Josie

Josie’s breast cancer is back. She prayed and suffered, worked through and ultimately triumphed over her first bout with the disease a few years ago. Since then she’s earned a Habitat for Humanity house for her family and finally, a couple of months ago, paid off the last of her medical bills. I cannot imagine how hard it must’ve been for her to hear that her old enemy is back; she’s got to fight the fight again; and, this time she’s going to lose both breasts.

Josie is a housekeeper at the hospital where I work, and I have never met a more hardworking, cheerful, optimistic, faith-filled person. While some of the other housekeepers skulk around reading magazines in the bathrooms and talking on their cell phones in corridors, Josie mops, dusts, sweats and hustles, doing the work of two or three. And, she does it with a smile on her face and a cheerful word for everyone she encounters.

A single mother with high standards for how her two children should live, Josie works all the time. And, on a housekeeper’s wage, the time she lost to treatments, surgery and recovery the last time, not to mention all the co-pays, almost got the best of her financially. Not one to talk about her problems or ask for help, Josie suffered in silence and did the best she could.

But, because she is such the hard worker, and such a delightful person, Josie is well-liked in the ER, and her prayers for help were answered in the form of a constant stream of donations, big and small, “to help Josie out.” Literally several thousand dollars were silently and anonymously donated by the ER staff during the months of Josie’s first battle with cancer. We helped with her medical costs, light bills and her rent. We even helped with her kids’ Christmas that year. Josie still cries and thanks the Lord when she talks about how “everyone took care of me and my kids at a time we really needed the help.”

Since Josie’s first cancer a lot has changed in the ER and many of the original folks who had a long history with Josie are gone. Donations this time have been slow coming in. Economic times are harder for everyone and the staff now has a higher percentage of young people just trying to make their own ends meet…I was beginning to worry that we weren’t going to come close to helping Josie the way we did before, and this time her treatment and recovery period is going to be longer and harder.

Then, yesterday, one of the older docs stepped in. He’s a rumpled kind of a guy who wears funny ties. He’s been in the ER long enough to be blunt with patients when the situation calls for it, and sometimes that generates complaints. He’s a quiet fellow who sort of sticks to himself around staff. So, it surprised me when he pulled me aside and asked, “So, with Josie, what are we looking at? How much does she need to make it through this thing this time?”

I told him and then he pulled a wrinkled blank check out of his white coat pocket and wrote it for a very generous amount. As quickly as he appeared, he disappeared, back into a patient’s room, not seeming to need any comment or thanks in reply.

It took me a few minutes to pull myself together, gulp back the tears and go find him to thank him. He wasn’t nearly as comfortable with the thanks as he seemed to be writing the check. “I’m just worried about Josie,” he said. “She works so hard; she doesn’t deserve this – especially not a second time.”

Last night, after I got home, I turned on the football game - a rare thing for me, but I got sucked into the Favre-and-the-Vikings-face-Favre’s-old-team thing. One of the first things I noticed was a deep shade of pink all over the football field. Both teams’ wristbands were pink; the bills of the coaching staff caps were pink; most of the players’ cleats and gloves were pink; the sideline towels were pink; even the refs were sporting little pink ribbons with the NFL emblem in the middle.

“What’s going on?” I wondered. “Has it been that long since I watched a football game? Since when is pink a football color?” Then it struck me, this is a breast cancer thing. About that time I noticed a big pink sign on the sidelines that said, “Catch the Cure!” So…the NFL has hopped on the breast cancer awareness bus. Now that’s some pretty awesome backing.

It occurred to me that what that doc did for Josie today was pretty much the same thing as what the NFL had done by putting all that pink on the field. In both cases, big men had stepped in and made a powerful effort to help women fight a great big foe.

I called the doc, who was still on shift in the ER, and told him about all the pink on the football field, and how that check he wrote was going to make an NFL-sized difference in Josie’s life over the next few months. He just laughed, and said he couldn’t imagine so many big men wearing pink…

“But, for a good cause,” he said, “Why not?”