Isolated at home, California woman connects by giving

Even as she fights cancer and struggles with a rare lung disease, Corinna Dewar thinks of helping others.

In past holiday seasons, she would bake cookies for some of her neighbors in a suburb of Sacramento, California, and drop them off at their doors. Amid the pandemic, she gave them Santa-decorated care packages of sanitizing products instead.

She’s housebound, so her husband helped deliver some of them and she mailed the rest. Giving back to others was especially important in 2020, when she underwent treatment for skin cancer. She said it “gave me a small way to help out and focus on something other than my health and the pandemic.”

Dewar was diagnosed with lymphangioleiomyomatosis a decade ago. For some years, she continued her job as a social worker and later counseled homeless people. When the disease advanced, she began to use an oxygen tank, and she prepared to get a lung transplant. She removed herself from the waiting list for an organ donor last May because hospitals were overwhelmed by the COVID-19 crisis and she felt it wasn’t the right time for a transplant. Two months later she was diagnosed with skin cancer and had a tumor removed from her foot.

Still, she believes in the importance of looking out for others, now more than ever.

“A lot of us feel disconnected from each other, and with the politics as well,” Dewar said, adding that “having some small connection” with others is helpful.