Dorothy: [00:00:00] What does it take to serve over 40,000 women and men in 43 Texas counties every year? Well, Dr. Dixie Melillo and I would tell you it takes donated top of the line mammography equipment but no facility to put it in, garage sale furniture, a bachelor’s auction, long nights, early mornings, and a world class team of doctors, staff, and volunteers.
Hi, I’m Dorothy Gibbons, CEO and co founder of The Rose, and this episode of Let’s Talk About Your Breast celebrates the 37th birthday of The Rose .
Let’s Talk About Your Breast, a different kind of podcast presented to you by The Rose, Breast Center of Excellence and a Texas treasure. You’re going to hear frank discussions about tough topics, and you’re going to learn why knowing about your breast could save your life. [00:01:00] Join us as we hear another story, and we answer those tough questions that you may have.
This week, The Rose is celebrating her 37th birthday. Now, we call it her birthday instead of anniversary because The Rose is like a woman. The Rose was set up for women, it is run by women, it is for women. So, 37 years ago, and I can remember it like yesterday. For over three decades, I’ve been involved in a world of miracles, of incredible happenings, of incredible people, a generous community, and it has been the most [00:02:00] amazing journey of anyone’s life.
You know, when I say that we have miracles, the first one was that we even made it. Thirty seven years ago, we had met Rose Kushner, and she had encouraged us to start a non profit, and we had this dream of having a place where uninsured women could go. But the reality was, Dixie was a general surgeon building her practice. I was a PR marketing person at a hospital, and my career path was along healthcare administration. Neither one of us knew anything about making a non profit or making it work or starting a business. And yet, somehow or another, we had the people who helped us make it happen.
You know, when we started, we had a dream. Our non profit application was approved in seven days. And we had top of the line mammography [00:03:00] equipment donated to us. What we didn’t have was a center. What we didn’t have was money for rent or employees. So, there comes the bachelor’s auction.
Who would have thought that we were selling men to raise funds for breast cancer? I mean, that’s something I don’t think you can even do today, but we did it back then. The Soroptimists came in and they, they helped round up every bachelor anyone knew. There were doctors and lawyers and real estate people and general store owners.
And Dixie even got her ex to be one of the bachelors. And as a neurosurgeon, he brought in a top bid. Dixie was so beautiful that night. Shirley Middleton had made sure that she had a gorgeous gown to wear. And we workers were dressed in these quasi tuxedos. Sherry Trainer had convinced the Hobby Airport Hilton to host us at no charge. And we raised, [00:04:00] that night, we raised a whopping $7,000.
That meant that in October of 1987, we were able to open our first center. It was in a strip center, and the landlord wouldn’t give it to us for free, and Dixie convinced him that, He would charge us 3 for every paying woman that came through. Now we only charged 50 for a mammogram back then. And of course our uninsured didn’t pay anything at all.
So our rent was pretty low at the, in the very beginning. The center was decorated an early garage sale. Sofas and chairs and tables that people would normally have tossed and were given to us. We had our donated machine. We opened with one paid employee, Terry Mitchell, who was a mammography technologist, and two volunteers, Anna Belle Baugus and Diana Plasse.
These two women were both breast cancer survivors, both patients of [00:05:00] Dixie’s, and they taught me more about what it means to be a survivor than anyone else.
Anna Belle was a two time survivor and Diana had stage four breast cancer when she came to us. Both of the women lived for many, many years and both of them worked with us for many years. Thank goodness back then we had the help of Joyce Pierce, who was a radiology director. And between her and Terry Mitchell, they handled all of the technical stuff.
They handled getting the licensures and the inspections and making sure we had quality control. And so we opened thinking that we had the world by a tail. I mean, it was just. We were so excited and there we had this donated machine. It was a zero mammogram machine and back then it was considered the gold standard, but it used a blue ink to create the films [00:06:00] and that blue ink created this blue dust that covered every single thing in the center.
We spent more time dusting than we did anything else. there because it was everywhere.
In 1987, we started our first support group, The Rose Garden. It met once a week, and during those meetings, I learned more about survivorship than at any other time in my life. Usually we had maybe a guest speaker. Dr. Hawk came many times, Dr. Roper, but usually it was just Dixie talking and answering questions and the women talking about their experiences among themselves.
I heard all kind of tales. There was Nancy who had to put a pillow between her and her husband’s as they went to bed at night because he had a habit of rolling over and [00:07:00] hitting her tubes or her surgery scars and then there was Charlie who brought her daughters and They would sit there and tease her about getting her way because she had the big C word And I was going how could anybody tease about this, but they teased her relentlessly. And then there was beautiful Olame, who dressed to the nines, drove a red Cadillac, and was a 13 year survivor, and was out dating.
She was the most motivating person we had there on any, any meeting. And then there was Terry. She was 28 years old, and she talked about how long it took her to get diagnosed. First, she had to convince her doctor, and then the first center that he sent her to, the receptionist told her she was too young for a mammogram and turned her away.
It took her almost a [00:08:00] year to find somewhere to go, and at that point, the cancer had already spread. She was told she was too young for a mammogram, but she sure wasn’t too young for breast cancer. It’s a story we continue to hear today, 37 years later, and the only difference is We hear it a lot more often because a lot more young women are being diagnosed.
On some meetings, I was brought to tears by the caring of the husbands and all the ways that they, they supported their wives and how much in grief they were when they lost them. And other times I was enraged when I’d hear someone talk about how her husband just couldn’t handle it, and he left her.
