Freedom Road
"Doing Double Time" by Sharon Schlegel
Published in The Trenton Times, October
5, 2004
Midge DeLuca wants to
talk about breast cancer and this week, the beginning of Breast
Cancer Awareness Month, seems the right time.
Her main
concern, she says, is urging women not to make the terrible mistake she
did
"through ignorance and neglect."
That mistake
was ignoring a lump. It became so prominent in a year's time that
her only
recourse was a radial mastectomy for the removal of what had
become a stage 3 advanced
cancer.
"This year
alone, there will be more than 200,000 cases diagnosed," DeLuca says,
quoting
statistics from the American Cancer Society. "More than
39,000 women will die. It's the No. 2
killer of women, second only to heart disease."
Early detection
is DeLuca's current mission, but it is by no means her whole
story. Her
incarceration for vehicular homicide in 1999 ended only two
months ago.
It was as a
maximum-security prisoner that she underwent most of her cancer
treatment,
which included chemotherapy and radiation. In a way, DeLuca
says, she felt she was serving "a
double sentence" because of the advanced state of her disease.
"I didn't want
to die in prison," she says.
Frank and jocular, DeLuca, 56, doesn't fit the
stereotype of a maximum-security prisoner. An
articulate college graduate, she majored in special education and
is only nine credits short of her
master's degree.
She grew up
with her brother in a traditional, two-parent family in Millburn.
Her father was a
supervisor for New Jersey Bell, her mother was a teacher's aide.
She successfully taught at several schools,
including Marlboro High School and the Vineland
Residential Treatment Center.
Until
1984, DeLuca thought she could control her drinking, a habit she'd
observed in her
childhood home. "I thought it was normal to drink all the
time," she says.
That was the year she says she "got a little
obnoxious" at school after drinking too much and
decided to attend a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. She
joined, doing well on the program for
years.
So well, says DeLuca, that "I thought I had it
all under control." She stopped going to
meetings and was "clean three years" when she found the lump in
her breast.
She says she knew exactly what to do -- deny
it.
"I'd started drinking again and, when I drank,
the lump got smaller," she says wryly.
She was able to rely on alcohol and denial to
mask the truth for a while, but the lump
enlarged, eventually protruding from her breast. DeLuca
finally made an appointment with a
doctor.
But, of course, she says, "I needed a few
drinks first."
On the afternoon of Jan. 22, 1999, DeLuca said
goodbye to her students with the usual "See
ya Monday!," drove to a nearby park and began to drink.
When she backed out of the parking lot at 3:22
p.m., she says, "I must have blacked out."
Her car hit a moving vehicle with a
couple inside. The husband was seriously injured. The
wife died.
"I had all kinds of good things planned for
Midge DeLuca," she says today. "Taking a human
life wasn't one of them."
DeLuca woke up in Cooper Hospital in Camden
with no memory of the accident. Her right hip
and ankle had been crushed. She spent weeks in rehab,
learning to walk again with the aid of a
cane she still uses.
There,
while under careful medical scrutiny, she finally had to address the
lump that had
continued to grow. Found to be malignant, it was removed in
a radical mastectomy, which
"went very well," DeLuca says. "But the prognosis didn't."
She had stage 3 cancer on a scale of 0 to 4,
and a tumor graded large, 5.2 centimeters. In
addition, 42 lymph nodes had to be removed from her arm, because
the neglected cancer had
spread.
DeLuca began to mentally prepare herself for
chemotherapy and radiation treatments, and
their possible side effects. Then, one morning in the
hospital, a social worker said to her, "You
know you're going to prison."
DeLuca says she had once again been in
denial. When she subsequently stood in front of a
judge and was given a sentence of five to 10 years for
second-degree vehicular homicide, she
was incredulous.
"I thought the judge wouldn't do this
because I was in the middle of chemotherapy. When
they cuffed me and took me out of the courtroom, I still didn't
believe it," DeLuca says.
