Whatever non-tourists see in the state of Florida has always been beyond me. I’ve lived here the majority of my twenty-two year life and have yet to muster much sentimentality or nostalgia for the state. However, if you had asked me a few years ago to name a state I have even less interest in living in, Georgia would have made the short list. That’s why it’s so humbling to admit that really, Georgia kind of saved me. At least a small, so-called plantation town just thirty-three miles north of the Florida border did. Or maybe it wasn’t even the sleepy Southern town of Thomasville itself, but rather the down-home family atmosphere and eccentric community I found at Thomas University, a private school of one thousand or so students.
It was cancer that brought me to Thomasville but it was sheer joy and contentment that kept me there for over a year and a half. You see, I’d been very suddenly diagnosed with an advanced stage of melanoma during my second year of community college in Tallahassee. Within a week of diagnosis, I had to quit my job at a local consignment clothing shop and withdraw from school, leaving behind a full load of incomplete classes and setting myself back an entire semester. Survival was obviously my top priority, however, the weeks spent at home alone recovering from multiple surgeries with limited use of my left arm were agonizingly boring and only gave me time to pity myself, which has never been my style. So, I began seeking less active work to fill my time and give me a sense of purpose beyond mere survival.
I met a middle aged man from New England named Bill at a local church who asked about the fresh scar on my arm while we were passing the peace and when I revealed its origin, he shocked me by saying he was a melanoma survivor as well. He told me to come talk to him after the service and I decided then that I wouldn’t be myself and run out before he could see me once the final song began. When the final prayer was prayed and the final hymn sung, I went over to meet him and his wife, Joann. As we got to talking, he shared he was a department chair at a university just over the Florida-Georgia border.
Another State of Being
“Oh, cool! I’d love to teach one day. What department do you work in?”
“Social work. It’s my job to help people and help people help people, you see.”
“Sounds like I’m talking to the right man then.”
“What’s been hardest on you since your diagnosis?”
“Well, I’ve worked for five years and I can’t right now. All I do is sit and think about this stupid disease and how it has me just sitting here thinking about how stupid it is.”
“Hmmm... What kind of work can you do?”
“Well, I’ve had office jobs back home before, just standard temp positions. I can type, I can answer phones. I’d just been working in a store here and had to leave when I couldn’t use both arms to lift bins of clothes anymore.”
“Are you licensed? Can you drive?”
“Yeah I can drive.”
“Do you mind a commute?”
“I’m from Miami, everything’s a commute.”
“Haha, well why don’t you take my card. I’m at a school about thirty miles over the Georgia border. We could use some extra help and I don’t think we’d need too much heavy lifting.”
Thomasville University Alumni Center
By Jessica Hughes
The Sprout