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Community honors four Women of Hope

Susan Bullard, Sally Massagee, Pam Laughter and Pat Whiteside were honored by the Pardee Hospital Foundation as Women of Hope.

Inspiration and hope came from all quarters at the Women Helping Women luncheon at Blue Ridge Community College on Friday as the Pardee Hospital Foundation celebrated 20 years of supporting women who need medical screening and treatment.

Especially reflecting the theme were four women honored as Women of Hope for 2017 — Susan Bullard, Pam Laughter, Sally Massagee and Pat Whiteside.

“Not only did these women overcome the odds, they did so with incredible strength, grace and dignity,” said Kimerly Hinkelman, executive director of the Pardee Hospital Foundation.

“You inspire us,” she told the crowd of nearly 450, asking all survivors of illness, professional caregivers and family caregivers to stand. Nearly everyone in the crowd did.

Friday’s event raised more than $140,000 to help uninsured or under-insured women receive a mammogram or other important health screening, said Sarah Murray, event co-chair with Debbie Rouse. Over the past 20 years, Women Helping Women has raised more than $2.3 million in that effort, she said.

Rouse recalled that in 1997, “the highest death rate in females and males for breast cancer was in North Carolina.” She said a group of women immediately decided they needed to do something to help people get the medical screenings they needed. So the idea of a luncheon fundraiser was born. The cost of the ticket, they decided, would be the cost of a mammogram in 1998 – $74.38.

“Today your ticket price (of $125) doesn’t cover that,” Rouse said. “I checked … and today it costs $225.60 for a screening mammogram if you are uninsured.”

Over the course of 20 years, 52 women have been recognized as Women of Hope, who faced crushing diagnoses with courage, strength and tenacity. In video messages, the 2017 honorees recounted what they had endured: Susan Bullard, a double lung transplant; Pam Laughter, breast cancer, Sally Massagee, a serious blood disorder that required chemotherapy and a stem-cell transplant; and Pat Whiteside, a cancer survivor several times and a dedicated volunteer for Pardee Hospital and at the Memorial Gardens at St. James Episcopal Church.

Guest speaker, author and CBS contributor Lee Woodruff spoke from the heart about how completely her life changed when she got the early morning phone call in January 2006 telling her that her husband Bob had suffered a near-fatal head injury while reporting in Iraq. Bob had just been named as co-anchor of ABC World News Tonight and was on assignment in the war zone.

“I had one job – to make sure Bob got well … as a mother (of four young children) I wondered ‘How am I going to do this?’ … I had to step out of my life to take care of him.”

What got her through, she said, was family, friends, faith and a sense of humor. “Laughter is a healing thing,” she said. “When you can put the thing that scares you in a box, you have power over it.”

Woodruff said that the doctors and nurses who helped her husband from the time he was flown by helicopter from the battlefield to Germany and then the U.S. for treatment. “In health care, leave the door open for hope,” she said. In delivering the message about diagnosis and prognosis, “it’s all about nuance.”

It took Bob months to recover from his injuries, she said, but now he is Asia bureau chief for ABC News. “We have a long commuter marriage,” she said. Their four children are grown, their two youngest applying to college. The Woodruffs established the Bob Woodruff Foundation in 2006, which partners with community and national programs, organizations and the military community to help service members, veterans and their families. On Oct. 17, the foundation awarded $1.4-million to 14 organizations that facilitate programs for post-9/11 veterans and their families.