She was sent to the Edna Mahan Correctional
Facility for Women in Hunterdon County, where
for the next three years she would undergo cancer treatment while
being incarcerated as a
maximum-security prisoner.
"I can't begin to tell you the shame,
the fear, the remorse when I went through those
gates," she says.
Her new home was an 8-by-10-foot area
she had to share with another prisoner.
In
prison, DeLuca took a course "that taught me to focus on the
victim. I think about her
every day. I was irresponsible; I drank and drove.
"And there's not a 3:22 p.m. that goes by I
don't think about her and that family."
As for prison life, DeLuca says, "It's not an
environment, it's an existence. I had my share of
altercations. You can't become an easy mark."
Chief among her regrets about those years is
that both her parents died while she was in
prison and she was not permitted to attend their funerals.
Over time, she adds, "family and friends drift
away." But, over that same time, DeLuca found
friends among the other prisoners.
"Through them, I came to see that I'm more
than a breast. They accepted me and it wasn't
pity...they genuinely cared about me as a person. No one
has ever before offered me that high
quality of friendship."
She became editor of Perspectives, the
prison newspaper. DeLuca and two other inmates
started an ongoing program called "Women for Women," aimed at
instructing prisoners about
their rights and avenues of redress and re-entry after prison.
"We set up a resource center in the
prison library with forms explaining how to get a driver's
license and Social Security card, how to locate county resources
and health-care resources,"
she explains. The program continues to function today.
DeLuca hopes to incorporate the "Women for
Women" concept and, with the help of several
other recently released women working with her, enlarge it to
include a transitional housing
facility and an office front.
She envisions it as a
place to gather clothing donations for women coming out of prison, and
as a mentoring facility and support system for community re-entry.
"Who's better to help a newly released woman than another woman who's
been through it?"
she asks.
Eventually, she would also like to set up a hospice program for
prisoners and work as an
advocate for better prison medical care. That's something
that is sorely needed, she says.
Although her chemotherapy ended in 2003, DeLuca's struggles are not
over.
"If I'm strong today, it's only because of the remorse I feel, which
motivates me to something
with myself.
"But sometimes when I go to the grocery story I think, 'people know
where I've been' and I
start to hyperventilate at that thought. It's something I
carry everywhere with me."
DeLuca's sentence was reduced and she left prison after serving 50
months.
She says she considers many of the women she met there "lifelong
friends, who are good
people." One of them gave her the use of the house in
Trenton where she resides.
But the end of her sentence was only the beginning of another struggle.
"You have no job to go to, no income, only a temporary ID and, of
course, I can't drive for
another two years. How do you find work and what do you do
about health care?"
Currently, DeLuca has no health-care coverage. But she's learned
the bus route to AA meetings and attends regularly.
In
June, just before leaving prison, she volunteered to speak at a
teacher's meeting. The
meeting, sponsored by Project Pride, was to address the problems
of alcohol and student
drinking.
During her talk, she told the group how much
she regretted losing "the privilege you have of
teaching young people."
Minutes after she finished, a woman walked
across the room and offered DeLuca a job
teaching in the juvenile justice system. Because of a
hiring freeze, the job has yet to
materialize.
Meanwhile, she is eager for any kind of work.
"Prison changed my whole outlook on life,"
DeLuca says. "I grew up in lily-white Millburn. I
didn't know what a black person was until I went to
college. Prison opened my eyes to such
much injustice and racism."
"I look at my cancer and at prison now
as blessings. They made me the person I always
wanted to be -- speaking out, not passive, not afraid of what
people think."
"I want to get the news out about early
detection, so women aren't as fearful of a strange
mass in their breasts as I was. Breast self-exams and early
detection are the key."
In a piece penned while editor of the prison
newspaper, DeLuca wrote: "Yes, I miss my breast
sometimes, just like I miss being 35; but now I book at my life
and my disease with different
eyes, and thank God for the gifts they have brought me."
Go
back to the Woman is the Word page
|
|