Donna Cassidy has always been a believer that behind every cloud is a silver lining – she is just a naturally positive person. But sometimes, it’s difficult to find the light.
For Donna, that reality hit home in August 2020 when, for a week, she, her mother and sister sat beside her fathers’ palliative care bed watching as the disease won out. Darkness had come to them in a very personal way, and the light was hard to see through the anger, frustration, sadness and concern. Her father was diagnosed with an enlarged prostate many years ago. At the time, doctors didn’t know what type or how aggressive it was until it was too late. It wasn’t until it had spread to many other parts of his body that his family realized how aggressive it actually was.
After the loss of her father, Donna wasn’t exactly looking for a silver lining, but rather for a way to cope. Sometimes, this can manifest through distraction. For Donna, that distraction came in the form of raising money to fund cancer research. Shortly after her father passed, she had to get ready for WICC’s inaugural Virtual Breakfast event. There was no time to waste. There was work to be done.
Donna found solace in pouring her energy into planning the event. It provided her with an outlet and opportunity to see that even when things seem bleak and pointless, there are ways to make a difference, if not for you then for someone else someday.
As a long-time WICC volunteer, Donna has participated in numerous events and in various roles, most recently as the Co-Chair of the Annual WICC Breakfast. The topic at the previous breakfast event that took place after her father’s diagnosis of metastases cancer was early detection of different forms of prostate cancer. At the breakfast, researchers explained how early detection on whether the cancer will remain in the prostate or if it would metastasize, would make a significant impact on the survival rate of patients because treatment plans would be vastly different.
Following the event, a decision was made to fund some of this research. “I hope you can imagine how good it felt to be able to be a part of this. To know that some of the money that you helped to raise for WICC was going to fund a program whose purpose was finding a way to identify types of prostate cancer earlier so that treatment could be more tailored to what the patients faced. This knowledge and change in treatment could be a saviour for so many lives that might otherwise be lost or affected by cancer,” Donna says.
So, there it was, her unexpected silver lining, a way to matter, to contribute, to fight back. Although the research could not bring her father back and it wouldn’t take away the pain from losing him too soon, it might save other fathers, or husbands or sons.
Donna explains, “WICC gave me a light, a candle to see past, my immediate darkness towards a day when maybe, just maybe, we get to talk about cancer in the past tense. And I hope that what we do can act as a candle for others in the same way.”