Cancer survivor focused on one step at a time

    Roz Sheldon isn’t the woman she once was.
    For one thing, she’s missing half her pelvis and a lung.
    But perhaps more importantly, cancer taught her some lessons about how to live.
    “I call it mindfulness,” said Sheldon,  40, a Wauneta native who now lives in Kearney. “Be just mindful of what you need to do in the moment and not thinking too far ahead.”
    The road to learning that lesson began in June 2014, when she was diagnosed with osteosarcoma—bone cancer—in her hip. “It was very painful,” she said. “My chiropractor actually found it on an x-ray.”
    She was referred to other doctors, who eventually determined it was stage 4, in her femur and her lung.
    Chemotherapy was the only option. She went to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for two rounds of treatment starting two months after her diagnosis. Because the chemotherapy was particularly toxic, she had to stay in the hospital. In between rounds, she lived in an apartment in Houston before finally, “I decided to bring my treatment back to the Med Center so I could be closer to home.”
    She returned to M.D. Anderson for surgery to remove the entire left side of her pelvis, the top of her femur and the joint, and a piece of her tail bone, an operation that took 14 hours.
    There were two more rounds of chemo in 2015 and the removal of part of her left lung. A recurrence of the cancer in 2017 required removal of the rest of the lung.
    She is once again cancer-free.
    While her cancer journey has been particularly arduous, she denies that she has shown any special courage through the ordeal.
    “I kind of tell people, the thing is, when it happens, you don’t really have a choice,” Sheldon said. “You just do what you need to do next. The plan is what’s next.” People often perceive the fight as courageous, she said. “They see it as unusual or different. But I think when you’re in it, you realize it’s just one foot in front of the other.”
    She had plenty of motivation for doing that. Sheldon is a clinical therapist and counselor, “so I have a few tricks up my sleeve. You have to practice what you preach. You redirect your thinking and you kind of have to motivate yourself in different ways.”
    She also was kept going by the thought that she had to be there for her children and faith played an important role as well, she said. And she had a great amount of community support, with Wauneta and surrounding areas throwing fund-raisers to help with the considerable costs, as well as providing emotional support.
    It also was a matter of choosing the right kind of people to be around.
    “You know, there’s only one person along the whole way that ever said anything about how much time I had,” Sheldon said. “One doctor, which I didn’t ever see again, said I had a year. But everybody else I worked with didn’t put a time [limit] on it.”
    That included Sheldon herself. “I rarely went there. I didn’t feel the need to think about death, I guess.”
    She learned what not to do if you’re a cancer patient.
    “Don’t listen to statistics. Don’t read things on the internet that say, ‘This is how this ends up.’ If I would’ve listened to statistics, I wouldn’t have been here. People survive. I can be one of those. Just do what’s right for your next step and get a second opinion. I believe that’s what saved me. My doctors were open and available to say yes, get a second opinion.”
    It also helps to keep a sense of humor, even when it takes a weird turn. “I could pull some pretty dark jokes pretty easy out of my bag,” Sheldon said with a chuckle.
    In the end, confronting her mortality worked only small but lasting changes, Sheldon said.
    “You know, I’m not entirely different, which sounds weird. I was a pretty realistic, focused person before and I don’t think that’s changed much. I had to adapt the way I communicate, because I have more needs. I think I was fairly positive before.
    “I’m definitely grateful, don’t get me wrong. I definitely have those moments, just grateful.”