‘A place where cancer is the norm’
October 25, 2009A profile of a 35-year-old woman with melanoma whose battle mirrors Clark’s. Everything about the way she describes the treatments and the emotion – it’s the same.
“They are patients like 35-year-old Mindy Lanoux of San Antonio, who has melanoma that has spread to her liver and lungs, her odds of surviving in the single digits. She has been to the hospital 16 times in nine months, spending a week there each time for treatments so debilitating she wanted to give up. But she keeps returning, smearing peppermint oil under her nose when she walks in the medical center’s door to hide the odor.
‘The smell gets to me,’ Ms. Lanoux said. ‘It smells like cleaning products and the sickness and the medicines. It takes your brave edge off.’
Then she and her father go to her room and start putting her things away. ‘We don’t talk,’ Ms. Lanoux said. ‘There is no polite conversation. It is like an army setting up to do battle.’”
