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ANDREA CARUSO & CINDY BELL
Paying the Bills for Patients
By Lacey Meyer
When Andrea Caruso was diagnosed with stage 1A breast cancer in 2004, her sister, Lynne Shade, wanted to help. But Caruso was in upstate New York and Shade lived in California, so the trick was figuring out how.
“I can’t mow your lawn and I can’t do your dishes, but I can help you de-stress your life,” Shade told her sister before picking up her mortgage payments for four months while Caruso was in chemotherapy—a total of $4,000.
Then Caruso wanted to give back. In 2005 she created a calendar featuring breast cancer survivors, including herself. Caruso took the photos with a throw-away camera and distributed the calendar herself. She wanted to donate the $25,000 raised through calendar sales to a charity—one that helped women the way her sister helped her.
When she couldn’t find one that did exactly what she had envisioned, she created her own nonprofit organization and named it SIS (Sustain, Inspire, Survive) to show the sisterly support for other women struggling during breast cancer treatment. “I feel like my sister was a magic carpet under me, lifting me up, and that’s what we want to be,” says Caruso.
A friend who saw the calendar told Caruso about Cindy Bell, a photographer and breast cancer survivor from Syracuse, New York. “I was more than willing to jump on the opportunity to be creative and help people at the same time,” says Bell, now Caruso’s partner at SIS and photographer for the 2007 and 2008 calendars.
So far, SIS has helped more than 200 women, but the waiting list for help is three times that, Caruso says. “We are not at a loss for finding women that need help; they are coming up from every corner of the United States,” Caruso says. “We need to find the money to help them. We would love corporate involvement and we are at that place now where we can start knocking on those doors.”
After verifying a woman’s medical and financial situation with her doctors and social workers, SIS gets the money directly to each woman to pay bills. This year, SIS hopes to double the $50,000 raised for the 2007 calendar, Caruso says.
“This is what I wish was waiting on my doorstep when I first got home from diagnosis,” Caruso says. “Because you are hit between the eyes with it and you immediately crave hope. Tell me women go through this and they come out on the other side ... I needed to be inspired. I needed to hear those stories.”
Bell derived the 2008 calendar theme, “Choices,” from the mind-set that helped her get through diagnosis and treatment. Everyone has choices in life, Bell says. It’s a concept she thinks anyone can relate to. When faced with breast cancer, Bell says she chose to have a positive attitude and to forge ahead one day at a time.
As for Caruso, she took on cancer one step at a time, breaking it up into tolerable doses and chunks, just as she would do with a marathon. After all, it was the photo of her “bald finish” at the New York City Marathon in 2004 that spawned the idea for a calendar featuring breast cancer survivors. (Against her doctors’ advice, she ran the marathon in the middle of her breast cancer treatment, just after finishing three months of chemotherapy and before beginning seven weeks of radiation.)
“When I was facing my last chemo, it had kind of built up in me and it was getting tough to handle,” Caruso says. “And I remember doing what I do with a race. Looking at the big picture ahead of you is just too much to handle, so you have to break it up just the way you do when you train for anything.”
With that first calendar, Caruso gave other survivors the opportunity to join her cause. SIS opens the door to women who don’t need the money but instead an opportunity to help others faced with the disease “to take the focus off yourself, because it’s bigger than just yourself,” Bell says.
One breast cancer survivor, a college professor who was diagnosed last summer, contacted SIS to take advantage of the opportunity to help others. Bell says that professor is now going to help write grants for SIS to get money from other sources.
“You have to pay it forward in life,” Bell says. “It’s extremely rewarding to reach out to other people. I’ve learned that it’s more important for me to be a giver.”
CURE and Heal would like to give a special thanks to the following non-profit partners
for making this information available to their constituents:
American Cancer Society • People Living with Cancer
HER2 Support • Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Fund • Men Against Breast Cancer
National Breast Cancer Coalition • Pink-Link
