When cancer calls, a Cancer Warrior answers

When Marci Dickerson learned she had breast cancer in 2022, she knew at least one thing she wasn’t going to do.

“I’m not going to start pink again,” she remembers saying. “I’m not going to be the face of breast cancer. I’m not doing it.”

It took about two and a half months for cancer to change her mind. These days, sometimes the result of that change comes in a phone call at 10 o’clock at night.

Not long ago, Dickerson's phone rang. A woman had just been diagnosed with cancer. She was frightened. She didn't understand the terminology or what was supposed to happen next. Dickerson stayed on the phone with her for an hour.

There are medical professionals and patient navigators to explain treatments and guide people through the health care system, and Dickerson is emphatic that Cancer Warriors doesn't replace them. But there are other moments.

“If you want to get mad at 10 p.m. and cry a little bit and cuss and scream, call me,” she said. “I got you.”

That phone call helps explain what Dickerson discovered during her own cancer journey, and why an organization she initially had no intention of creating became Cancer Warriors.

Dickerson had watched women such as Pat Sisbarro and Laura Conniff build Tough Enough to Wear Pink into a force in Las Cruces, bringing breast cancer awareness and research to the forefront and raising millions of dollars along the way. But that campaign had run its course, and Dickerson had no intention of picking it up again.

Then she became a patient herself. Her own cancer experience, she said, was relatively easy. But as she moved through diagnosis and treatment, she began noticing the things that weren't easy — the confusion, the gaps, the questions patients didn't know to ask and the fear of suddenly entering a world with its own language.

Her longtime friend Julie Gustafson was about six months ahead of her in her own cancer journey. Other women they knew were dealing with breast, ovarian or uterine cancer. Eventually Dickerson’s personality emerged. She’s not the type to stand on the sidelines.

“I was like, OK, we’ve got to go do something,” she said.

Cancer Warriors was born in March 2023, but Dickerson didn't want to recreate what had come before. Tough Enough to Wear Pink raised millions for cancer research. She saw a different need.

“I don’t want to take money out of this community and send it to research,” she said. “What I want to do is take the money that the community gives us and give it back to the people that are fighting the fight, that are in the journey.”

It was important that the money be used right here at home, and the community responded quickly. At Cancer Warriors' first kickoff luncheon at the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum, supporters raised $220,000 in an hour.

“People lined up to write us checks,” Dickerson said.

That support allowed Cancer Warriors to grow by following a simple approach: Find something making the cancer journey harder and see if there is a way to make it easier.

Dickerson's own diagnosis took just 10 days. When she discovered other women were waiting months for answers, Cancer Warriors helped create Mammos to Answers, a program with Memorial Medical Center aimed at shortening the wait between an abnormal mammogram and a diagnosis.

When women brought them a yoga program designed for people fighting or recovering from cancer, Cancer Warriors funded it. The organization also provides welcome bags and items designed to help patients through chemotherapy, radiation and surgery.

“We can do anything we want as long as it helps people who are battling cancer or have battled cancer or affects the cancer treatment available here in Las Cruces,” Dickerson said.

But the programs and boxes are only part of it. Cancer Warriors is also a community of people who have been through cancer and can help someone else navigate it. A newly diagnosed patient can be connected with someone who has experienced a similar cancer and understands some of what comes next.

Cancer Warriors' unofficial slogan gets to the point: “Make the journey of cancer suck less.”

Cancer Warriors operates under Revolution 120, and Dickerson said the money it raises in Doña Ana County stays in the county. The all-volunteer organization has no payroll or brick-and-mortar headquarters.

Before her own diagnosis, Dickerson admits, she didn't fully understand the importance of early detection. She suspected something was wrong months before she sought testing but delayed it while her son was graduating and life was busy.

“I thought if you had cancer, you had cancer,” she said.

Going through it taught her how much difference early detection can make. It also taught her how isolating cancer can be. Not everyone wants to announce a diagnosis. Some are scared. Some don't know whom to ask. Others simply need someone who understands why they are angry, exhausted or afraid.

Dickerson believes her relatively uncomplicated experience gave her the opportunity to become that person for somebody else.

“God gave me enough cancer for me to be aware and realize the shortcomings in our community of the cancer journey,” she said, “but he didn’t give me so much cancer that I’d be too tired to fix it or too tired to help.”

Now, when Cancer Warriors sees another shortcoming, Dickerson's instinct is much the same as it was when she finally abandoned her insistence that she wasn't going to start another cancer organization. Find a way to help.

It isn't the role Dickerson planned for herself when cancer entered her life.

Sometimes it is as simple as picking up the phone in the middle of the night.