Friends and colleagues organize fundraiser in support of Teresa Glover
Published in the March 5 – March 18, 2014 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Photo by Marty Cheek
From left, Brian Glover, Teresa Glover, her daughter Makayla, son Darrien and Teresa’s mother Linda Miller in their Morgan Hill home.
The irony was bitter. For years, Morgan Hill resident Teresa Glover gave of her time and energy through the Team in Training program raising money to help people with lymphoma and leukemia. She was healthy.
Then last December, a day before heading with her family to spend Christmas with relatives in Wyoming, she learned in a crowded Good Samaritan Hospital waiting room after an ultrasound and two tests that she herself had stage-three non-Hodgkins lymphoma. A cancer mass had grown on her spleen, causing the muscle cramps she had been feeling.
Glover, 39, sent her husband Brian Glover back to their Morgan Hill home from the San Jose hospital to get their two children, Makayla, 9, a Paradise Valley School third-grader, and Darrien, 17, a senior at Montevista School in Watsonville, ready for the next day’s flight. She refused to let her cancer cancel their kids’s Christmas vacation trip.
“I just pretty much spent my night in a hospital crying that I didn’t get to go to Wyoming, not crying that I had lymphoma,” she said, recalling the painful experience. “I never once said ‘Why me?’ I’ve always said, “Thank God it’s not my children, because I’m strong, I can do this.’ That’s how I found out. It ruined my Christmas.”
Her son didn’t want to go to Wyoming but wanted to stay in California with his mom. “As soon as my dad called and said there was something wrong with mom, I said, ‘Oh, it’s probably cancer, knowing our luck.’ And apparently I was right,” Darrien said.
Makayla also was reluctant to leave. “I was sad,” she said. “I was crying in the plane all the time.” But it helped that Christmas to be in Wyoming with her cousins, aunts and uncles.
Always healthy throughout her life, Glover started in 2008 running half marathons with the Team in Training. She knew nobody with lymphoma or leukemia but simply wanted to help other people.
“I felt strong and I felt healthy and I wanted to do something positive and give back,” she said. “I like helping people. It was a great organization. The money gets to where it needs to get to.”
She recalls running in the Nike Women’s Half Marathon, her last race in October 2013, before being diagnosed with cancer two months later. The 13.1-mile race wound through the hills and streets of San Francisco.
“I ran through part of Golden Gate Park and Team in Training put up all these signs for lymphoma and leukemia with people’s names,” she said. “You’re running through a bunch of fog. And I looked at all those names and I just thought, ‘Wow, all those people have been touched and effected by cancer,’ and here I’m running through unscathed.”
The cancer has turned out to be her teacher, she said. “Every day you learn something new in this journey,” she said. “I’ve learned to be thankful that people care so much. I’m not a limelight person. I like helping other people. But I’ve learned it is OK to have other people in your community come around you and boost you up, because I have done great things and that’s been hard for me to say.”
People in the South Valley region care so much about Glover that a committee of her friends and employees of the M&H Tavern, where she bartended since 2009, organized a special benefit concert for her. It will be held starting at 3 p.m. Saturday March 8 at Troy’s Bocce Ball.
Morgan Hill Life’s own Mark Fenichel will open up the show, followed by Mad Jack, Nate Castillo, and the Gundacker Project. The star attraction will be three members of the hit band Smash Mouth performing as the concert’s closing act.
Smash Mouth’s lead singer Steve Harwell volunteered to play in support of Glover. Harwell’s 6-month-old son, Presley Scott Harwell, died from cancer in 2001, which inspired him to perform for her.
“I’m all about helping out now,” he said. “After losing my son to leukemia, the more charity I can do the better. I’ve been fortunate, so why not help? Music is my serenity. If it helps raise money and awareness, I’m totally down with that.”
All the money raised from the concert will go directly to pay for Teresa’s treatment, said Mike DiRubio, director of public relations for ARTTEC (Arts Related Technical Training for Entertainment Careers) which is organizing the musical acts. He hopes at least 300 people attend the concert to support Glover.
“We want the place packed,” he said. “We want it wall-to-wall, shoulder-to-shoulder, person-to-person. Teresa is a pretty special person and she has been involved with people who have lymphoma and who have cancer, and the irony is that after doing all of these things, she now actually has it.”
When Glover heard about the concert project to help her, this support of the local community gave her spirits a boost. “That’s cool,” she said. “I mean I feel cool.”
One of Darrien’s friends was impressed with the special guest star musicians of Smash Mouth getting involved. “My friend said, ‘Wow, dude, they’re famous. I mean like whole-country famous. And they’re doing a concert for your mom… wow.’”
Glover will be excited to be at the concert in her honor. But the event she really looks forward to being at is a Team in Training fundraising run that will pass through Golden Gate Park in 2015.
Perhaps with fog streaming through the trees, she’ll pass by a series of signs, one of which will have her name on it. She’s fighting the cancer battle through chemotherapy that has caused her hair to fall out, but the doctors said her body is responding well to the treatment.
“This disease is going inspire me. As soon as I’m healthy again, I’m going to go out there and do it,” she vowed. “Next year, I’m going to run again as a survivor.”
