Transcription of Meredith Strang Burgess for the show Sugarloafers Helping Others #220
Lisa: I’m fortunate to have in the studio with me today an individual who has previously come on and shared her story with us. This is Meredith Strang Burgess, who is the president and CEO of Burgess Advertising and Marketing. She is also a breast cancer survivor and an active and outspoken advocate for cancer awareness and prevention. She is deeply involved in the Sugarloaf’s annual charity summit and is also known for finishing last in the annual Tri for a Cure on purpose.
Thanks for coming in again.
Meredith: You bet. Thank you for having me.
Lisa: The last time you came in, we were talking more about Tri for a Cure. It was several years ago. You were one of our earlier guests, so thank you for doing that for us.
Meredith: Oh, thanks for having us in and thanks for giving us a chance to talk about these different events that are out there for women.
Lisa: Yeah, so let’s talk about the Sugarloaf Charity Summit. You’ve been doing this, and this year will be the 16th annual charity summit. The Snowshoe Shuffle, the kickoff event, is December 30th, and the actual charity summit itself, the big event, is January 30th.
Meredith: At Sugarloaf.
Lisa: At Sugarloaf, exactly. Last year, you raised over $214,000.
Meredith: Which is amazing. That was our best year yet, which always is a wonderful thing, except for those of us that have to look forward going, “Oh, my gosh, we’re going to have to really, really, really work extra hard this year.” That was a wonderful, wonderful year and a wonderful goal to meet. We wanted to break $200,000, and we did.
Lisa: It’s interesting that you would say that it’s something that might concern you because, in the times that I have talked to you, you were just like a woman of energy. You never seemed like you were intimated by anything. You’re like, “You know what, I’m just going to go out there and I’m just going to throw it all up against the wall and see what happens.”
Meredith: We have a fantastic team of very, very dedicated folks that are involved in the Sugarloaf Charity Summit. The planning, like all good events, starts almost a year in advance and leads up to that. Martha Bradley and Bruce Miles, who I believe you’ve talked to as well, are really the human dynamos behind the Sugarloaf Charity Summit in pulling together a plethora of volunteers to really help make all the parts and pieces come together.
Then, really, in the end, of course, it’s the generosity of the Sugarloafers and folks who come up for our weekend special, and there are some, plus all of the wonderful Sugarloafers that are there that are very supportive of this event specifically, and, unfortunately, because the topic of cancer and the subject matter is something that’s very near and dear to many people. It’s affected so many people everywhere. I feel like the Sugarloaf community really has been an extra hard hit over the years with cancer, so that is a very special touch, if you will.
Lisa: You actually had an experience during the Sugarloaf Charity Summit when you were out on the slopes that was directly related to the treatment you were receiving for cancer at that time. Tell me about that.
Meredith: I often credit the Sugarloaf Charity Summit for saving my life, which is sort of a big statement to say about an event. In its early days, actually, back in its first few years that it existed, we’ve had a few different formats over the course of years here. The event at that time was what was called a vertical challenge. A vertical challenge is done in different ways and in different ski slopes, but, for the way we implemented it, is that you had to make in a 2-hour period of time, we kept track of the number of runs that you would make, and we had people standing down at the bottom by the lifts. As you would ski in, they would give you a little hash mark to prove that you actually completed your run.
Sugarloaf had given us a specific ski part of the mountain. We skied off of Whiffletree lift and we literally could take off, go up the lift and literally bomb down, which is probably not the safest thing that we could have done, but they kind of cleared the trail for us to do that. There were a few people that … Like it’s a treat when you can kind of ski fast because it’s not really safe to do during a regular ski day with a lot of people around the mountain. We had that. We did this as safely as we could. You try to get as many runs in as you can in the course of the 2-hour time period.
It was just a fun day. I kind of got caught up with the group. We just really started racking up our runs. I confess it was a little … It got a little competitive as people were kind of like, “Wow, how many runs did you get in?” We got caught up in that. I think, probably, I need to sort of backtrack at this point to say that, at this point in the season, I had started my chemo a few months earlier than this event and had some ups and downs through that process. I was feeling pretty good that day, so I went out and got caught up in the day. We had a lot of fun. I was skiing with a bunch of younger guys who were sort of ripping it down. I thought, “This is great, if I could just keep up with them.”
Finally, we got to the point where I was really dehydrated, I guess. I needed to get some water. I bailed out, ran into a lodge, got a bunch of water for all these guys, I think I had water stuffed in my ski suit, and candy bars and things like that that we would need to give us some energy, joined them, so I only missed about 1 loop with the guys, did our thing. I can’t remember. We got 13 or 14 runs in. The guys maybe got 15 or 16, but I was close. I was close.
