Getting a Police Escort Through Cancer

Fellow Officers Help With Costs

First, Prince George's County police officer Mark Lightfoot called his parents. He had a rare form of cancer, he told them, and he would be in the hospital longer than expected.

Then, Lightfoot called a colleague to ask for help finding someone to straighten up his bachelor pad before his folks came to town.

With that simple request last year, fellow officers in the District 5 squad rallied to help. They refurnished Lightfoot's Laurel apartment on their own dime. They generated nearly $4,500 from a fish fry to pay for his medications. They even received special permission from their commander to drive their squad cars to the Baltimore hospital where Lightfoot was being treated and took turns visiting him.

"There's a support network, and there's a support network," said Lightfoot, who returned to light-duty work last month and has been cancer-free since February. "It just helps to have good people around you."

Lightfoot, 39, a four-year member of the police force, said his own wry sense of humor -- and his squadmates' ability to tolerate it -- helped him overcome the cancer, known as histiocytic sarcoma, which was in Stage 4 when doctors spotted it.

Lightfoot said he never thought of cancer when he started to feel lightheaded and lost his appetite in spring 2008. Maybe it was the midnight shifts or the abundance of fast food that made him feel like he "just didn't have it," he said he thought.

Then, when stomach pain intensified, causing him to miss work two days in a row, he checked himself into a hospital. Doctors found a grapefruit-size mass behind his lungs and told him that his liver was twice the proper size. Weeks later, at University of Maryland Hospital in Baltimore, a doctor told him with certainty that he had cancer.

"I looked at him for a second and I said, 'Thank you. You're the first person who's given me a straight answer about anything,' " Lightfoot recalled.

Lightfoot never asked the doctors what his odds were, and they never offered to tell him, he said. He was too preoccupied with trying to stay alive so he could watch over his godson, niece and nephew, he said. Hospital officials simply told him his course of treatment: six sessions of chemotherapy, radiation and a bone marrow transplant.

Members of Lightfoot's squad took it upon themselves to work out the logistics of helping. Capt. Amal Awad, then a lieutenant, started collecting money to help defray the out-of-pocket costs of Lightfoot's treatment, and she and other squad members bought him a new bed. The in-house collection soon turned into a department-wide ordeal and, eventually, a community fish fry.

"You know the police culture," Awad said. "We're relatively close, and you bond with each other."

Lightfoot's family moved into his newly furnished apartment, he said, to take him to and from his chemotherapy appointments. Capt. Craig Howard and other high-ranking police officials authorized the visits to Lightfoot in the police cruisers.

"We didn't want him to feel lonesome up there," Howard joked.

Lightfoot, who was a military police officer in Iraq, works temporarily as a clerk for the squad. But he said he feels 100 percent better and is eager to return to the road.

"I've got more energy," he said. "I'm feeling stronger every day."

Added Howard: "He wants to get back out there with his crew."