Sue Paskert fought off leukemia and is back at the job she loves - selling bay area houses.
By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published October 1, 2004
BEACH PARK - The business cards and glossy new photo come as a reminder.
People remember her: Her jingle was "Sue's Super Buys!" Back in the mid 1990s, Sue Paskert knew how to cinch a real estate deal.
The math teacher-turned-real estate agent worked 14-hour days cultivating her business. She listened to clients, wrote personal thank you notes to everyone who graced her open houses and always returned phone calls.
For seven years her residential sales ranked in the top 1 percent. She and her husband owned a charming beach place on Little Gasparilla Island and a home in Beach Park.
Then, in October 1996, along came a curve she never saw coming.
It started as a nasty cold that lingered and resisted antibiotics. She remembers wrapping up a contract on a house in Palma Ceia and being so tired she had to rest for 20 minutes.
"I was so exhausted," recalls Paskert, now 64. "I actually had to lean against the outside of the house before I could walk to my car."
She went to a walk-in clinic, looking for answers. The doctor ran some tests and sent Paskert to a specialist.
The diagnosis: acute myelogenous leukemia. The aggressive illness has a 17 percent survival rate over five years. Chemotherapy sessions lasted 24 hours a day in seven day cycles. She traveled to Baltimore for a bone marrow transplant and came home even more exhausted.
Her immune system was so compromised that her grandkids had to coordinate their chicken pox vaccinations so as not to expose her.
"I used to joke that all I wanted was some free time," she says. "Well, then I got leukemia and got more than I ever wanted. I couldn't drag myself out of bed before 10 a.m."
Her real estate career was out the window. Survival was all she could think about.
A tiny, energetic woman, Paskert is the daughter of Tampa's first TV fishing show host, Captain Marty Foster, who started broadcasting on the old WSUN TV from the St. Petersburg Pier.
"I was the kid who always held the dead fish," she likes to joke.
Foster, a well-known fishing captain, had died of Hodgkin's disease.
Though the doctors assured Paskert that her cancer wasn't hereditary, she admits to having a Type A personality like her father - and wonders if that overdrive made her sick.
"The pace of real estate is immense, never-ending," she explains. "That, combined with the stress and eating on the run compromised my immune system."
Paskert, who taught junior high math for two decades at Tampa area schools, ventured into real-estate briefly in the early 1970s.
Then in the late 1980s, encouraged by a teacher friend, she tried again, enrolling in an intensive training program offered by Merrill Lynch. She specialized in becoming a listing agent, helping sellers market their property.
"When my husband loaned me $3,000 to get the business started, I said to him: I don't believe this real-estate stuff actually works."
But it did. The amalgam of Paskert's sunny optimism and willingness to work pushed her to the top.
"I have such a go-go-go personality that it took me five years to even begin to get my stamina back," she says. "I can't explain the fatigue associated with chemo; nobody can unless you've experienced it."
Despite her husband and three grown children worrying, Paskert slowly waded back into real estate, first teaching the residential ropes to the daughter of a friend who sells commercial real-estate, then selling condos on Little Gasparilla Island.
Her family's beach house there, with a third-story porch overlooking the water and bones so beautiful it's been painted by a local artist, remains her spiritual retreat. The surrounding waters remind her of the place her father loved to fish. It's where she takes her six grandchildren for special junk-food weekends, where she walks the beach and tools around in her 17-foot skiff, "The Island Granny."
Now she's back in real-estate for good, cancer free for seven and a half years. She's a real estate agent again, assembling "an awesome team" that may include other cancer survivors. She's been helping the Keller Williams Realty company train new agents, something she finds truly satisfying.
Her hair is grown back, her energy high.
"I'm back in it full swing, it's happening again," she says, juggling phone calls. "It's almost scary. I had a $360 cell phone bill."
She talks about giving her house a budget makeover, about the cherished china she collects, sometimes for a buck apiece at discount stores.
She's a survivor, she says, with a passion for survivor stories, always willing to share hers with anyone with a few minutes to listen.
"These survival stories are what helped me, day after day until I got my life back again," she says. "I never thought I was going to die, although some days I felt like it. Now, I've survived, too."
