Choosing Their Weapons : Cancer Survivors Tell Circle 1000 Members How They’ve Fought the Battle
Diana Golden and Susan Nessim are both young women who have survived cancer, but they offered two very different accounts of their battle with the disease.
Golden and Nessim recently spoke at the Four Seasons Hotel in Newport Beach to 350 members of Circle 1000, the Hoag Hospital Foundation’s support group for the Hoag Cancer Center.
Circle 1000 members contribute a minimum of $100 to the foundation annually, and in exchange they receive an invitation to the brunch. Many members give much more than the minimum donation (a dozen gave more than $5,000), so actual proceeds from the brunch exceeded $220,000.
Downhill Racer
Golden, 31, and Nessim, 36, were first stricken with cancer in their youths, and both found different but effective ways of coping with their illness and its aftermath.
Golden lost her right leg to bone cancer at age 12, yet became an award-winning skier. She received an Olympic gold medal in the women’s disabled giant slalom at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary and won 19 U.S. Disabled National Championship gold medals.
Wearing an emerald green dress and accompanied by Midnight Sun, her giant Alaskan malamute that carries her bags, Golden talked about overcoming fear--using her skiing experiences as a metaphor for facing life’s challenges.
“Imagine you’re getting ready to ski,” she said, and before anyone knew it she had climbed atop a table with crutches in hand. Standing on her one leg high above the audience, she imitated her movements as she recalled tackling a particularly “vicious” downhill course.
“This is not a graceful ski ride, this is hang on for your life, baby,” she said, twisting, turning and suddenly jumping off the table toward an imaginary finish line, causing many in the audience to gasp.
“It’s laying it on the line for what you love,” she said.
A year ago Golden underwent a bilateral mastectomy for breast cancer. She has given up ski racing full time but she still skis, hikes and tours as a motivational speaker.
“People’s understanding of cancer always needs to be broadened,” she said.
Tale of Rejection
Nessim was 17 when she developed a rare form of childhood cancer that attacked one section of her thigh. After leaving the dark and painful “kingdom of the ill,” she found she still had another battle to wage: getting people to accept her. As a cancer survivor Nessim has encountered rejection, isolation and discrimination in the workplace.
She recalled how, as a college student, she got engaged and went to visit her fiance’s parents on spring break. At one point her fiance’s mother turned to her and asked, “What’s it like living with a time bomb inside of you?” Her worst fears were confirmed at dinner when the father said, “I love my son, but I don’t want him to be a widower.”
“I felt part of me died at that table,” Nessim said.
In 1985 she founded a support group for cancer survivors called Cancervive that helps people deal with the aftermath of their illness. She has written a book called “Cancervive: The Challenge of Life After Cancer” and is working on several children’s books dealing with cancer.
Brunch chairwoman Arden Flamson said the speakers were chosen in part because of their age.
“Cancer can strike young people, too,” she said.
Hoag Hospital Foundation is the fund-raising arm of Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, a nonprofit community hospital in Newport Beach.
Among the guests: Sandy Sewell, Circle 1000 founding chairwoman; Al Auer, chairman of the Hoag Hospital board; Robert Dillman, medical director of the Hoag Cancer Center; Patti Jamieson, executive director of the Hoag Cancer Center; Frances Applegate, Hyla Bertea, Sherry Cagle, Patricia Cox, Jacquelyn Dillman, Louise Ewing, Lillian Fluor, Betty Grazer, Jodi Greenbaum, Michael and Kellina Hayde, Charles and Nora Hester, Nora Jorgensen Johnson, Don and Dorothy Koll, Anabel Konwiser, Susan Phillips, Judy Steele, Dottie Stillwell, Judith Swedlund, Rita Teller, Catherine Thyen, Ginny Ueberroth and Janet Curci Walsh.