Cancer survivors, friends ready to walk for a cure

HAMPTON ? Two years ago, Linda Batchelor Smith couldn't finish a lap around the track at Darling Stadium during Hampton's Relay for Life.

The nerves in her legs had been damaged from her chemotherapy treatment and her entire body was weak.

Last year's relay was a different story.

"As I walked in the 2011 relay with other survivors, I was grateful to be alive and inspired by the determination of other survivors," Smith said.

"There was a numbness that took over my body that words can't explain," she said, recalling how it felt to walk the lap. "You see the love, the friendships developing, the oneness and the unity as we all come together for one purpose, fighting cancer."

Smith, clerk of Hampton's Circuit Court, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer on March 21, 2008. She still remembers the doctor coming in and telling her the news no one wants to hear.

"I was going out of town for training, so that's the mind-set I was in," Smith said. "I was just at the doctor's to be told everything was fine, and then be on my way."

But everything wasn't fine.

"When the doctor came in, he had a thick red packet in his hands," she said. "He told me I had breast cancer, and I just sat there emotionless."

Smith can remember the physician being concerned about her reaction.

"He kept asking me if I was OK, because I wasn't crying, I wasn't saying anything," Smith said. "It hadn't hit me yet, what the doctor had just told me."

After leaving the doctor's office, Smith went home to tell her husband.

"I walked in and handed him the packet and walked out," Smith said. "It wasn't until after I finished my training that I pulled out the packet and read the information in it alone in my hotel room. That's when it all hit me."

Once Smith returned home from her business trip, she underwent chemotherapy first, since the form of cancer she had was an aggressive one. After six weeks of treatment, she then had surgery, a lumpectomy.

After the surgery, Smith was then placed on radiation treatments for what was supposed to be six weeks, but ended up being just two.

"I had the radiation five days a week, and I began deteriorating. I thought I was supposed to be feeling better," she said. "I became so weak and had breathing issues."

What Smith had was a severe case of pneumonia, which landed her in the hospital for a month to get antibiotics intravenously. She was also put on oxygen.

"I always tell people, it wasn't the cancer that almost killed me, it was the pneumonia," she said. "Cancer and the treatments affect everyone differently, and by the time I made it to the hospital I was told I had a 15 percent chance to live."

That experience forever changed Smith.

"Laying there, knowing you're on your death bed, you appreciate life so much more, you're thankful for life," she said.

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