Sharing a Smile

There’s nothing funny about cancer, but there are stories that can make people smile. They may be the proverbial needle in a haystack, but they exist and sometimes they can even inspire.


One of those stories is the Irving Greenberg Cancer Centre at the Queensway-Carleton Hospital. The four-storey, 85,000-sq.-ft. facility is already a world-class treatment centre offering shorter wait times for all procedures, including chemotherapy, radiation and surgery.

The centre is part of an expansion of the Ottawa Hospital Regional Cancer Program, and it’s estimated it will help 1,300 more cancer patients each year.

That’s worth a smile.

Dr. Adam Mamelak, a Queen's graduate who went on to study dermatology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, was recruited last year to set up a clinic for the most common forms of skin cancer.

Thanks to a procedure called Moh’s surgery, 99% of patients will survive and will barely show a scar because dermatologists remove a portion of the tumour and examine the specimen while the patient waits. Thanks to an onsite teaching laboratory, dermatologists are able to continue working on the wound in small stages until all traces of the tumour are gone.

When the clinic officially opened in June 2009, there were 14 doctors in Canada and only two in Ontario who were trained to do the procedure.

That’s worth a smile. At least it was to the first patient who walked away healthier and unblemished and, I’ll venture, to countless more.

Then there’s my friend Madeline. I met her when I worked in Montreal for a community weekly newspaper. She had instituted a charitable foundation to help children of war-torn countries and I was given the assignment to have her tell me all about it for the paper.

Madeline wasn’t well when I first met her. She had Stage-5 cancer and had been given months, if not less, to live. She had to stop now and then to take a deep, tired breath, for which she apologized each time. Even feeling as awful as that, she was the picture and model of decorum. We sat in her atrium that showed off a gorgeous and full garden in her back yard (she wouldn’t let me leave without vegetables and herbs she harvested herself).

We hit it off, though I was immensely sad that our new friendship would be so brief. I guess that in the grand scheme of things our friendship was indeed brief, but it turned out to be longer and deeper than either of us could have hoped.

At one point, Madeline’s cancer seemed to be in remission. The last time I saw her she was lively and hopeful that her work was making a difference. She was given an award at her alma mater McGill University and I convinced my editor that it would make for another good story. So I tagged along and watched her work the room with such panache that I was humbled to be her friend. Some of the biggest wheels in the country were there, but she treated me as well or better than she did them. She made the coal feel comfortable among the diamonds.

I moved to Ottawa a short time later and while we stayed in touch we slowly travelled our own paths and drifted apart, as will happen.

One day, I found an email from Madeline on my computer. Or at least I thought it was sent by her. But it was her mom to tell me Madeline had passed away shortly before Christmas, some five years after they gave her months, if not less.

Her mom asked for my address, saying she had something to mail to me.

It was a New Year’s card from Madeline she had meant to send. The inscription was warm and personal, as though the few years apart had changed nothing.

I’m sad she’s gone, but immensely happy I was allowed to call her my friend for years longer than either of us expected.

And that, I think, is worth a smile too.