Anna Belle -- Day 5 of 25 Memories -- A Countdown to Our 25th Anniversary Gala by Dorothy Gibbons

The people who were brave enough to take those first steps alongside us kept me humble.  From our beginning, volunteers have been at the heart of The Rose.  I marvel at the generosity of people, and always wonder what motivates them give so freely of their time and talents. 

Anna Belle Baugus was one of those people. She started at the center as a volunteer and later became our first paid non-technical employee.  She was a patient of Dixie's, having gone through her own bout with breast cancer a few years before I met her.  Seems, breast cancer was the nemesis of her family, her mother, and one sister had died of it, and her other sister was fighting it.

Meeting Anna Belle meant coming face to face with the enemy.  Breast cancer was no longer a nebulous clinical diagnosis confined to a few women who briefly crossed my path.   Now it became fully exposed, unfathomable in its callousness. The  threat of reoccurrence was palpable and became a silent and invisible intruder bordering every conversation, every success, every passage of normal living. 

Anna Belle would have violently objected to my description.  She’d be the first to insist that breast cancer was just one of those things that happens in one’s life. 

Describing Anna Belle is a challenge.  Take everything good, mix it with a lot of country, top it with genuine hospitality and dabble in some of most outrageous humor you'd ever expect to find in a woman, and you'd have a glimpse of Anna Belle.  A natural beauty, she had a certain elegant presence contradicted slightly by the layers of denim she often wore. Her sharp, opinionated speech and no nonsense approach to life regularly caught me off guard.  Anna Belle told it as it was.  Sometimes the telling wasn't always easy to hear.

You'd think someone who'd had such intimate history with breast cancer would be incredibly sympathetic to the plight of others but her she never had any "truck" with whiners. Her approach was you do what you have to do, you pay attention and don't believe everything the doctors tell you. You’re the one that decides how long you're going to live, she’d tell you.

She always had a new joke to share.  Invariably it bordered on the risqué or bawdy but would be just clean enough to squeak by.  Then she'd fall into hysterical laughter when she delivered the punch lines. You couldn't help but join in her merriment.

Anna Belle thought most of our patients were geographically challenged. Often she would schedule an appointment and hang up the telephone saying, "That one will never find us."

She was never more vocal than when she thought someone was trying to take advantage of our sponsorship program.  I don't think any non-deserving person managed to get by her.  She'd look the patient right in the eyes and make a comment about what a nice suit or ring she had on (or fine automobile she was driving) and then she'd immediately ask how much did she think she could pay towards this mammogram. 

Back then I really worried about her questioning too much. I wrestled with the thought that we might actually turn away someone who really needed our help, but funds were limited.  I sure didn’t want our criteria to be so strict that we couldn’t make a decision to help someone who was temporarily down on her luck.

"There would always be some," I'd try to assuage her indignation, "who would try to beat the system."

"And I know everyone of them," she'd retort. 

My worries were ill-founded. For that woman who really was down on her luck, Anna Belle would be the first in line to help.  The old saying "give you the shirt of her back," must have started with her.  Her “heart of gold” was never more obvious than during support groups.

By the time Anna Belle became a part of The Rose, she was clearing her third cancer free year.  Anna Belle had undergone a double lumpectomy, the second one was done months after her first surgery.  She was one of the rare women who didn't lose her hair during chemotherapy, something she usually didn't share with the support group.  She had lots of other stories to share.

When Anna Belle had a reoccurrence, the cancer was especially vicious.  I remember the day, the look on her face, the tipping point that foreshadowed the end of her life.  She had completed her annual mammogram. The tech called asking me to go back to the mammography work area. I pushed open the doors to see her leaning up against the wall, staring at the films on the light box.  The cancer was obvious. 

“This makes me so damn mad.” she said with a pure hatred that I had never heard in anyone’s voice before. 

The months that followed were impossible. Anna Belle was the office manager, she held together the entire operation. Hers was the back that carried the load and her load was about to become even heavier. 

The process started -- biopsy, surgery, bilateral mastectomies, reconstruction, complications and chemotherapy.  This time she did lose her hair; she was incredibly ill. Yet she kept on working, through the next year and a half, at first trying to keep her regular schedule, then moving to part time. 

The most vivid memories I have of her now all revolve around those last months of working. She’d walk into my office wearing a sassy hat, or bright scarf, make-up always perfect, lipstick in place.  The most important thing she wore was her “I can beat this” face.

She might have too if her husband of over 29 years hadn’t contracted a cancer of his own. The tumor that appeared on his arm seemed to multiply overnight covering his body. He was diagnosed with leukemia, even more aggressive than what she was fighting. Within ten months he was dead.

She once told me he had no choice but to leave, he couldn’t bare to see her so ill.  Once he died, Anna Belle’s cancer metastasized to her lungs. The battle was winding down, and one day, much too soon, she was gone.

This same two-year period marked a huge growth cycle at The Rose. The Rose Joan Gordon Center was bulging at its seams and months were spent finding it a larger, new home.

We opened the Rose on Vista in Pasadena which immediately became incredibly busy and was a huge success. A year later, we opened a small screening center across town which proved to be a time consuming and short lived disaster.

We jumped from 7 employees to 21 employees and had to lease extra office space at the main center. New funding meant computerizing our system and attempting to combine our multi data bases, a feat we never quite achieved. We were involved in more fund raisers than ever before and received publicity that would have made major corporations envious. We were leaving behind an old way of being and entering into a new one.  We had no option, the number of women needing our help continued to explode, forcing us into new areas and levels of service.

I felt Annabelle’s absence with every change. The challenges were sharper without her sometimes cynical but always encouraging humor that kept me grounded. Our successes never again would be celebrated with her outrageous enthusiasm.

As much as we welcomed the new, it’s hard to say goodbye, especially to an old friend.

This memory is one of 25 short stories written by Dorothy Gibbons, the Co-founder and CEO of The Rose, a nonprofit breast cancer organization. She and Dr. Dixie Melillo received the 501C3 documents for The Rose in 1986. A memory will be shared daily, culminating with number 25 on the day The Rose celebrates its 25th anniversary November 10.
© 2011 Dorothy Gibbons. All rights reserved.