The Letter

As I reflect on this last decade, my mind returns to Leigh.

Leigh was the first person to ever receive a meal from Culinary Care in March 2013.

I was working full-time but could take my lunch break to deliver her meal. The next day, I contacted Leigh to see if she could provide some feedback about the program. This is a portion of the four-page letter I received back from her:

Dear Courtney,

 I want to start by telling you how much your program and services mean to me and how wonderful it is to have people like you who think of things that cancer patients need, but that few actually realize the significance. Growing up, we associate food and mealtime with nourishment and family and love; during cancer, sometimes we’re too sick to eat or too tired to visit with family, and sometimes we feel so alienated and isolated from love. Your program not only nourishes us physically, but emotionally as well.  

I had been a travel nurse from New York City taking an assignment in Florida for the winter 2009-2010, when I was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer. My only family was my dad, still living in NY and he was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia a month after I was diagnosed. I was settled in Florida and didn’t want to be a burden to my dad who was also very sick.

It was a very long road for me, especially living alone. I was sick often, my appendix ruptured in the middle of chemo, which delayed several treatments and extended the end date. A social worker came to visit me while I was hospitalized after the appendectomy asking if I was homeless because nobody came to visit or sent cards or flowers. No, I wasn’t homeless, I was just alone.

I finished chemo in May of 2011. My hair was growing back and I was training for the Komen walk when I was sidelined by a stroke in October of 2011. This resulted in right-sided weakness and months of physical therapy and delayed my breast reconstructive surgeries.

Finally, in April 2012, I was able to begin my reconstruction process, and although I was very happy and very relieved, I was also very exhausted. I felt as if I had been sick for a very long time. I had also been alone and grown a little jaded over the lack of support from my friends, at the distance they kept from me, at the lack of emotional comfort at the very least. I have since learned that people don’t usually know what to say when a friend or loved one is sick, and therefore they refrain from saying anything at all, maybe worried about saying the wrong thing.

I felt unable to ask for support because I felt like an outsider in the world of normal, healthy people.

In March 2013, I found myself in Chicago. I realized that I needed some support in learning how to find my new normal, how to create a new life for myself, and most importantly, how to figure out the new me.

It is during this time that I learned of the services of Culinary Care Cuisine. My first thought was how nice it would be to have a real meal, a dinner with a main dish, a vegetable side, maybe a nice salad and all freshly prepared by gourmet chefs and delivered right to me. As I thought more about it, I found myself salivating, dreaming of not only tasting each morsel of food and appreciating the nutrients, being grateful for the care being extended but also for the opportunity to sit down and enjoy an actual full meal and the love that is delivered with it.

I expected that I would be ill during chemo. I adjusted to the fact that I was too tired to cook when I was recovering after the stroke. I accepted that my arms could not reach overhead or stretch too far to the sides during the long months of reconstruction, but I have been unable to get around the alone part. And I just have not been able to bring myself to cook a full meal for one person. It seems wasteful first of all, since I am on a tight budget. And it seems to amplify the loneliness; there is no such thing as shopping and cooking for one, everything comes in big packs, and full-course dinners are made with love for the families who share them. 

To me, Culinary Care Cuisine not only represents providing a meal for someone in need of a healthy, nutritious, gourmet prepared meal, it represents love and all that love means: friendship, caring, togetherness, laughter, kindness, goodness, joy and goodwill toward our fellow human beings.

From someone who has been a little jaded by loneliness, still receiving treatments with more surgeries ahead and learning about survivorship and how to reintegrate into society, I’m truly grateful. Your services have not only strengthened me physically through nourishment but your goodness, grace, and tenderness have restored my faith in human kindness.

Godspeed,

Leigh B.

The idea that we could change Leigh’s life with just one meal was all the motivation I needed to keep going.

This is the difference we are making with every meal we deliver. This is what we’re fighting for.

Thank you for being on this journey with me.

~ Courtney