Cancer forced Fremont woman to make a life-changing decision

“This is going to kill me.”

Leslie Shanahan wasn’t speaking figuratively.

The 54-year-old Fremont woman said she is losing her second bout with cancer.

She will be one of several people whose lives have been touched by cancer at Friday night’s Relay for Life, the annual fund-raiser for the American Cancer Society. The Dodge County Relay for Life begins at 7 p.m. on the Memorial Stadium track in Fremont. Teams will spend the night with each teams’ members taking turns walking the track.

Shanahan won’t be as involved this year as she has been because she just isn’t feeling up to it.

Since November, she has been taking chemotherapy treatments.

Her first bout started in December 1999, when she learned she had breast cancer, but she said after that cancer was destroyed she had felt well until late October 2008.

“I found out I had it back,” she said. “It was in my bones, my spinal fluid and my liver.”

The tumor in her liver is about half the size as it was when she started this round of chemotherapy, she said. But the cancer throughout the rest of her body isn’t responding quite as well.

“The doctor said that pretty soon the chemo will stop working. I thought I was done with cancer because it had been eight years. I’m still mad about it. I’m stumped.”

This diagnosis forced a life change. If has forced her to retire from doing what she has loved doing for the past 33 years.

“I’ll never get to go back to teaching,” Shanahan said. “I’m retired now whether I want to be or not. That’s hard because teaching was my life.

“I’ve wanted to teach since I was in fifth grade. It’s one thing to be prepared to retired. It’s another thing to be thrown into it. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Shanahan has a different outlook on her bout with cancer this time.

“When I was sick before, I saw it as being sick and then getting better,” she said. “Now, I see it as being sick until I die.”

Last week, she gathered her personal items, including teaching tools that she had bought, from her classroom at Bell Field Elementary School.

“That part of my life is done,” she said. “It’s not easy. I miss my kids.”

She wants to see her former students one more time. She wants to hold a party at the Fremont Family YMCA and invite everyone she’s ever had in her classrooms.

“It would be my way of closure,” she said. “But it would be good to see everyone again. It’s hard to not be in the classroom. Teaching was my life. Now, there’s a big hole. I need to fill it.”

The combination of retiring unexpectedly and fighting another bout with cancer has left her with a more negative outlook on life.

“My outlook now is too much about cancer and not about things I’m interested in,” she said. “I need to look at things more positively. Being retired I can do stuff now that I never had time to do before. I just don’t want to.

“Part of me wants to go out and get everything I want to get, but I’d be spending money that I should be saving.”

There’s one other recent factor that’s affecting her overall attitude right now.

“Two of my good friends have died from cancer: One in October, and the other one last week,” she said.

But she still isn’t ready to give up.

“I will probably do more with Relay For Life next year,” she said. “I just don’t feel like it this year. I’ll do some this year. Relay For Life is a good thing.”

She’s also been asked to serve on a Nebraska Department of Education special committee on kindergarten.

“It would be good if I could make a difference again,” she said.