Afterwards, we went into the lodge, and I took my helmet off. The guys were really freaked out because I didn’t have any hair. They were sort of surprised, A, that I didn’t have any hair and, B, that I wasn’t their age.
Lisa: They didn’t know this because you had a hat on, a helmet.
Meredith: Right. When you’re skiing, you’re all covered up. We were all doing this event. It just doesn’t matter who’s really under there. You know what it’s like skiing in the winter. You don’t know who you’re actually skiing with, unless you can recognize their voice on the lift. That was always kind of a fun thing. It’s always nice when you’re a little older to have the young people go, “Wow.” It’s like, “Okay, I can still do this.”
What actually is going on at that time period was I was having had some issues with my Mediport that I had been having some heart palpitations and things, which the chemo can cause that. I just thought, “Well, it’s the chemo, and life goes on,” but that particular day, I felt pretty good. The next day, I went in for chemo, and my port wasn’t working at all. The next day, I went in for chemo, and my port was unable to be used, which caused people to investigate.
I had been having these heart palpitations. They were still sort of there, but they were somewhat better. I thought, “I’m over that. Let’s get on with the chemo.” Because the port wasn’t working, they did a few things to figure out why. One of those was to do an X-ray. The X-ray proved that the port in fact had broken off. Mediports are an amazing thing because it makes it so that a person doesn’t have chemo through their regular veins in their arm. It’s an implanted device that’s usually around the clavicle area and goes into your artery to feed the chemo direct. It sounds terrible, doesn’t it? That’s what they are. It’s a great thing for the person for their veins to save them as the chemo is kind of … It does nasty things to them. Anyway, way off track on that one. Sorry. The Mediport is a great and wonderful thing for people to have. I want to be sure that the message isn’t not to get a Mediport. I think the message really is for people to just be aware.
We discovered that my Mediport had broken off. In fact, about 6 inches of the tube that would be normally inside my vein was missing. Through the X-ray, they were able to see that, in fact, it had traveled and gone through my heart and it was actually lodged in my pulmonary artery and, hence, why I was having heart palpitations. I had a tube blocking different parts of my heart.
Now, normally, this would probably be a fatal situation because it’s just a dangerous thing to have a piece of tubing running through your veins. It there was any part in my veins that had caused it to catch, it would have collapsed upon itself. That would have been that. It would be the end of my story. The fact that it made it as far as it did successfully, really, at that time, it was stuck in my heart, we think that was during the time when I was doing the Sugarloaf Charity Summit, because we were really working hard, skiing hard and, because of that, when you do work out, your veins somewhat expand and you pump a lot more blood through. It was that extra boost, I guess, that we can say the Sugarloaf Charity Summit gave me to get the tube actually through and finished in my … because it pushed the tube through my heart as opposed to leaving it somewhat stuck in there.
We can truly say that the Sugarloaf Charity Summit saved my life by doing that extra push. It was a great day. I had a lot of fun. The guys I was skiing with were a riot. It was a pretty amazing thing. We spent the next few days trying to figure out how they were going to get this tube out of me. Science is pretty amazing. We have some great doctors here in Portland. We’re very lucky. I had a little angioplasty. They fished it out, and I got a new Mediport put in and chemo went on.
Lisa: It’s interesting. As you’re talking about this, it reminds me that when you have cancer, it’s not like, okay, life stops, you take a break, then you get to do your cancer thing and then you could just start life again. Cancer is, the diagnosis of cancer, as with any serious illness, is really … It becomes interwoven in the life that you live.
You didn’t stop when you had to have chemo. You said, “I’m going to keep skiing. I’m going to keep doing the things in my life that make me happy,” but there still is a very real medical something that you have to keep in mind.
Meredith: There is. I often talk about how it’s almost like having 2 parallel lives that somewhat go along truly parallel, and you as an individual is stuck between them. Sometimes, they actually, truly intersect in ways. During the course of a business day, you’re a wife or a mother or a sister, best friend, coworker. You’re functioning and a part of life. You’re taking care of people. You have commitment. You have things, friends, life. As they say, life is what happens when you’re making other plans.
Cancer comes along and, all of a sudden, you step over to this other life, and you have this medical life. You go and you need millions of doctors, so it feels sometimes. There’s your regular doctor. You have now an oncologist. You have a radiologist. You have your surgeons. You have so many different doctors. It’s overwhelming at first to meet your medical team. Of course, after a while, you really get to know them and you get pretty close with them. We’re so lucky that we have some wonderful medical teams here. It’s a lot to kind of take in.
