Q&A: Clovis resident joining cancer fight in New York

Clovis resident Shiray Berry is one of 29 ambassadors for a new national colorectal cancer awareness campaign launched in New York City by Fight Colorectal Cancer (Fight CRC).

Berry, 31, said she was diagnosed with stage three rectal cancer in August 2016. After six weeks of radiation and chemotherapy, surgery and four rounds of chemo, doctors believed Berry had beaten the disease.

A recent scan showed Berry now has stage four rectal cancer and she will be seeking treatment in a few weeks from the Mayo Clinic, after visiting Washington, D.C., with Fight CRC to lobby for a reduced screening age.

Berry visited The News on Thursday to talk about her role in Fight CRC's campaign and her fight with rectal cancer.

What will your involvement with the campaign entail?

So it's a whole year, it's basically volunteer time and we just raise awareness. I put a lot of statistics out there, we post a lot on social media. One of the biggest things is the strong arm selfie campaign where you just take a picture of you doing the strong arm (pose) and you (post) #strongarmselfie and tag Fight CRC and that raises $1 every time you do that, so it's a really easy way to fundraise. There's also some fundraisers that are going on with other ambassadors that we'll lend a hand on if they need it, so just volunteering basically anywhere they need us.

How did you get consideration for the campaign? Did they find you or was there an application process?

There was an application process. So when I got diagnosed everyone was telling me stories about their relative or friend who died from cancer, so I was trying to find somebody who was my age who got what I was going through. So I got on Instagram and just did a search for colon cancer and I found a girl named Ivory from Washington and she was involved with this organization. She was actually an ambassador last year, so watching what she went through led me to apply and I just met this huge group of people online that got what I was going through and didn't tell me stories about their dead aunts.

How nice was that for you to find people that had a shared experience in this fight?

It really meant a lot. It gave me hope too. At first I thought, "oh my god, everyone dies from this, so I'm going to die soon." But seeing all of these people who were living through it and had all of these great lives even while they were going through treatment, it meant a lot to me. It just gave me hope.

How did the cancer diagnosis change your daily habits? Are there any kind of foods or activities that you used to enjoy that now you can't?

So I had a lot of complications after radiation and I ended up having to get a diverting colostomy bag and that changed everything. So I have a bag on my stomach that my colon is attached to, it comes out of a hole in my stomach, and so my poop goes into that bag rather than going to the restroom. So it's just attached and I have to empty it rather than you know going to the bathroom like normal. This is a really awkward thing for some people to talk about but I talk about poop all the time now.

So that changed everything because that got us into the medical devices world and so we're working with medical suppliers now all the time, trying to find bags and breakdown of the skin, it's just a hot mess. So that changed a lot. I was out of work for like seven months because of the issues with radiation though and so this bag actually kind of gave me my life back. I was able to go back to work, I could leave my house, so it's been a good thing.

With the Fight CRC campaign you said, "I fight for everyone in rural America who feels like they don't have a voice." How has living in a rural area like Clovis impacted your fight with the disease?

We were very adamant the first time around to stay local because if I was going to be really sick, I wanted to be sick at home. Our cancer center has a lot of patients there and when you have complications, it can be difficult sometimes to get the right care. I don't want to make it sound like they didn't treat me well because they did, but I just don't know that Clovis was set up for complications so we had to do a lot of traveling. We ended up going to Lubbock quite a bit. We had to go to Dallas for a meeting with a specialist and then of course this move we're fixing to do to get to Phoenix to get to some specialists too.

What's something people don't realize about this disease?

That it's so preventable. If you get screened early, they can catch it as a polyp before it would even turn in to cancer. Nobody wants to go through prep for a colonoscopy, it's not fun. I've had like 15 of them though, it's much better to do the one and catch it early than it is to catch it at stage three or four. So I guess that's the biggest thing I want people to realize - it's uncomfortable and it's not fun, but do that so you don't have to do what we've done.

What do you hope people take away from the campaign?

I think the biggest thing is education on the symptoms and fighting for yourself. So if you have any symptoms for any disease, not just colon cancer but anything, talk to your doctor and if he won't listen to you, find someone else. That's difficult in Clovis, we don't have a whole lot of doctors, but go to Lubbock, go to Amarillo, go to Albuquerque, just find someone that will listen because there is a doctor who will listen and who can catch it early rather than just sitting on the symptoms. I actually did that. I sat on my symptoms for about a year and a half and I'm at stage four now.

Berry said anyone experiencing symptoms who is looking for resources or someone to talk to can contact her via social media at Facebook.com/shirayberry or on Instagram @shirayberry

- Compiled by Staff Writer Jamie Cushman