Breast Cancer Survivor Fights Back Through Volunteerism

Breast Cancer Survivor Fights Back Through Volunteerism
Article date: 2009/04/09
Every time I volunteer with the American Cancer Society -- whether I'm holding a cancer patient's hand at an outpatient clinic or rallying a team for Relay For Life -- I feel like I'm fighting back. Volunteering turns all my feelings of grief and powerlessness towards cancer into real power.

For Sue Sgambato, volunteering is not just a way to give back -- it's a way to take back what she's lost to cancer.
Sgambato, 51, raised in New York and currently living in Mapleville, Rhode Island, has lost several members of her family to cancer, including her mother and a grandmother to breast cancer. Through her work as a volunteer with the American Cancer Society, she's been able to channel that grief to make a positive difference in people's lives.
Her mother died exactly 2 years before Sgambato, then 36, found a lump in her breast that turned out to be an aggressive form of breast cancer. Because of her family history, Sgambato opted to have the breast removed. When her doctor noticed thickening in her other breast, she decided to have it removed as well. During this period, she also had a total hysterectomy, after tests showed abnormalities in her left ovary.
"I just didn't want to risk it," she says, "And I have never regretted the surgery for even one day."
After the surgery and rounds of chemo, which Sgambato describes as "a blur -- somehow I put one foot in front of the other," she says she needed a way to channel all of her feelings of anger towards cancer, especially her feelings of grief and loss over her mother's 13 year battle with breast cancer. So she started volunteering with the American Cancer Society.
"I wanted to be with other women who were going through treatment and facing similar struggles," she recalls. "And I wanted to honor my mother's memory. The American Cancer Society offered me a way to do that."
Finding her voice

www.QuitSmoking21days.com