Published: October 03, 2008 10:43 am            

Pink Ribbon Celebration to spotlight portraits of strength and survival

PRINCETON — Linda Shroyer always wondered what a doctor would say when delivering the piece of news a patient prayed he wouldn’t.

In March 2006, the artist who had previously worked mostly with brightly colored, cheerful illustrations on a small scale found out. It took a single phone call, and she knew for sure how the words would sound.

“They said, ‘I’m sorry. The news is not good. It is cancer,’” she said this week.

Instantly, Shroyer’s life, her body and her art changed.

The cancer required that she undergo a mastectomy, surgery to remove her left breast, followed by months of chemotherapy designed to kill any remaining cancer cells.

The surgery left her feeling violated, missing a part of herself, and the chemo stole her hair, along with the dexterity in her hands.

But Shroyer remained defiant in the face of disease. She found new art within herself and put her pain to work in paint and cloth breast forms. Tuesday, her show will be part of the Princeton Community Hospital Pink Ribbon Celebration and will trace her experiences from diagnosis to remission and all stages in between.

“The chemo really crippled my hands. It was almost an arthritic-type thing that happened,” Shroyer explained, pointing to “Graffiti,” one of the prints she completed while she was healing from surgery and feeling “all tangled up.” “As a result, these works are much larger than my art used to be. It was fun to work a little more abstract, a little looser.”

The entire show, titled “Exposure: A Creative Response to Breast Cancer,” follows her journey from tangled up and connected to a chemotherapy port to finally feeling free to dance again in “Elation.”

“Definitions of expose are: ‘to lay open, to view, not shielded or protected.’ Yes, I felt physically bare, singled out and unprotected,” Shroyer wrote in a program explaining her comprehensive show on display in 2007 at Southwest Virginia Community College. “I also identified with other nuances of expose: ‘to unmask, to bring to light as something shameful.’ Yes, I felt a terrible sense of shame and vulnerability.”

Each piece features a woman who has lost her hair to cancer treatment, drugs that poison the disease and some of her body too, and each carries a mastectomy scar, the wound that remained after the fight for her life.

“They’re not necessarily me,” Shroyer said, explaining the emotions behind the prints. “I just wanted people to see that there’s still some rhythm to life, even as a woman with one breast, and I wanted to be OK with who I am now.”

For her, the artwork was a form of therapy that helped her psyche heal while her body fought off the cancer and weathered the chemo.

“Any kind of creative activity can add to healing,” Shroyer said, surrounded by nurse practitioner and breast cancer survivor Shirley Aycoth and Mary Lou Baker, a nurse and another fellow survivor.

As Aycoth and Baker reviewed Shroyer’s work, shadows of their very personal bouts with cancer lingered as well.

“A picture really is worth a thousand words,” Aycoth, who was diagnosed on Valentine’s Day 2006, said. “It just brought back these raw emotions that I couldn’t express, or didn’t want to at the time, and made them tangible.”

Aycoth began her treatment with a lumpectomy at the site the cancer was discovered, but as she struggled through chemotherapy, doctors discovered the cancer had spread more than they originally thought. Ultimately, she underwent a double mastectomy and chemotherapy.

She had her last surgery in January 2007 and has been in remission since. She recently joined Mercer Medical Group as a health care provider, where she now helps treat patients who face similar situations.

Baker’s favorite print is the one titled “Elation.”

“I love the dancing one. Even though she’s lost her hair and she has this scar on her chest, she still feels like putting on her dancing skirt and dancing,” Baker said.

She was diagnosed with advanced-stage breast cancer Sept. 15, 2001. She survived surgery, only to face chemo and radiation. At one point, she faced 11 straight months of treatment with no breaks to let her body heal.

“My prognosis was horrible. But, I learned that I had to just take it one day at a time, and there were days when it was one minute at a time,” she said.

Baker remembered a vow she made to herself that kept her going. On her worst days, it was all she could do to walk into the oncology unit for her therapy. As was their practice, nurses tried to convince her to let them wheel her there in a wheelchair, but she refused, finding an inner strength in a determination to be a survivor instead of a victim.

“My body was just so exhausted, but I told myself, ‘I will walk in. I will walk out. I will walk both ways,’” she said. “If you can do it, you have to do it. You don’t have to do it all at once. God doesn’t expect you to do that. He just expects you to do what you can at that moment, and then you move on to the next moment.”

In a society where much of a woman’s femininity is visible in her breasts and shape, all three women said they had a tough time coping with their bodies’ new forms after surgery. Shroyer made a decision to face life as a single-breasted woman, accepting her body as beautiful in its healed form. Aycoth, who said her illness turned her breasts into more a liability than a pleasure, said she now proudly wears a shirt that declares her breasts “fake,” because her real ones nearly killed her.

And, Baker said she made peace with her scar. That was one message she hopes Shroyer’s audience sees in the art.

“It was encouraging to know we weren’t by ourselves. It’s OK to be a little bit different. It’s OK to have a scar on your chest. If I’m nothing more than a scar on my chest, then I am nothing,” she said. “I am more. I’m a mother. I’m a sister. I’m a nurse. I’m a survivor. Whether you want to be strong or not, you wind up being strong.”

Today, all three of the survivors are in remission. Baker has even surpassed the five-year mark that unofficially declares her cured, though there’s always a chance cancer can recur. They’ve all found new normals, past their diagnoses and treatments. And, they’re determined to draw strength from other survivors and support those still amid the journey they know too well.

That’s why they, along with PCH’s Deb Griffith and Mercer Medical Group’s Dr. Ashley Fritzius, joined forces to establish the Pink Ribbon Celebration Tuesday, Oct. 7, beginning at 5:30 p.m. in the PCH Parkview Center lobby. PCH CEO Wayne Griffith will welcome the audience, and Riel, Amber and Kelcey Sarno will present the music during a reception. Visitors will also be welcome to tour the PCH Women’s Imaging Center and view the digital mammography unit there.

At 6 p.m., Shroyer will speak, followed by a breast cancer survivors’ ceremony and dove release.

Women of all ages are invited to wear pink and join in observance of national Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

If there’s one thing Shroyer hopes the people who see her art and hear her speak leave knowing, it’s that scars and perceived imperfections can be just right for a survivor who squared off with cancer and walked away with a life.

“There is beauty, and there is life, and it’s OK to not be this perfect model,” she said.

Along the way, she’s learned to live more than she plans, and sharing her story to strengthen others’ resolve is part of her life now.

“I don’t want to put things off. I want to go ahead and live now,” she said.

“The grass really does look greener, and the sky is bluer when you face cancer,” Aycoth added.

For more information on the Pink Ribbon Celebration, call (304) 487-7936.

— Contact Tammie Toler at ttoler@ptonline.net.

        

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