Now, why do I have to go to a different doctor for radiology as opposed to surgery and then if you’re going to have any diagnosis done or there’s a lot of scans, so you get to know a lot of the folks at the hospitals that work in MRI or CAT scans, bone scats. I mean who knew all of these wonderful things? You sort of step over. It’s at first very hard to understand. These folks are very capable and all, but you really do get to know them, and then they do just become part of your family.
It’s the individual who walks that line and steps between. Then there are times where the lines really truly intersect, and your real life comes in contact with your medical life. That’s when those moments are when your friends and family, something happens that draws them truly into the conversation of the medical world that they come into the hospital or that they also get a chance to experience what you’re doing.
One of those areas that I liked to educate people about the process so it’s not so scary was chemo. I would always bring a bunch of folks with me to chemo, and we’d have chemo parties. I’m sure there were other patients there who probably weren’t very happy with us, but we used to make it pretty much a fun day. It’s the classic. You can make it what you want it to be. It was fun because we would be in the treatment room being very silly. I mean, after all, you’re dealing with something so serious. You have to be silly. We’d always have cupcakes or we’d bring sparkling apple cider and pretend it was… we were drinking champagne and, of course, we would share with everybody that was there that day.
People really got into the whole thing. It was a lot of fun. There were always a few that were like, “Gee, I just kind of want to sit in my corner, and leave me alone,” but a lot of people would join us and be part of it, and we would all talk. It was a lot of fun. I had some friends who would come with me and then the next crop of friends would be coming to the next round. I know they would ask each other, “Okay, now, what is it really like? How bad is it? How depressing is it?” and they’re like, “Oh, my God, we had such a great time. It was wonderful.” People are just like incredulous that that could go on.
It’s all in what you choose to make of it. These lives are very interesting. Then, all of a sudden, you reach a point where you’re done with your medical journey. You know what that’s like when you sort of go back to this other life, although we in the back of our heads wonder. I go once a year and I say, “Check me all over. Look at me really, really carefully. Test me. Look at me.” You’re just always… that I don’t think ever goes away.
Lisa: Part of the Sugarloaf Charity Summit is the annual ball. Part of the ball is a candlelight ceremony which is held in remembrance of those who have been impacted and passed away from cancer, but also people who have survived and people who continue to walk among us. Tell me about that.
Meredith: I’ve been involved in a number of different events over the last 15 or 16 years that sort of are supporting, of course, no one supports cancer, that are in honor and remembrance of cancer. I think it’s really important that we don’t gloss over cancer. I think it’s important for every time we do an event that we honor, celebrate, but also truly take time to absorb that cancer is killing people, and it’s killing people every day and it’s continuing and, in some places more so than others in certain kinds of cancer and that it needs to stop. I mean we need to get our handle on this.
Cancer doesn’t discriminate. It happens to everybody when they least expect it. Over the course of people’s lifetimes, today, they say one in 8 women, one in 6 men, and now I’m hearing numbers like if you lived to be 90 or 95 years old, it could be like literally one in 3 will experience some experience with cancer. That may not be … just different kinds of cancer, but that’s a pretty amazing thing. It’s really important for all these events to understand the gravity of the topic. I’m a big believer that, at some point, you need to recognize what cancer, the devastation that cancer is causing here, right here in our front yard in Maine.
We created the candlelight ceremony as part of the charity summit. The way we do it, instead of showing a movie and say, “This is just a terrible disease,” we believe in telling the story. The best way to tell the story is to have somebody from your own midst to tell the story. Each year, unfortunately, we have stories, new stories to tell. I always say, “I hope someday we have no stories to tell and we can finish this up, put a bow on it and put it away, but, in the meantime, the stories do continue.”
The other part is people don’t appreciate necessarily how invasive it is. There are so many that have been touched by cancer. The good news is many of those of people are very much here today. We do the candlelight ceremony, exactly as you say, to honor those that have passed, celebrate those that are surviving today. Some of them are surviving and are still on the front lines with their battle with cancer. Others, a few years have passed. It’s a very amazing thing when we, during the dinner or after the dinner goes by and we invite everybody who has personally been touched by cancer to come up and be part of the candlelight ceremony, and the circle grows larger every year.
I always am struck with this. It’s so wonderful that the circle is large. That means people are there, but it also means that cancer is continuing. It just is a very emotional part of the evening, for sure.
Lisa: The 2 beneficiaries of the Sugarloaf Charity Summit both enable people in the area to get treatment and get early diagnosis up in the area of Sugarloaf, but also enable us all within the State of Maine to have a sense of hope about the future. The Maine Cancer Foundation is doing research within our state on things like breast cancer and other sorts of cancer. The Martha B. Webber Cancer Center up in Franklin County is actually helping families deal with the cancer right where they live.
It’s an interesting thing to have the sadness of the cancer itself and the frustration, but then you also have this mirror of hope on the other side. Is that why you do the Tri for a Cure and the charity summit and all of the speaking that you do on the subject?
