Feature Stories
Suzie Matthews
by Michael Corey
Catharsis is as individualistic as one's taste in music.
For Suzie Matthews, a long-time general music teacher at Jones Middle School in Upper Arlington, her love for guitar-strummed songs helped her cope and heal from the tumultuous efforts against Inflammatory Breast Cancer (I.B.C.)
"I tried not to whine too much and tried to be a good patient, and I used relaxing techniques--music's real important to me," Matthews says. "I'm a professional player."
And like any artist, Matthews hones her craft by heeding the work of other professionals.
"I'm a real lover of guitar, I play all styles and collect guitars,"
she says. "So I listened to a lot of James Taylor, Sting--more laid back music, Fleetwood Mac."
So through the fire and rain of eight rounds of chemotherapy, a mastectomy and 30 radiation treatments, Matthews used her music as a mental buttress, providing her the stability and the strength to carry on.
"I felt it was just a road I had to go down, and I knew it wasn't going to be pleasant," she recalls. "I could do it, I could give up a year to get better, I tried not to look ahead to surgery. I just looked at one thing at a time."
Peering down that path was rendered all the more difficult by the type of breast cancer Matthews was facing. While the survival rates for more common forms of breast cancer are very high, inflammatory breast cancer has proven far more difficult for patients and their caretakers to overcome.
"It hit me pretty hard," she says. "My whole family is here in town. I have 8 brothers and sisters, and my four sisters were a big help. And with my mother, they went with me to all my appointments--I had quite the team for support."
Her team also included one of her best friends, who just so happened to be a nurse.
Support came from her employer and students, as well. Despite missing
75 days of school, the administrators were extraordinarily accommodating. But it was the compassion and understanding of her students that meant even more.
"Hand-written cards came to the house--just things they wrote from school," she says. "Parents signed their kids cards; boys who you would never think would write really touching things--they wrote about just how much they missed me and they hoped that I got better. It was so very supportive."
The response came from families, also. Countless of them brought meals to her doorstep, making her recovery process that much easier.
And when she returned to the classroom, her hair having fallen out, the response of her students was just as loving.
"The kids looked past [my appearance] immediately--I wore a bandana and ballcaps, and the first day the kids had questions and looked at me, but that was the end of that, the kids look past that and just accept you. I thought about taking the whole year off, but I'm so glad I didn't, because Jones Middle School is such a part of my treatment, such a special group of teachers and kids."
Matthews will soon be celebrating her fifth year of being cancer-free.
While the day will undoubtedly be one of joy, there will be memories of the lessons learned from her experience. The lump in her breast had been discovered during her very first mammogram at the age of 41--early detection was critical. And through it all, she relied on her family, her school and her students to pull her through. These are sunny times indeed, having weathered all that fire and rain. Her focus now is on sharing her story and her strength with others.
What could be more cathartic than that?
