The advice from Gina Smith is simple and heartfelt.
“Live each day like it’s your last.”
“Take one day at a time, and you will get through it.”
“Cancer is not a death sentence.”
She’s one of the first people you meet when someone visits the Allison Radiation Oncology Center at St. Rita’s Regional Cancer Center. The 55-year-old worked in the department since 1981, when it was a subsection of the X-ray department in the main hospital. She offers a calm to patients that everything will be all right.
She knows the fear her patients face. She faced it herself.
“If someone comes in really anxious about radiation, then I’ll say I’m almost a 20-year cancer survivor,” Smith said.
Smith, 55, of Harrod, noticed something on her breast when she was 37. Doctors told her to let it go for a year because she was young. Still, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at 40, and her father died from colon cancer, so she asked them to remove the lump. It turned out to be cancerous. Three sisters have since faced down breast cancer.
“It was scary for me, even though I had worked here a long time,” Smith said. “Just being told you have breast cancer, and I was only 37 at the time? I never had to go back and lay on that table for a treatment before that. I got through it, though. I took my treatment, then I went to work.”
Now that she’s a survivor, she identifies people who need encouragement and gives it to them.
“She’s been through it,” said her daughter, Julie Fields, who began working upstairs providing chemotherapy after 17 years working in the emergency room. “It’s easy for us to say it’s OK and you’re going to get through it. If you have a survivor sitting in front of you, you know you’re going to be OK.”
Fields, who was a senior in high school when Smith was diagnosed, calls her mother a fighter. Smith says she just has a really big heart and wants to help.
“There was a girl last week who was pacing out there. I said, ‘Are you OK?’ She said, ‘No, these steroids are killing me,’” she recalled.
“I told her you have to tell the doctors upstairs. She wouldn’t do it. When she went back for treatment, I told them, and they fixed her immediately. They took her off some medication, and she had a wonderful evening.”
She tries to appreciate her own wonderful evenings. She goes home to play with her Yorkie dog. She and her husband, a survivor of prostate cancer himself, enjoy taking short rides on their Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
When she first met him, she told a friend she’d never marry him but loved his Harley. After 27 years of marriage, now they each have one and ride together, he on his Fat Boy and she on her Sportster.
She’s living proof that there’s hope after a cancer diagnosis.
“There are survivors,” Smith said. “I don’t mean surviving in a nursing home. I mean survive in you go home, and nothing has changed. There is hope.”
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