Touched by an angel: Cancer battle inspires volunteer

WINDERMERE – When Jane Guida went through her own breast cancer battle at 49, a hospital volunteer’s kindness gave her the strength to persevere. She vowed to return the favor.

Most would not blame Jane Guida — a breast-cancer survivor — from never wanting to step foot inside a hospital again.

But every Friday morning for the past 15 years, Guida — a transplant from Connecticut and a retired Windermere resident — has donned her red hospital volunteer uniform adorned with a lapel pin of a cancer ribbon on the collar and made her way to the UF Health Cancer Center in downtown Orlando. 

While there, Guida spent five to six hours preparing food, snacks and drinks and engaging in conversations to help patients receiving chemotherapy treatment pass the time as comfortably as possible. To date, she’s logged 2,000 volunteer hours.

Guida’s efforts and dedication motivated Trustco Bank’s Windermere branch manager, Messerette Newsome, to nominate Guida for the bank’s Hometown Heroes award. The award, an honor given to individuals for exemplary contributions to their communities, earned Guida a plaque recognizing her service to Orlando Health, as well as a $1,500 donation from Trustco Bank to the UF Health Cancer Center.

Yet, despite the recognition and 15 years of service, Guida has no plans to quit anytime soon. She feels she’s only repaying a debt of kindness she once received from volunteers during her chemotherapy sessions at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa.

At 49, Guida was diagnosed with stage-two breast cancer after a biopsy proved a suspicious lump was indeed a malignant tumor. At stage two, the cancerous cells enter your bloodstream.

The unwelcome news, she said, turned her life upside down. 

ATTITUDE IS EVERYTHING

A year of chemotherapy and radiation treatment followed. Her first chemotherapy treatment came the day of her 25th wedding anniversary. Guida remembered crying to herself as she wondered if she were reaching the end of her life. 

While her thoughts spiraled into negativity, a volunteer suddenly approached her and asked if she wanted to talk. The volunteer sat down next to her. Guida doesn’t remember what the volunteer said, but she remembers the volunteer gently squeezing her hand and rubbing her back and neck, settling her down.

“After she left, I thought, ‘You know, if I survive this, I want to do this for somebody else.’ Because after that, I was OK,” Guida said. “When I went in for my treatments every three weeks, I was OK. And the strange thing was — I always called her my angel — because I kept asking the head nurses if they’d ever seen the volunteer that sat with me that day. I’d said I’d like to see her again and thank her because she really did help me. In that one day, she helped me get through the next year. But they said, ‘No, we never saw her again.’”

To this day, Guida believes God sent her an angel when she needed one. So after a year of treatment, plus an extra year of waiting for her hair to grow back and to start looking healthy again, Guida did what she pledged to do that first day, and she signed up to volunteer at a cancer center.

CANCER IS A WAR

During her volunteer hours, Guida mostly helps patients pass the time with light conversation. Sometimes, they discuss different movies they’ve seen or books they’ve read. Other times, she gets very chatty patients who tell her their whole life story in 20 minutes.

However, sometimes, she gets patients who gently shun her efforts to approach them. But as she is intimately familiar with the challenges of battling cancer, she understands.

“When they say cancer is a battle, they mean it’s a war, because chemotherapy is tough,” she said. “You have a lot of bad days where you feel awful. So that’s why I understand when I see a patient and they, sometimes, just sit there and go like this (gesturing with an outstretched palm), which means, you know, just leave me alone.” 

As a cancer patient, Guida had tough days too, so she is thankful for her recovery. According to the American Cancer Society, there are more than 3.1 million breast cancer survivors in the United States. However, breast cancer remains the second leading cause of cancer death in women after lung cancer, and the ACC estimates about 40,610 women will die from breast cancer in 2017. 

Given the statistics and her own experience, she deeply empathizes with the 30 to 40 outpatients she cares for every Friday and tries her best to make them as comfortable as possible.

“They just got the worst news you could ever hear,” Guida said. “And I have empathy for them because I know the first thing you think about is, ‘Am I gonna be here next year? Am I gonna celebrate another birthday?’ You don’t know. It’s a very difficult time, so we try to do everything we can for the patients.”

When they consider the continual advances of modern medicine, Guida said, she and her fellow volunteers grow optimistic for the survival chances of their patients. Sometimes, Guida even runs into fully recovered patients she met at the cancer center months or years later.

Anyone wishing to learn more about volunteering at an Orlando Health facility may visit Orlandohealth.com/volunteer-services or contact Shari Bryant at (321) 841-5902.

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Contact Gabby Baquero at [email protected]