Monday, November 23, 2009
Fund helped Catherine Nabors when insurance ran out
Catherine Nabors' life was disrupted after she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
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- Good Neighbors total ahead of last year's
- Still time to get a cookbook
- Mom wishes for a steady job
- Woman, 93, loves to care for younger people
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Catherine Nabors, 42, knows that life can change in an instant. In April 2008, shortly after she turned 40, her doctor suggested a routine mammogram. When the imaging facility called Nabors back the same day, she said, she had no idea what they wanted.
The news was bad -- she had several small tumors in her right breast.
"I was kind of surprised," she said, "but I was blessed that it didn't get as big as it could have."
After genetic testing, she chose to have both breasts removed a month later. For good measure, her doctors took four lymph nodes from under her arms and gave her four rounds of experimental chemotherapy.
Nabors graduated from William Fleming High School in Roanoke and went on to college to study early childhood education.
Although she didn't finish the course, she said, she is still paying off her student loans.
Most of her working life was spent at Wachovia Bank, where she worked in the returned mail department for 15 years. She quit a few days after she was diagnosed.
She was scheduled for another surgery anyway, she said, and even though there were four weeks between her chemotherapy sessions, she needed the entire time to recover.
When it was over she was anemic, and when she tried to use her arms, they would swell due to the damage to her lymphatic system, she said.
Nabors' subsequent reconstructive surgeries did not go well, either. The wound on her left breast kept getting infected, and in October 2008, before the problems with it could be resolved, her medical insurance from her job ran out. She applied for Medicaid and got it, but her physician did not accept Medicaid patients.
She found a new doctor who agreed to waive his fee, and the hospital paid her bills through its charity care program. Nabors is the mother of two young boys.
"I try not to worry them about me," she said, but when she was most ill, the family had to relocate to her mother's house.
"At times I feel like I'm not doing my part as a mother," she said. "It tears me up."
By March, the household had no money coming in except for $463 in food stamps. The long-term disability policy Nabors had through her employer had paid out.
In March, the gas bill was $600, she said.
She received a grant from RAM's Emergency Financial Assistance Program -- which is supported by The Roanoke Times' Good Neighbors Fund -- for part of the bill. More than half of it was paid by a church, and Nabors' family helped with the rest.
Besides the monetary grant, Nabors said, the caseworker at RAM "talked to me a little bit. She gave me a comforting feeling."
Nabors said she is now in remission, and in September had what she hopes is her last reconstructive surgery.
She would like to return to work when she feels better and also wants to buy the house she is living in.
