A real survivor

Young Chang

Glenn Quinliven has too many thoughts racing through his head.

His hand can only write them down so fast. He’s frustrated.

He wants to say that he’s grateful and overwhelmed because his friends

are trying to save his life.

Tears drop from the 55-year-old’s eyes, and he doesn’t bother to wipe

them.

His friend and caretaker, Junko Suzumura, blots them with a tissue.

She apologizes for him -- for Quinliven having to spit out mucus every so

often, for having to write out answers because throat and tongue cancers

have destroyed his ability to talk.

His tears -- of gratitude and joy, not of frustration -- are the first

to fall in a while, Suzumura said.

“I never thought I would become ill,” the Huntington Beach resident

wrote. “I’ve always been active and strong.”

When he was diagnosed in September with cancer, doctors predicted he

had only a couple of months to live. Quinliven’s first priority was to

complete his volunteer project for the Corona del Mar branch of the

American Cancer Society Discovery Shop.

Quinliven started volunteering last summer and gave countless hours of

his time and talents, shop captain Edelene MacDonald said.

His father had passed away within the past year, also of cancer, so

the cause became personal.

Walking through the shop, manager Gloria Godfrey points out all of

Quinliven’s touches.

The dressing rooms, the torn out wall in the back, the mudding, the

molding, the architecturally stylish columns near the men’s apparel

display -- these are all Quinliven’s creations. He came in with paints

and hammers and all sorts of tools too technical to name.

He taught other volunteers what to do, Godfrey added, and gave the

Discovery Shop a new look.

And then the cancer struck. Surprising doctors and friends, he

survived through not only Christmas, New Year’s and Valentine’s Day, but

now Easter is fast approaching. He sold many of his possessions to pay

for his treatment and medicine, and his home is in the process of being

sold too.

Friends and fellow volunteers are certain he will live longer. They

organized a fund-raising Sock Hop last week. Proceeds will help to pay

for his treatment and medicine.

After all his efforts to help the shop and, ultimately, cancer

research, it’s the least they could do, volunteers say.

Recently, organizers of the Corona del Mar shop needed a truck. Theirs

had broken down. It was Quinliven, from his sick bed, who saved the day

by giving his up.

“He’d give you the shirt off his back,” Godfrey said. “Even when he

had nothing, and we all knew what he was going through, all this cancer

thing, he said, ‘Why don’t you take my truck?’ So we did.”

But it is Quinliven who is the grateful one, wrote the former bowler

and active member in the Huntington Beach community who also served as

campaign manager for former Planning Commissioner Geri Ortega in 1988.

“If this had not have happened, I probably never would have known how

many people really care about me, my life and my well-being,” he wrote.

“Now, at 55, it’s like being reborn, reevaluating one’s life and what’s

important.”