Back then, I went to more funerals than my priest. It was a very sad time. At one time, we hosted [00:09:00] six different support groups. One was The Rose Garden. Then we had The Rose Buds, which was at our second center. Then we had The Rose Buds II, which was for women who had metastatic breast cancer. Then we had the Las Rosas Vivas, we had the Essence of The Rose for black women, and we had the Knockout Roses for our women under 30.
And that was led by Dr. Hoagland, who was such a champion. Such a champion of The Rose. Our first milestone, most people would say, well that was when you had your first hundred women or your first thousand women or something like that. Well, for Dixie and I, it was very different. She had taken me, forced me to go to this conference for doctors in California.
She always wanted me to go along, and I learned a lot. But remember, these are doctors. These are radiologists and oncologists and surgeons. And, you know, they all came together to talk about breast cancer, the latest [00:10:00] treatments and what was new in the field. I was just in awe. But we’d gone to a reception.
They normally had receptions after the day of courses. We’d gone to this reception and it was in this small conference room and it was packed. People were talking and we were trying to make our way to the, to the table and all of a sudden we heard one doctor say, well in Iowa we don’t have anything that’s available to the uninsured, we just have nowhere to send them.
And then we heard this voice say, In Houston, we have a place called The Rose. And he proceeded to tell this other doctor about all the things that we were doing. Dixie poked me and said, “They’re talking about us!” And I said, “I know!” And that was when we met Dr. Gabe Hortobagyi and Dr. Victor Vogel, who were, instrumental in helping us get the women into M.D. Anderson [00:11:00] Hospital when they needed treatment. I mean, those two men were incredibly important during our early years, because there was nowhere to send the uninsured once you knew they needed treatment. Otherwise, we had to depend on pro bono services from doctors and hospitals, surgeries or chemotherapy or radiation therapy, but they helped us in such an incredible way.
You know, for our uninsured women, the story was always the same. No insurance, no money. If they’d had money, they would have had insurance, as one patient back then told me. And they didn’t know where to go. They didn’t know there was anyone that would help. And usually by the time they found us, it was too late.
Those are the same women who, if they survived, they would hold bake sales for us. Or they’d come back and volunteer, or they’d help in some way.
I didn’t become a full time employee at The Rose until 1989. And that was when [00:12:00] the Herman Foundation granted us enough money to cover my salary for six months. Of course, I thought that’s all I needed. I just had to work for it full time. It was my very first proposal to have funded. Not the first one I wrote, but the first one to be funded.
And, of course, there were a lot of things that were very different once I moved over to The Rose. For one thing, I had been working at the 10th largest hospital in Houston. I mean, we had things any hospital would have. If I needed pens or paper or staples, I did a P.O. and I sent it to purchasing and it arrived the next day.
Now I had to go to Office Depot and go buy that, those kind of things. My office was this little cubby hole that was right next to the imaging center. So of course I heard the machine going all the time. And it was fashioned by these two huge bookcases that were donated to us. And that became, with a [00:13:00] desk, that was my office.
And those bookcases were so heavy that we couldn’t even move them when we tried to. We had 915 square feet. And we, we were on a roll. Now you have to remember, at the hospital, we had benefits. We had insurance. We had holiday pay. We had employee, uh, professional education. It was three years before we had enough money for our employees to have insurance. And that was another milestone for me. Back then, Dixie and I had so many dreams. We’d talk about someday having a hospital that could do it all. It could diagnose, and it could have treatment, and it could research, and it would be open to the uninsured woman. It would be open to all women. We’d drive around, and we’d see a piece of land, or an abandoned building, an old hospital that had been abandoned, and we’d say, “Oh, what could we do with that? We just need that to be donated to us.” And then we [00:14:00] started dreaming about how it would look, and how it would have a lot of glass, and plants all around, and cabins for that women and couples, if needed, could stay in during their treatment. Now I’m convinced that we don’t need a hospital, but what we do need is a Rose in every hospital.
Then we could really, really serve the women who need it most. Did we have hard times? Of course. There were some times when money was low. There were some times when we weren’t sure how we were going to make ends meet. make payroll, but always something would come through. It would be a grant from some foundation or the Soroptimists would go do another fundraiser, or the Shrimp Boil. That was our saving grace year after year. That meant that we were going to make it through. There was one time when I got so discouraged that, and it, and it was just one of those days, it was in a very emotional day, someone else had a [00:15:00] tough treatment. We had trouble getting someone into— into treatment.
It was another grant was not approved. It was just one of those days. And I went home and when I went to bed that night, I said this prayer in my nightly prayers. I said, “God, if you don’t want me to run The Rose, don’t let me wake up in the morning.” Well, I woke up. So I guess I was supposed to run The Rose, but That always reminds me, that story of The Roses always had some kind of divine guidance, some kind of help that was beyond us.
And I think that what it’s taught me more than anything else was some days you just have to go on faith.
So in spite of all the times of being discouraged or those times when everything was working just perfectly, [00:16:00] the one thing that I know after 37 years is, we never would have made it without our employees, without our, our staff, the doctors, employees, volunteers, all the people who stepped up to help. The community that always seemed to care enough to find the money to help someone that they didn’t even know.
That is what has meant that we have made it through 37 years. And the other thing I know is no matter what, there’s never been a day when I didn’t love The Rose.
Post-Credits: Thank you for joining us today on Let’s Talk About Your Breasts. This podcast is brought to you by The Rose, visit therose.org to learn more about our organization. Subscribe to our podcast, share episodes with friends. Friends and join the conversation on social media using #Let’sTalkAboutYourBreasts.
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