Caring for the caretaker
By TAMARA EL-KHOURY
Published July 7, 2007
DUNEDIN - To her friends, Leanna Skerritt is the woman who invites the stranger sitting solo at a bar to join her group. She lets a wandering couple and their two Great Danes park their van in her driveway for a few months to live. She points out a misbuttoned shirt to a young man so he can fix it.
Momma Leanna, as some call her, has been taking care of her friends for years and now they say it's time they take care of her.
"I'm more about making the people around me comfortable than I am myself, " Skerritt said.
Skerritt, 47, a Dunedin resident of more than 15 years, has been fighting cancer for half her life. The breast cancer came when she was a 26-year-old mother of three young boys. The cancer has since traveled to her liver and spine and to the lymph nodes around her lungs. It is in its most advanced stages.
"I've never had anybody survive this long with the situation she's had, " said Skerritt's oncologist, Dr. Jennifer Ball. "She is remarkable."
She always worked between chemotherapy and radiation treatments, until six months ago when she couldn't see. Doctors treated a malignant tumor from her left eye and told her to stop working.
She's always worked. She's worked as a bartender and waiter in several Dunedin restaurants and bars. Then she moved on to the "real world, " as she called it, working as a health care administrator.
And she's been involved in city activities as a volunteer coordinator for the city's Dunedin Wine the Blues and Mardi Gras events.
Now, without work, treatment is more expensive than ever. Skerritt's newest prescription, an oral chemotherapy treatment, costs $2, 200 a month. She exhausted her disability benefits and just signed up for Medicaid.
Sunday, her friends are throwing a benefit at Skip's Bar and Grill on Main Street to help pay Skerritt's bills. Local businesses offered gift certificates to use in a raffle. Friends have called in favors looking for items to give away in a silent auction. The Dunedin Brewery donated a keg.
The bar's owner, Skip French, said any money made at the bar during the benefit hours will be donated to Skerritt. He said he's known her since the day he opened in 1992. She never complains about being sick, he said.
"I keep forgetting to ask her how she is because I keep forgetting that she's sick, " he said.
Last year, Beverly Nelson, a friend who researches new treatments online and calls pharmaceutical companies looking for cheaper drugs, asked Skerritt and her significant other of 16 years, Dave Gunn, if she could throw a benefit on their behalf. They refused.
When Nelson asked them again last month, they agreed. That's when Nelson knew the situation had gotten bad.
"It's very hard for them to accept help from anyone, " Nelson said. "They're the ones that help everyone."
The benefit is being held at Skip's because that's where everything happens for Skerritt and her friends. It's where many of them first met. It's where they start off their Friday nights and where they go to mull over a new diagnosis. Skerritt's youngest son, Tristan Skerritt, 23, a Marine back from three tours in Iraq, is a bartender there.
Skerritt said she's grateful but embarrassed for the help. When asked what the benefit means to her she choked up and excused herself to go get some tissues.
IF YOU GO
Benefit for Leanna Skerritt
6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday
Skip's Bar and Grill, 371 Main St., Dunedin
For more information, visit www.myspace.com/weluvleanna
Donations also can be made at any Wachovia bank branch with a check to "Benefit for Leanna Skerritt."