Cancer Sucks

CANCER SUCKS

Article from Madison Business First by Joanne M. Haas

When three entrepreneurs founded Choose Hope™ last year, investigating 401k plans was not high on their list, but getting a laugh out of cancer was.

''Two of us are not planning for retirement and one is. And that makes it tough,'' says Chris McHugh, the very public voice of a business she helped organize. Doctors gave her no hope. So she found it herself: in herself, in other cancer patients, and in friends.

And from that newfound hope, she let loose a defiance that fuels a big chunk of the humorous and inspirational products made and sold by Choose Hope™, which incorporated in March 1999.

''It truly has been a blessing,'' says McHugh, also a mother of a daughter, 10, and son, 12. ''But until you're faced with death, you really don't live. You get up, go to work and that's what you do. But in the last three years, my family has really lived and really laughed a lot. You don't live to not take risks."

And the business run by three women who draw no salaries and do the duties out of their homes is one of those risks.

The roots of the business took hold when McHugh returned from a Washington, D.C., cancer March in 1998 with a ''Cancer Sucks'' button she wore to her chemotherapy appointment. ''We saw what that one button did. Communication started happening. There was laughter in the chemo room. There was never laughter in the chemo room,'' says McHugh, who closed her beautician business with its 200 clients the very day she got her diagnosis.

At first, McHugh would just pin the button on fellow cancer patients. Then, she and fellow business partner Linda Nielsen of Oconomowoc, also a breast cancer survivor, started making a few buttons to bring for others at appointments. Then, they made a few more and sold them for cost. ''Then we thought, 'This is crazy, we could be making money for research,' '' McHugh says.

And so McHugh and Nielsen joined with fellow DeForest resident Paula Lundberg and incorporated the business. McHugh serves as president, Nielsen as vice president and Lundberg as treasurer.

Lundberg says last year (1999) the company donated about $2,600 to research organizations such as the University of Wisconsin Comprehensive Cancer Center and to groups such as the Breast Cancer Recovery Foundation. These donations represented about 30 percent of the company's profits while 70 percent went back into their products. ''There never is enough to draw salaries. We also donate a lot of product,'' Lundberg says. '' We're definitely growing. Our first quarter (in 2000), we did two-thirds of all we did last year.''

A few months ago, the company also advertised in national cancer magazines. ''We feel we sort of tapped out this market,'' Lundberg says of the local market. So the women went national, and the response from this niche market has been strong. There are lots of people out there looking for humor and hope in a society that's often afraid to face cancer.

Their products include key chains, magnets, T-shirts, totes, sweatshirts, poems and blankets. They come with inspirational messages, such as: ''Never place a period where God has placed a comma'' and ''Life is worth the fight.'' They boast the ''battlefield humor'' described by McHugh and Nielsen with phrases such as, ''Hair today, gone tomorrow'' and ''I can't remember; I have mammary loss.'' One saying from Nielsen, who lost a breast to cancer, is: ''Symmetry is boring.''

Nielsen and McHugh also serve as the patient representatives on the advisory board for the UW cancer center. ''We're shaking things up,'' McHugh says, adding that some board members at first didn't know how to approach people actually living with cancer. This is true for society, the women have found, where they and their products unnerve some. ''I really truly am a scary thing. Perfectly healthy at 34 and (now) I've lost my hair three times.'' But they aren't about to stop. Besides the overall goal of providing research dollars for drugs for all cancers, the women want to provide products that offer hope, a good laugh and a sense of community something they know has been lacking for too many for too long.