I get messages every day from people seeking publicity to raise money.
Most ask on behalf of charities. Some are trying to stave off foreclosure. One woman was soliciting contributions for her grandson to make bail.
The messages keep coming. And as a rule I’ve said no to writing their stories.
Then came the e-mail from Cindy Sheehan: “Susie, I think I need your help.”
I know Sheehan from having parked behind the office where she used to work.
I’ve heard about her tenacity keeping indigent clients off death row. I’ve seen her honored by colleagues with a Gideon Award, named after the landmark ruling guaranteeing legal defense for the poor.
Mainly, I’ve always been struck by the kindness in her eyes and by her quiet grace.
Sheehan inspires me. She’s one of those people whose parents you’d like to meet, if only to tell them they did a terrific job raising their daughter.
Then came a lump in her neck that she noticed two years ago while she was in China volunteering to prod legal reforms. Soon followed a breast-cancer diagnosis: stage four, terminal.
Fast forward through a year of chemo and radiation, and biopsies and body scans finding that another kind of cancer had invaded her liver, glands, spleen, pancreas and brain. Her tumors were “too numerous to count,” records said. Then a bone scan showed cancer in her legs, hips, arms, neck and spine.
Through it all, Sheehan has sent friends e-mails with off-color jokes or photos of sunsets or furry animals — anything that makes her smile. In less-frequent messages, she has outlined the latest news about the disease besieging her body. One e-mail taken after brain surgery showed her scalp stitched from crown to nape. She called the picture “Cindy’s zipper head.”
By March, she was spending her days comatose on a cocktail of various narcotics or writhing in pain, “begging Jesus to take me.”
Her doctors projected it would take the cancer only a few weeks to kill her. They’d given up on fighting it.
She, in turn, gave up on them. She and husband John Norgren headed for Georgia, where a doctor treated her for two months with non-chemo infusions and other cleansing and immunity-building homeopathic therapies. The experimental regime hasn’t been approved by the FDA and isn’t covered by Cigna, her insurance company.
Sheehan is back home looking and feeling stronger and testing normal for two of her three tumor markers. She still needs up to two years of the treatment for her breast cancer, yet can’t afford it now that she’s not working and she has drained savings and loans from friends and family.
“G-d help me, I never thought I’d have to ask for public help. But if we don’t basically come up with $100,000 a year, we’re not going to make it,” she wrote. “I’m sorry if this is an outrageous request. We’re really quite desperate.”
I can’t vouch for Sheehan’s treatment, though it seems to have helped keep her alive.
I can vouch for the disbelief in her face when she talks about having paid into a system that won’t cover the only therapies that seem to be working.
I can vouch for the determination in her eyes when she forces herself to eat, drink a gallon of alkaline water a day, swallow her many supplements and get herself up and out seven days a week to a local clinic she convinced to drip the experimental treatment into her veins.
I can vouch for how convincing she is about her recovery: “By rights, I should be dead now. But I’m walking on faith. I know I’m gonna live.”
I leveled with Sheehan that it’s hard to imagine strangers will read this column and cut checks for her treatment. Truth be told, I feel a little like Jerry Lewis as I’m writing.
Still, I make the request because I’ve got to believe she has come this far for a reason, and because I’m in the good company of folks who need her to stick around.
Send mail to Cindy Sheehan at 2244 Hooker St., Denver, CO 80211. Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
