Upcoming Cancer Fundraisers & A Newspaper Article About My Mom

Hi All,

Here is a flyer about upcoming benefits to raise funds to help my mom fight cancer. I've also attached an article printed about my Mom in the newspaper since I thought you might be interested to know a little more about her. I know many of you don't live close enough to attend these events but there are many other things that you can do to be involved besides attending, helping with, or donating items to these events. You can first and most importantly continue to pray. You can also tell others our story. You can donate funds as you are able. You can also stay informed about my mom's situation by signing up for free to be a member at www.carepages.com/carepages/PaulaBellow. Thanks for all of your encouragement already.

Sincerely,

Misty Bellow Laenger


Cancer Treatment Fundraiser
RUMMAGE SALE and Silent Auction

Friday, July 10th 8a-5pm

Saturday, July 11th 8a-2pm

Faith Assembly of God

570 S Main, Lumberton, TX 77657

Benefiting Paula Bellow

Paula Bellow was diagnosed with breast cancer about 5 years ago. She had targeted radiation and a lumpectomy and she was cancer free for about 4 years. In the past 1 or 2 years her cancer has come back. She has received many treatments since then but it has still spread to at least 6 places in her breast that we know of (including the chest wall and cavity), to the fluid in her lungs, to both her ovaries and to her bladder and abdomen. Paula and her husband have ten children. We ask that you first and foremost keep Paula and her family in your prayers. We also ask that you please donate any amount that you are able to help pay for medical treatments to fight her cancer.

Rummage Sale Item Donations accepted. For drop-off or pick-up call:

Theresa 409-960-4175 or Pauline 409-751-4644.

You may also send financial donations to FivePoint Credit Union

604 South Main, Lumberton, TX 77657- Account# 4057241-0

Or mail donations to Paula Bellow 230 Beech Dr, Lumberton, TX 77657

Also Link Sale and Car Wash Saturday, August 15th @ Market Basket


Lumberton mother of 10 faces mom's death, battles breast cancer

By JANE MCBRIDE – Beaumont Enterprise May 2006 Article

LUMBERTON - This is the place where Paula Bellow held her babies, sang them lullabyes and taught them the things a child needs to know. Photos of the four girls and six boys - seven of them now grown and gone, three of those with babies of their own - hang in places of honor. Hand-painted rainbows and clouds float across the ceiling and walls of the upstairs bedroom, where four of the babies she wasn't supposed to have slept soundly. It's a nice house. Large, solid, comfortable. Unlike the shacks she lived in as the child of a migrant worker. But Paula has known since she was little that houses don't make homes and homes don't always last forever. Even a mom can disappear without warning. Pauline "Paula" Bellow was one of nine children born to Pauline and Raymond Wright, of Akron, Ohio. Both parents worked to help the family get ahead. Dad was a switchboard operator during the day; Mom waitressed at night. Things began to look up for the family. They arranged to move into a bigger house. Late one afternoon, they loaded up two cars with kids and furnishings and headed out to pick mom up at work. Paula's dad and older sister were in the first car. As they neared the corner where their mother was waiting, she saw them, waved and headed across the street. A drunk driver hit and killed her. He thought she was a cardboard box, he told the police. It was a week before they told Paula her mother wasn't coming home. She was 4.

The family moved into their new home, but it wasn't long until the welfare folks showed up, Paula said. "Back then, Welfare would not allow fathers to raise children. It just wasn't done," Paula said. "They didn't think it was proper." Early in their marriage, Paula's parents had talked about what they would do if anything ever happened to one of them. Both her mother and father had been torn from their homes as babies and grew up in children's homes. No matter what, they promised each other, their family would remain intact. "Dad sold everything we had. He chose to become a migrant farm worker so we could work with him and stay together," Paula said. "We left in two cars, because there were so many of us. We had room for only one two-foot by four-foot box in each car."The family left Ohio, working in the tomato fields in Indiana, following the corn, cotton, potato and grape crops from Florida to California. Everyone worked, even the babies, mostly during the summer months. "We couldn't stay there by ourselves," Paula said. In good times, they lived in one-room shacks with an outdoor toilet. In lean ones, they slept in the car or in a family member's back yard shack. "I wouldn't change my childhood for anything," Paula said firmly. "I learned that family being together is more important than Christmas and Easter and birthdays and stuff like that, which we didn't have. It didn't bother us. We had what we had and didn't mind." Paula said some people talk about faith. Others, like her dad, live it. "He was always singing hymns and reading the Bible and was full of the joy of the Lord," Paula said. "We never saw him in any way act like it was someone's fault, blame it on God, or pity himself. When it comes to being strong, I saw him live it out, in bad situations and in good ones. He played with us and prayed for us."

