For a day, cancer survivors forget pain

Some had been told that they or their loved ones had weeks to live. They underwent treatments that sounded as bad as the disease, with no guarantee of a cure -- and many are not out of the woods yet.

They gathered for cotton candy and a mini-parade Sunday at Stony Brook University Cancer Center to celebrate National Cancer Survivors Day.

"I'm not glad that I got cancer, but to be honest with you . . . The way my life was going, it's actually in a better direction because of cancer," said Maria Pagano, 48, of Centereach, who was found to have uterine cancer in 2009 but is recovering after chemotherapy.

She quit smoking, got out of a bad relationship and has a new outlook on life. "I move slower," she said. "I listen to the birds, I hear bugs, bees. I appreciate more. When you're getting chemo, you're laying down, you feel like you're so close to death -- I feel like I was woken up. I feel like I'm here for a purpose."

Friends Carole Todaro, 57, of Holbrook, who has survived four bouts of breast cancer, and Liz Dama, 62, a breast cancer survivor, talked about taking long drives out to Montauk together to look at the beaches and buy farm stand vegetables.

But Pagano lost her home and her job when she became too sick to work. Todaro worried that her children knew her as someone whose life seemed at times dominated by a disease.

Annette Gerani, 48, a painter from Centereach, can no longer hold a brush to make a living. In February, a week after she finished treatment for one form of cancer, doctors told her she had another. After a lifetime of healthy living and no history of cancer in her family, it "came out of the blue," she said. "I was not happy about that. I was devastated."

Kenneth Kaushansky, an oncologist and the dean of Stony Brook's school of medicine, spoke optimistically in an interview about the future of cancer treatment. Big changes are afoot in the next 10 to 15 years, he said, and eventually cancer may be reduced to just another chronic disease, serious but not necessarily life-threatening.

Sunday, Gerani said she'd enjoyed herself, particularly the wisdom and jokes from Ann Jillian, an actress and breast cancer survivor. "You can forget for the minute, for the hour, what pain you have that day, what financial disaster you're having, because there's always a disaster," Gerani said.

Also Sunday, breast cancer survivors and supporters took part in the eighth annual Long Island 2 Day Walk to Fight Breast Cancer in Shirley.