LIBERTY TOWNSHIP, Ohio — Despite her own battle, one breast cancer survivor is helping others with disabilities.
You can’t see it, but Lisa Schneider can feel it.
“It’s devastating, really,” she said. “Personally, I take it really hard for my family. I don’t want them to know how it affects me.”
The mother of four is in a battle with breast cancer that recently started getting worse.
“The cancer has grown. The spots have grown in my skull, my spine, and then it’s moved to my liver,” said Schneider.
She said surgeries, dozens of radiation treatments, and constant chemotherapy have been keeping the cancer at bay.
“Once I get over the initial shock of, ‘Of course, it’s moved to another organ. What does that mean for me, then?’ I think, ‘Okay, I have to be happier for my family than I am sadder for myself,’” said Schneider.
It’s part of what kept her going after she said the cancer was first spotted in a mammogram.
“I was a little, you know, perplexed at how this could happen. Our family lives into their nineties and we die of heart disease,” said Schneider.
For the last nine years, she’s been in and out of hospitals, fighting to survive, but she’s not looking at it as a terminal illness.
“I’ve got those pictures to show. Is this what cancer is supposed to look like, or do I want to defy the odds?” said Schneider.
She sees it as her time to create change.
“Like six weeks in a row and I just got all this paperwork done, 139 pages I filed, and we got approved as a 501c3, and it took off. It was just amazing,” said Schneider.
From her Liberty Township home office, she and her husband started a group called ‘Operation Ramp It Up’, a nonprofit that builds wheelchair ramps for disabled families in need.
“We feel like we’re preventing, you know, suicides and sad thoughts and bad things that can happen to them if they’re not mobile. We’re giving people that,” said Schneider.
She says they’ve now built ramps in every state, close to 300 so far. She says as long as she’s here, she’s going to keep helping.
“Today’s not the day that I’m dying. This week isn’t the week I’m dying. It’s going to come, and it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be miserable. As I lay in that bed, you know, for three weeks while my body shuts down, it’s going to be awful, but that’s not today. I don’t want to live like it could be today or tomorrow,” said Schneider.