Paula and her siblings watched the world divide people into haves and have-nots, blacks and whites, educated and ignorant. She knew better. "In Indiana, we had to go to a school that was for migrant farm workers' kids. We had to ride on the back of the bus. We weren't allowed to go to the public school where regular girls and boys went." The bus driver would drop off the public school kids, then let the migrant kids get off to cross the street to the migrant school. "We got rocks thrown at us and were called names, but it just made us stronger," Paula said. "We never held a grudge against the people who did that. We knew they needed help, not us." The migrant kids looked out for each other, bound by circumstance and need. "Everybody worked in the fields, the Hispanics, blacks, whites," Paula said. "You all become one big family. No one was ever better than the next one. We lived the same and worked the same and ate the same." There were days without food, sometimes two in row. But there also were days with root beer floats. No matter how strong the example their father gave, surely the rocks and names hurled at her must have stung? "Nothing could match the hurt of my mother's death. Nothing could be as powerful as that hurt, that young, when you are looking out the window waiting for her to come home."

Paula left at home at 16 because she didn't want to burden her father, who made very little money. He didn't want her to quit school, but she did, moving to the YWCA and getting work at a car wash as a cashier. "It provided for me. I had everything I wanted. I wasn't brought up to want anything. What I had in life, I was satisfied with, no matter what it was. That was how my dad was." Paula said she and God did fine. He even sent her a husband. "I saw my sisters abused by their husbands at a young age. I didn't want that. As I prayed for my sisters, I prayed for God to send me a good man, believing that he would answer my prayers." Michael, Paula's husband of 32 years, was an only child. When she told him she wanted at least a dozen children, he wasn't fazed. The first two babies came easy. The third birth was complicated, with the baby in distress during delivery. Doctors performed an emergency C-section and told Paula she should consider a hysterectomy. She said no. The next two babies also were C-sections. Doctors told her three C-sections were the limit. She had eight. When she wanted to continue having children, one doctor "quit her," she said.

Five years ago, Paula was diagnosed with breast cancer and was positive for the mutated BRCA1 gene, which gives a person a higher risk of cancer. The normal gene suppresses cancer. She wasn't surprised, having watched two of her sisters die from the disease. Her doctors wanted her to have a double mastectomy and undergo radiation and chemotherapy. When the oncologists wouldn't consider other, less-aggressive treatments, Paula told them she would go elsewhere. "They were putting fear into my life and not letting me make my own decisions," she said. The doctors, worried about her, cut to the chase. "How would you feel if you died and left 10 kids behind, because that's probably what is going to happen," the doctor said. Bellow gave her answer. "I have lived that." Paula chose a lumpectomy and a five-day form of radiation from a hospital in Louisiana that encourages patients to be involved in their own treatment, she said. She has been in remission for four years, but last year, found a new breast tumor. She again chose lumpectomy. "Many of the procedures nowadays have just as much of a chance to kill you as the cancer," said her oldest son, David, 24. It's not as if his mother is someone who says, 'God will take care of me so I'm not going to do anything,' David said. "My mom has really studied and looked into many types of medical procedures to deal with different types of cancer in a safer way. "No, it might not be what people normally do, but it's a known, solid choice." Paula doesn't say God will keep her from getting cancer again or that he won't let her die. She says she trusts Him to help her make the right decisions. "When you die, you want to die with peace, knowing you did the best you can, raising your children the best way you can," Paula said, adding that her husband, a shift worker, has been a true partner in raising their family. The Bellow children include teachers, business men and women, small business owners and students. So far, six of them have attended college, five earning degrees. Paula doesn't hide the truth from her children about the potential for cancer to return. "I talk frankly with them. I tell them dying is not a bad thing. It's a sad thing." Paula, who went back to school and earned her GED when she was 22, plans to attend Lamar University when the kids are all grown. She hopes to become a teacher or nurse. Whether she is able to be cancer free or it one day takes her life, Paula believes her kids will be all right. "I raised my children so that they will help each other and live through it, like I did. It made me want to be the type of mom for my children that my mother didn't get to be with her children. That's what I want to do for my mother, to let her live on in me," Paula said. Faith is only as deep as your roots, Paula believes. "My roots go to my mother and father. They live on in me and I will live on in every one of my children and hopefully, in their children and their children. The roots will grow deeper, like a tree planted by the water that cannot be moved."