The saying goes, “laughter is the best medicine.” But it turns out that there’s scientific proof of that.
Jade Laswell has been on plenty of journeys. The middle school teacher has been through breast cancer, which brought a bilateral mastectomy, chemotherapy treatment, and eight surgeries… so far.
And that was just round one.
“I was actually in the middle of a reconstruction surgery this January when, the morning of my surgery, I found a lump,” Laswell recalled. “My surgeon found me, sat down next to me to tell me there were cancer cells on that lump. So, we've just started over again a couple weeks ago.”
A teacher, a wife, and a mom who beat cancer once is now right back where she started.
“My heart like, literally, how do you describe like where you have that dropping feeling in your stomach where like my breath literally was taken away,” Laswell said. “I was just devastated, absolutely devastated, and couldn't stop crying.”
But if you hang around Jade at school, or at home with her husband and four children, you’ll notice that instead of crying, now she prefers to laugh instead.
“It's a very, very dark place when you're dealing with cancer. It's scary and there are a lot of scary things. And to be able to make fun of it kind of takes the power away from the cancer,” Laswell described. “You're not going to let the cancer have that control over your life, you know? We're going to laugh at you, we're going to fight, and we're not going to let you win. It's nice to connect with other people who get that, who understand that fight! Because not everybody will understand that fight.”
She found that someone on a Friday night in Deep Ellum, where comedian Larry Garza’s stage 4 cancer journey is on stage and under the lights, offering that potential best medicine that a fellow cancer survivor might need.
The two cancer fighters met after a show, where they shared stories and laughs for more than half an hour.
“Joking about [cancer], to me, is really important because it lightens it,” Garza said. “As much negativity comes with the disease, one thing that is positive about it is community, is family, and love, really. I know it sounds mushy but it's true.”
Studies have shown, that laughter does have its benefits, that people with a strong sense of humor have outlived those who don't, especially when battling something as brutal as cancer.
So Jade plans to keep busy laughing, especially when she gets news like she got last week, when she heard that tests didn’t reveal any cancer in that lump she found with her surgeon.
“Sometimes with this cancer fight, it's just about waking up and putting one foot in front of the other and hanging onto a little tiny piece of hope that you can survive what the day is going to bring you, because you really don't ever know,” she said.
But we do know that in her classroom, among all the positive and encouraging messages on the walls, is the one right behind her. It says, "A day without laughter is a day wasted."
So here's to Jade's journey, of no wasted days and laughing in the face of cancer every precious moment she can.