Meredith: Absolutely. I’m a little parochial as a Mainer, multi-generational Mainer. I believe in keeping our money in Maine and I believe in helping our neighbors. There are so many people right in Maine that need help, a hand up. Unfortunately, we’ve made, a lot of our different causes, we’ve kind of made those people invisible. More and more people are giving their money out of state or out of country, which is great, but I think, unfortunately, we’ve made, right, our neighbors sort of invisible to the fact that they could use as much as if not more. We used to do that. Another area that’s really critical is health access. Health access, we know leads to a better, more fulfilling, longer life if you can have access to good healthcare on an ongoing basis.
The Sugarloaf Charity Summit is fun to do for a couple of different reasons. One, we tie in with the Martha B. Webber Breast Care Center, which is at the Franklin Memorial Hospital in Farmington. There’s a lot of people in Western Maine that didn’t have access to a breast center and they were just being seen by their regular physicians. With the breast center, you have some physicians who are specialized in that area or can really judge things a little bit more quickly just because they’re dealing with it on a larger scale.
Also, through the Sugarloaf Charity Summit, they have made it so that many of the women in Western Maine can receive mammograms for free so that any woman out there for that matter in the State of Maine, not getting a mammogram or not getting your breast checks or your health checks is not an excuse. We have wonderful programs out there. We have the Maine Breast and Cervical Health Program. Women can apply to that and they can be seen by a doctor to get their Pap test and get mammograms. Money should never be the reason for a woman to not get checked. Many of the employees at Sugarloaf are involved and appreciate that resource that’s there.
Then the other pieces is the Maine Cancer Foundation, which is a statewide independent organization. They exist to do 3 different things, primarily, research, Maine-based researched, and it has to be scientific. We have a very elaborate process for applications and grants to go through. It somewhat is a great thing for me because not only are we hopefully going to solve parts and pieces of what’s causing or how we’re going to treat cancer moving forward, but it’s also creating jobs, wonderful jobs, wonderful high-tech jobs. We’re seeing some of these scientists who have a hypothesis. They test it out. They write their grant. They go to Washington, and they bring back millions of dollars and opening labs here, which is a benefit that we’ve just started to see play out.
Then we also do patient support and we do education. Education and prevention, of course, is where it all is at. At the end of the day, women need to be smart. Who knew that these breasts that we all couldn’t wait to have were going to be such a pain, as we got older. It’s sort of kind of a funny little part of growing up. Sorry. I know. We all couldn’t wait to have them and, now, I couldn’t wait to get rid of mine.
Lisa: Certainly, if you’re not using them anymore and they are causing you problems, I am completely behind that notion. Now, there are going to be people who are listening to this who may or may not have ever been to the Sugarloaf Charity Summit before. How can they learn more about it?
Meredith: Absolutely, great question. The Sugarloaf Charity Summit information can be found at Sugarloaf.com under events. It will be the Sugarloaf Charity Summit. We also have a Facebook page, Sugarloaf Charity Summit. It has all of the auction items as they’re coming. Martha does a wonderful job of putting pictures up and putting information.
The day itself is January 30th, 2016. Oh, wow, it sounds so far away. It’s a full day of activities. People can participate in all sorts of different ways, even just buying a raffle ticket, participating in fundraising for Loafers for a Cure or a program that’s just really been growing in the last couple of years called, Cut for a Cure. That is being expanded this year to the SuperQuad, I think Whiffletree and also, too, Skyline.
For, I believe it’s $20 for the 2 hours, I think 10:00 to 12:00, you can cut line. Believe you me, there are some long lines some days. If we have a beautiful day, the lines are obviously longer. We always hope for that beautiful day because more people want to cut the line. In that, last year, we raised many thousands of dollars doing that. It’s just a way that people can contribute and also get a really fun benefit out of it as well.
Then, that evening, we do the charity summit ball. It sounds a little pretentious for it to be a ball, and we call it that on purpose to be a little fun. Dressing up at Sugarloaf is not exactly like dressing up perhaps if you go to a ball in Portland. We pull out our best ski sweaters and have just a fun time. We have the silent auction, and then we have our candlelight ceremony. We have a lot of fun and wonderful, wonderful Sugarloaf stories.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Meredith Strang Burgess, who’s the president and CEO of Burgess Advertising and Marketing. Meredith is also a breast cancer survivor and an active and outspoken advocate for cancer awareness and prevention. She’s deeply involved in the Sugarloaf’s annual charity summit.
Thanks so much for coming in and for all the work that you’re doing in this area. I appreciate it.
Meredith: Thanks, Lisa. I appreciate your time and support of this effort as well.