By WALLYCE TODD
Staff Writer

This past weekend, I heard my knee pop at the same time I felt the pain shoot out and around my leg joint. I chose not to stop, but just changed my shuffling run to a skip and kept on going, thinking all the while that I needed different shoes. Later, when my back began hurting, I just wrapped a flexible brace around it and got back to work. Then, as my head began to pulse, I grabbed some ibuprofen and said a prayer.

Yes, the 24-hours of Relay for Life was an experience to me, an amazing and inspiring one in so many ways. However, it was also an experience that allowed me a just a few hours of empathy with those who suffer from cancer or take care of someone who is affected by the disease.

When I was sleep-deprived and hurting, and it was my time to walk around the track (I had the 2-4 a.m. shift for The News Reporter team), I decided to take a lap where I talked less and looked around more. The entire track was illuminated by names written on candle-lit bags highlighting the names of someone who had dealt with or died from cancer.

These people, I knew, had to have hurt, and for much longer than my aches and pains were going to last. As I read each name, I was looking for my aunt’s name. While I lived in Slovakia, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Caroline Galan (my dad’s sister) was our own family’s inspiration.

She went through chemotherapy and surgery like a trouper. And in the days since she has been in remission – even when she’s occasionally had to deal with the residual effects of her treatment – she has still not complained, but continued forward with strength and faith.

It was a beautiful thing to me to see her near the front of the “survivor’s lap” on Friday night at Relay. May I emulate her when it comes to my own challenges in life.

Then, there was my mama’s mother, Henrietta Phillips. My maternal grandmother was my inspiration for traveling. She visited virtually every continent after she turned 60 and before she was diagnosed with colon cancer. It was this cancer that later became a tumor in her brain, the effects of which ultimately resulted in the end of her life on Earth.

I can remember being in college and visiting Grandmama during an academic break. I drove her to the hospital where she sat and read as the chemo dripped into her veins. In her early 80s and at a time when even the sight of food made her nauseous – she still had the wry sense of humor as to cut out and post a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where the little tyke is saying “Blecchh” about eating certain types of food.

May I face with humor the hard times in life whenever possible. May I realize that I serve a Lord who promises to return the years the locusts have eaten and who will turn my mourning into dancing.

I didn’t get to mourn with my family when my beloved grandmother passed away in July of 1995 because I was in the UK. But I was given the gift of feeling awash with memories of her as I sat on the ruins of the Dublin cathedral in the same moments when her body’s sufferings became her soul’s eternal joy as she entered into the presence of God.

Even this week, days after Relay, when my knee that “popped” is still playing up – I remember my friend Natalie (Padrick) Platt, who last I saw in the days before I moved to Central Eastern Europe in 2004. After our visit, during which we had reminisced about being middle schoolers and dancing to the jukebox in my parents’ basement, I hugged “Nat” goodbye.

My hug was given while she was still hooked up to several hidden tubes dripping treatment for her cancer into a body that would soon be called to its heavenly home. Yet on that day – she, her sister, and her husband were all focused not on the pain of the process, but on the love of a treasured life lived. How many of us focus on the love instead of the pain?

Then, there’s Nina Ferguson, my high school friend. She graduated from WHS in 1988, the year before me. She now lives in Virginia. Even now, less than a year after surgery removed the cancer that had left her colon and traveled into her womb – she is once again faced with the very real possibility of chemotherapy after doctors discovered what looks to be cancer in the area near her lungs.

A woman of faith, Nina isn’t looking forward to chemo, but she is looking forward to life after it -- and she is trusting her Heavenly Father to carry her through. She is not letting cancer keep her from soaking up all that she can experience in each day.

Relay for Life is just that, a celebration of the lives of those we know and love who have faced and fought back against cancer. This year’s theme, “Spreading the light of Hope,” is apropos, for without hope, what do any of us have?

Existing is not good enough for me, and my experience with my own loved ones who have been confronted by cancer is that it’s not good enough for them, either. Instead, each person – whether they were healed on earth or in heaven – looked the disease in the eye, and said: “you will not define me; my life is more than the pain I’m experiencing; you might affect my body, but you will never capture my soul.”

This is what I realized as my headache subsided, my back ceased to ache, and my knees began to heal. Pain is temporal, as is cancer. Life on earth is not without pain, but it can be filled to the brim with eternal hope. I believe if we will allow it, hope leads to Peace.

Note: If you’d like to send Nina Ferguson an email of encouragement, she can be reached at ninaferg@gmail.com.