Lean On Me
By Haley Shapley
Support from family — both at home and at work — helped AA employee Doris Ellenburg through her fight against breast cancer.
Doris Ellenburg stashed away almost 500 get-well cards sent to her by Flight Attendants and fellow American Airlines coworkers as she battled breast cancer eight years ago. “I still look at them every once in a while,” says the Flight Service Manager. “I can’t stress how important family and friends are — a good support system is really necessary when you’re going through something like [cancer].”
In addition to gaining strength from others, Ellenburg quickly learned that first and foremost, you have to be your own advocate. When she initially received a clean bill of health from her doctor after her yearly check-up, she knew something was wrong. “We all know our bodies better than the doctors do, and if something doesn’t feel right, get it checked out,” Ellenburg says. She showed her doctor an indentation that seemed amiss and was immediately sent to a surgeon, who determined that she had breast cancer.
After six treatments of aggressive chemotherapy — “nothing would stop the nausea. I’d have to go for three or four days in a row after treatment and get IVs just to survive,” she recalls — a round of radiation, and visits to her oncologist every three months, Ellenburg is cancer-free.
Now she uses her position at AA and her experience as a survivor to help others who are beginning their journey with the disease. “It’s very important to me now to be able to talk to people who have just been diagnosed,” says the 19-year AA veteran. “They’re really scared, but I tell them that it’s not the end of the world. If anything good comes out of it, you find out what is most important in life, you find out that it’s your family and your friends and it’s not stuff, it’s not material things.”
