My name is Mirela Stefanescu. This was my fifth social to attend and I now I feel like an old pro. The Kellogg Cancer Center in Evanston was a beautiful location with lots of greenery in the waiting room. We set up in a room off to the left. The unique part of this location is that it provided us with two screens on which we played clips representative of Imerman Angels as well as interviews with both the founder Johnny and with other mentor angels.
As usual, we set up the room with flyers, water bottles, and signup sheets before we went around the waiting room explaining the benefits of Imerman. One gentleman who signed up was an eighteen-year non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma survivor who talked about his journey with cancer when he was just sixteen years old. His treatment had been in Evanston and he explained how different the facility was now. He also talked about how he hadn’t wanted to know any details about his cancer but, looking back on it now, he felt he had blocked out a good portion of that part of his life. Now he wanted to sign up so he would be able to provide support to another young man who might be going through the same thing he had experienced. He talked about what a difficult time it had been in his life. When his friends were getting their driver’s licenses, he was projectile-vomiting after chemotherapy – something the doctors had told him should not have happened as a side-effect to his treatment. He said if one person battling cancer could benefit from one of his previous experiences, he would feel the experience he went through would not have been for nothing.
As we were finishing and beginning to pack up, one woman came up to me to thank me for coming back every month. She explained that she has been coming to the Kellogg Cancer Center for treatment for the past six months. Although she had listened to other people ask questions, she never thought this kind of support system would be for her. Last month she sat in the room and listened to the stories that played on the video from Imerman, and she finally signed up. She said her mentor angel has been amazing, and she wished she had signed up earlier.
I found this story to mirror my professional experience with Vogelzang Law: Some of our clients were scared at first to contact an attorney because they felt intimidated by the process, or they believed that they developed lung cancer or Mesothelioma because they smoked for most of their adult lives. But once they finally meet my boss, Nick, and once they see that we are here to fight for victims of asbestos-related diseases and their families, these same clients come back and say they wish they would’ve contacted us sooner.
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Written by Mirela Stefanescu
