Malinda Fister
Mechanicsburg BIC Church
In early March 2009, Malinda Fister, office administrator at Mechanicsburg (Pa.) Brethren in Christ Church, awoke in a strange place, under strange circumstances. She was in a stark-white hospital room, IV tubes poking out of her arms, her frightened-looking husband and parents hovering above her. Confused and disoriented, Malinda found herself asking the same questions over and over again, “Where am I? What am I doing here?”
The answer: Malinda had had three seizures caused by a walnut-sized tumor in the right frontal lobe of her brain. She had been rushed to Hershey (Pa.) Medical Center, where emergency surgery was performed. Malinda and her husband, Mike, were informed that the tumor was 90 percent stage-two cancer—a relatively optimistic prognosis. Yet 10 percent of the mass had metastasized to stage-three cancer, a potentially serious difference.
According to Malinda, the doctors decided “to give me the ‘big dog’s treatment’”: six weeks of intensive chemotherapy and radiation treatments followed by six months of regular chemotherapy.
Following a four-month paid leave of absence provided by the Mechanicsburg church, Malinda returned to the office part-time while still undergoing therapy. In the closing weeks of December 2009, she returned to full-time work. Now, less than a year after her initial diagnosis, Malinda rejoices that she’s “cancer-free and treatment-free.
“My whole perspective changed last year,” says Malinda. “In November 2009, Mike and I celebrated five years of marriage. I was only twenty-six years old when we got the diagnosis. I really had to come to grips with the fact that, despite my young age, this might be it.”
Now, reports Malinda, “things that would have been a big deal to me, I think, ‘That’s nothing.’ I’m not nearly as easily stressed out. And I think I’m more grateful, too, for all the blessings in my life.”
Part of Malinda’s gratitude is directed toward the Brethren in Christ Church Health Plan, which went into affect for Mechanicsburg just a few weeks before Malinda’s surgery.
“Our old health plan was fine,” admits Malinda. “But the BIC Health Plan has been a major factor in this journey with cancer. Without the plan, Mike and I would have had to pay $13,000 out-of-pocket for the surgery at Hershey Med—and that’s not even including the hospital stay, the chemo/radiation, and other costs. Our old plan wouldn’t have covered any of it. What the BIC plan’s HRA allowed us to do was pay those costs in a way that didn’t leave us burdened with bills.”
“Obviously, when we were discussing whether or not to join the BIC plan, our staff couldn’t have predicted the situation Malinda and her family encountered last year,” observes Layne Lebo, senior pastor at Mechanicsburg BIC. “If we had still been with our old insurance company, in a risk pool as small as our staff, not spreading out the risk over a much larger group like the BIC plan does, who knows what our premiums would have been like this year.”
What is Malinda’s advice to other congregations considering joining the BIC Health Plan? “I think they need to look at demographics of their staff, but they also need to think to the future,” she says. “We have people on our staff who are in their seventies, but I was in my twenties. I went to bed one night and woke up the next morning, and my whole life had changed. And I was healthy: I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I eat right and exercise—I was the picture of health. So my recommendation would be, ‘Don’t assume if you have a young, healthy staff that you can’t be affected by health challenges.’”
