Loretta Swan: My name is Loretta Swan. I am from a small town in Oklahoma called Kellyville and I am a lung cancer survivor.
The original diagnosis was from my family doctor. When he finally came in I knew something was wrong by the look on his face but he just said, “Sometimes bad things happen to good people”, and I knew what he meant. When you are told something of that nature it’s kind of like being slapped. I was totally in shock for a while and then as I began to think in I just felt like my life was over.
One of the amazing things when you come to Cancer Treatment Center is that there’s nothing but hope here. There is no down, no one looks down and says, “Oh you poor thing – you’ve got six months”, you know, it’s “We’re going to fight this thing”. Everything is uplifting; everything is encouraging and keeping your strong and you can fight this, you can beat this, you know, you just have to have the strength.
One of my doctors told me, he said, “You are the batter and we are going to throw everything at you that we can throw”, and he said, “Your job is to stand there and take it, and it’s going to be hard, but you can take it, and we are going to beat this”, and that’s exactly what happened. They threw everything they could do and sometimes it was tough but you stand there and take it and hope and pray that you get through it and the other side is beautiful – I have to say.
I feel wonderful. I have a new lease on life. It is so good that I don’t know what to do with myself each day, just be thankful for it and I have to make myself not do things that I know I shouldn’t be doing because I feel great, and I want to tell everyone – I just want everyone to know that there is hope, that the big ‘C’ word, when you hear it, just is demolishing and just takes everything away from you but there is life. There is life.
It doesn’t mean the end of your life and it doesn’t mean you don’t have hope. There is always hope, and one of the things that they had told me here was where there’s life there’s hope, and it’s so true.