• Cancer Patient Stories

    MaryEllen’s Journey: Coping with a New Reality (Episode 3)

When you last saw MaryEllen Sheppard in Episode 2, she spoke about how she was beginning to lose her hair.

After two rounds of chemotherapy, MaryEllen said  she was beginning to lose clumps at a time. She knew the day was coming.  But the awkwardness of going bald wasn’t what was engulfing her. As her husband MaryEllen at chemotherapy Chuck began to shave her head as the Melissa Etheridge song “I Run For Life” was playing in the background, the loss of hair was making the cancer diagnosis hit home even harder.

“…From the very core of me came these emotions – something about all the women, the daughters, the mothers, the grandmothers that are now going through breast cancer and have to go through chemo and then have to go through the loss of hair and potentially the loss of life – it just got to me,” recalled MaryEllen. “The tears just flowed.”

In this latest installment of Mayo Clinic’s multi-part video series, MaryEllen and her sister Eileen speak about the hair loss and  how a breast cancer diagnosis impacts a family.

Below is bonus footage of MaryEllen discussing why she decided to enroll in a clinical trial at Mayo Clinic.

Click here if you missed Episode 1.

As always, please feel free to post a comment about the series or leave a message for MaryEllen after each episode.

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