Journey Through the Cancer Experience

Compassionate staff guides him through

Radiation therapist Denise Melvin provides just the right touch to caring for patients.

His test results weren’t good. The skin cancer that was discovered in a mole on his back had metastasized throughout his body’s soft tissue. Hearing this, Ed Shannon just stared into the face of his oncologist, Victor Aviles, M.D.

“So...does this mean you’re quitting?” Shannon asked.

Aviles leaned in closer, his eyes reflecting understanding and compassion, and replied, “We will do everything we can.”

“Well,” Shannon said, “what’s the problem then?”

Journeying through the cancer experience, Shannon has never questioned “Why me?” but instead “Why not me?” “I prefer it to be me rather than my wife and two daughters,” he said one day during chemotherapy. “You’re dealt a hand of cards— and you either play or give up.”

No question, Shannon and his caregivers at the Cancer Center at LVH–Muhlenberg are playing hard—15 rounds of radiation, three cycles of chemotherapy and more to come. “The nurses, those are his buddies,” said Shannon’s wife, Linda. “They treat him like gold.”

“My main nurse” is what he calls Janette Tough, R.N., with a smile. He likes to tease her, as well as the others. Heck, going through hours of treatment nearly every day, he can use a good laugh and so could they. “Things can get trying around here,” Shannon said, “but Janette and the girls always make time for everybody.”

Sometimes caring for 20 patients a day, “we make people feel like they’re our only patient,” Tough said. “We’re high-touch as well as high- tech.”

Through LVHHN’s Cancer Center, patients have access to multidisciplinary consultation, dozens of clinical trials, the cancer support team and more. At LVH– Muhlenberg Cancer Center, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, blood product support, infusion therapies and specialized testing are all under one roof. Patients come from Bethlehem, Bangor, Bath, the Poconos and even New Jersey for care.

“We literally function in one suite with a common staff, and that is unique,” Aviles said. “Patients see the same staff all the way through their experience and feel like this is the home of their care.”

To Shannon, the LVH–Muhlenberg Cancer Center is like home. He’s spent 14 years in facilities management at LVH–Muhlenberg, mowing the lawn, setting up the Summer Festival, making friends. He’s still making friends. When Sharon Borger, secretary for facilities management, sent an e-mail asking for PTO donations, dozens of colleagues responded from all campuses at LVH—people he didn’t even know—with 100 PTO days and monetary donations.

The overwhelming response brought him to tears, but you won’t catch him crying in pity. He doesn’t need to because, “I feel like the world is praying for me.”

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