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Humor Defines Cancer Survivor’s Attitude, Message
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- In her room in the intensive care unit following surgery, Brenda Elsagher knew her husband, Bahgat, would say the right thing to her.
Seeing the multitude of tubes and wires hanging to her, he leaned over and told her she looked like the back of his stereo.
“It was so goofy and ridiculous, it made me laugh out loud,” she recalls. “So even though I was in the middle of all that pain, I laughed and I felt good for that second. I felt I’ll be OK.”
It’s that attitude that defines Elsagher’s approach to dealing with and talking about her experiences with cancer. A lecturer, author and humorist, Elsagher addressed the meeting April 8 of the Youngstown Ostomy Support Group at St. Elizabeth Boardman Health Center.
Anna Fitzgerald, a certified wound, ostomy and continence nurse with St. Elizabeth Health Center, oversees the ostomy support group, which meets at 6:30 p.m. the second Tuesday of each month. It alternates between Humility House and the Boardman campus.
Fitzgerald became acquainted with Elsagher when one of her patients introduced her to one of her books. When she went online to order copies, Fitzgerald invited her to speak at a function. Elsagher responded a few days later “and here she is,” Fitzgerald says.
Before she was diagnosed with cancer at age 39, Elsagher operated a hair salon in Minnesota. She and her husband worked alternate shifts to minimize the time their two children spent in daycare. “I was highly stressed by my own choice to see how hard I could work and how much money I could make,” she recalls.
“I did not know at the time about stress and the effects of stress. I thought you only got problems with stress if something bad happened to you,” she said. “I didn’t realize the problems caused by stress, that you put yourself under by choice.” Because there was no family history of cancer, her initial reaction the diagnosis of colorectal cancer was denial, followed by anger.
Elsagher asked her doctor several questions. Although she had been trained in the American Cancer Society’s “Look Good Feel Better” program -- it deals with people who suffer hair loss from chemotherapy – no one she dealt with through the program talked about cancers such as hers. “And I was a hairdresser, and supposedly you tell your hairdresser everything,” she remarks.
“I knew that day I was going to end up with the bag. I knew that I would have my rectum removed. And to save my life I would probably have all my female internal organs removed, a hysterectomy and vaginal reconstruction. That’s what I had to look forward to,” she recalls.
Elsagher adopted humor as her vehicle for acceptance when she went in for a CAT scan before undergoing surgery, after a story the nurse who disconnected her from her intravenous tube shared after the scan.
“That story made me laugh, made me laugh heartily,” Elsagher recalls. “Humor that day changed things because I laughed hard and I think it clicked – I need to laugh more. I think it was an inside message that told me I need to laugh more.”
That visit also determined how physicians would proceed. Had the cancer spread to Elsagher’s liver or lungs, her doctor told her, they wouldn’t bother with operating. “That was almost 18 years ago. These days they don’t say that because they can sect part of the liver, they can sect part of the lung,” she says. “So I wanted the operation. I went from being repulsed by the idea of having a colostomy to embracing it in that one visit. … I wanted to see my kids grow up.”
Following surgery, Elsagher cut back on her work hours and shared her experiences with interested clients. One of her goals post-surgery – “a bucket list kind of thing” – was to become a comedian so she went to comedy school in Minneapolis, where she learned to write and perform comedy. She realized “I was never going to be” Carol Burnett, Ellen DeGeneres or Whoopi Goldberg, her idols. She did, however, on her 40th birthday perform 10 minutes at an open forum at a club. That performance won the Twin Cities Funniest Person competition.
Today Elsagher does 40 to 50 speaking engagements each year. When she speaks, she has two goals. The first is to encourage people to get a colonoscopy. “If they have a little polyp, it can be removed at that time. It’s that simple,” she says. The second is to dispel the stigma of having a life-saving operation such as an ostomy. Today 250,000 people in North America are walking around with ostomies, she says, and colon cancer rates are declining because of the rising number of early screenings.
Elsagher also has written four books -- If the Battle Is Over, Why Am I Still in Uniform?, I’d Like to Buy a Bowel Please!, Bedpan Banter and It’s in the Bag and Under the Covers. She recalls a favorite story from her most recent book told by a woman who had had six surgeries for Crohn’s disease. The woman was preparing to inform her boyfriend, about her ostomy and her disease over dinner.
He says he understands. Does he have any questions, she asks.
Will she be able to have sex and have kids?
Her answers are “yes” and “yes.”
His last question: “Can we eat now?”
“I love it. I love the fact that she’s moved and she’s dared to tell someone that she has this disease and yet she's embraced her life. She has a bag. Now she’s asking him to embrace her life too and he says, ‘Can we go eat now?’ That’s so wonderful.”
Copyright 2014 by The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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