork and pints” at a local pub.
“The only thing we don’t do is cook or bake,” Morgan says. “We just want to throw a party. Battling cancer can be fun.”
With her endurance and the life lessons she learned, Morgan doesn’t “regret for one minute getting cancer. Not one minute.”
“Believe me when they say, 'don’t sweat the small stuff,'” she says. “It was the best excuse to get rid of toxic people that you allow to drain your energy. You find out totally who your friends are and who your friends aren’t.”
Morgan keeps on her phone a recording of Stuart Scott accepting the Jimmy V Perseverance Award at the 2013 ESPYS (a national sports award presented by ESPN network). “Beat cancer by how you live, why you live and the manner in which you live,” said the ESPN anchor. After 10 years of pharmaceutical therapy, Morgan doesn’t say she’s in remission. She prefers “no evidence of disease.”
“Remission just sounds like it’s there waiting to come back,” she says.
Morgan remembers the powerful lesson learned the year that the Lancaster County Relay raised $1 million. Joy at the news was dampened by an error that left some teams out of the closing ceremony. People were angry, and Morgan was in tears. But then, ACS staffers asked her to talk to a woman who had just shown up, and Morgan went into Reach to Recovery mode. The woman had gotten a cancer diagnosis that morning. Driving around, too stunned to know where to go or what to do, she saw signs pointing toward the American Cancer Society Relay for Life. She followed the arrows, and for an hour and a half, Morgan sat and talked with her.
“We really found out what the true meaning of Relay was,” Morgan says now. ”It didn’t matter what we raised. Yes, it’s important, and it was unfortunate that we missed something, but we supplied what was needed for one person, and you have to be happy with that.”
Morgan has kept in touch with the woman, who is “fine to this day. That’s the power of Relay. That’s why I do it.”