The next chapter

Mary L. Foster-Galasso has no plans at allowing cancer to derail her career, her life or for that matter her sense of humor.
The longtime Evangeline Parish Library Director was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer early in 2015. In the two years since then, Foster-Galasso has gone through chemotherapy, surgery and a total of 38 radiation treatments.
Yet despite all of that, and the lingering side effects of those treatments such as extensive exhaustion and pneumonia to name a few, Foster-Galasso is still able to crack jokes about her battle against the disease.
“This time last year when it was my birthday I spent my birthday in the emergency room,” Foster-Galasso said. “I was suffering from some side effects of the radiation treatments, including something called radiation esophagitis where I couldn’t eat. It was a tough time.
“One side effect I haven’t had and I wouldn’t have minded having it was that I didn’t lose weight,” laughed Foster-Galasso. “I thought that I would at least lose some weight. But it doesn’t work that way always.”
Foster-Galasso’s recent battle with cancer though is only part of a much longer story, one filled with accomplishments and tribulations that span not only the United States but the world.

From small town girl
to big city woman
Foster-Galasso was born and raised on a family farm in the small unincorporated community of Morrow in St. Landry Parish. After graduating from Morrow High School, Foster-Galasso would go to attend Northeast Louisiana University (now known as University of Louisiana-Monroe) and obtain her bachelor’s degree in geology.
Foster-Galasso’s insatiable appetite for learning though would not be fulfilled by her stay in Monroe. Foster-Galasso would then attend the University of Houston where she received her master’s degree in English, before heading off to Tulane University where she worked on getting her PhD in English.
“I always just had a passion for learning and school,” Foster-Galasso said.
Foster-Galasso had already completed all of her course work for the PhD program and was beginning to work on her dissertation when an unexpected career opportunity presented itself in the oil field of all places back in 1978.
“The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was starting up and a company based out of New Orleans that was doing project management for SPR and they liked the fact that I had degrees in both English and Geology,” Foster-Galasso said. “So I went to work for them. Of course I told myself that I would go back to Tulane in a few years and finish my dissertation but of course I never did.”
Foster-Galasso started off as a tech writer and then later as a budget analyst, working on cost-plus contracts, for three years.
“It was really a fun time to be part of the reserve,” Foster-Galasso said.

Taking on the role of military wife-mother
Foster-Galasso’s career in the oil field though came to an end when she reconnected with an old flame Gary from her days on campus in Monroe. Gary was in the aviation program and went on to enlist in the United State Army, while she went on to pursue further higher education.
The two reconnected, fell madly in love and Foster-Galasso would join her husband at Fort Gordon in Georgia, where she would briefly teach on base helping military men improve writing skills.
Foster-Galasso would spend the next few decades traveling the United States and world as a military wife. The Galassos would not spend much time in Georgia as they would then transfer to Fort Huachuca in Arizona for three years.
It was there that the couple had their oldest child, daughter Laura, and it also where Foster-Galasso obtained her third college degree, an MBA from Golden Gate University.
The Galassos would two years later then relocate to Redstone Arsenal in northern Alabama, where their second and youngest child Collins was born, before transferring once again to the U.S. Military outpost on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Foster-Galasso would pick up teaching once again as she taught for the University of Maryland’s Asian Division serving as instructor for English and Business on the base.

Traveling thousands of miles to help son
It was during this period of transition that the Galassos began to notice that there might be something medically wrong with their son.
“We knew something was wrong but didn’t know exactly what was wrong,” Foster-Galasso said. “We had been a little concerned before we had moved because Collins had starting losing language. Once we got to Kawjalein he started getting worse compared to the other kids.
“So we started looking for help and it was difficult to get help on a military island without even a pediatrician. The nearest military help was 2,000 miles away in Hawaii.”
The family took multiple trips to Hawaii and it was there during a visit that doctors diagnosed Collins with Autism.
After a few years, the Galassos would relocate back to the states as Gary received an assignment at The Pentagon. The family’s plan was for Collins to receive expert care at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center but then Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm happened, and many of the top doctors that could have aided Collins were deployed to Iraq and Kuwait.
“We kept having to see different people and Collins was getting worse and worse,” Foster-Galasso said. “He was already by that time in special education. I remember watching him through the window and seeing that he wasn’t interacting at all. The Down Syndrome kids were social interacting and he wasn’t”
The family would finally find relief at Children’s Hospital in Washington D.C. Collins would be medicated to help with his seizures and to help him focus with his school work as he slowly began to become more and more social. Eventually, Collins would be so focused that he graduated from North Central High School as Valedictorian, and then later graduated from University of Louisiana at Lafayette with a degree in biology.

Returning home
to Louisiana
Gary retired from the U.S. Army with the rank of major in 1993 and the family remained in the D.C. area for a few years while Collins continued to progress. But it wouldn’t be long until finally the call to come home to Louisiana became too loud to ignore.
“We also saw that if we were going to move back home it was time to get back home,” Foster-Galasso said. “My husband Gary is from Brooklyn, New York and the agreement had always been, because I couldn’t handle New York, that we would come back so I could be a country girl again.”
In 1999 the Galassos relocated to Louisiana and put a trailer in the old cattle lot where Foster-Galasso used to feed calves as a child growing up. After spending a year teaching multiple subjects at St. Joseph’s of Plaucheville in Avoyelles Parish, Foster-Galasso got a chance to work at the Evangeline Parish Library.
To Foster-Galasso, working among all those stacks of books felt like home, which wasn’t surprising considering that her late mother Mary Louise Foster, who passed away last June at the age of 95, worked as a school teacher, public librarian and then school librarian.
“I really liked working at the library and I realized it was a good blend of my talents,” Foster-Galasso said. “I instantly fell in love with it.”
Foster-Galasso knew that one day she would want to become Library Director and so began taking classes at LSU to earn her yet another degree, this one a masters in library information science.
Foster-Galasso had only completed one course before the previous director resigned to take a position outside of the parish. So the board opted to make Foster-Galasso the acting director, and after a few short months later made her full-time director with the condition that she would complete her degree, which she did in 2007, while she continued to work full time at the library.
Those few years were at times hectic but ultimately rewarding.
“It was a mess,” laughed Foster-Galasso. “I was working full time here and I was going to school there one course at a time but I got it done.”

A calling found among the books
Foster-Galasso took her position as Library Director very seriously, and with the help of many of her staff members, worked at doing what it took to obtain the land, funding and resources to build a new state-of-the-art facility. That dream was finally made a reality in 2015 when that facility opened its doors on 916 West Main Street, the site of the former old hospital.
“I am very proud of this building,” Foster-Galasso said. “This was a labor of love that took 10 years for us to do from saving the money, acquiring the land, getting the funding, getting public support and design. We had a lot of hard luck during the process. Our first contractor walked off the job and then having another contractor walk off the job. It was not an easy trail for us.”
In addition to the new facility, Foster-Galasso is also extremely proud of the continued cross training of all 22 employees of the parish library system and other projects that the library has completed in the past decade include building a branch in Turkey Creek, the renovation of both the Basile and Mamou branches, and adding a large room to the branch in Pine Prairie.
“Our parish wide library system is what it is today because of the dedication, perseverance and professional administration that our director, Mary, continues to bring to work with her every day,” Evangeline Parish Library Outreach Director Suzy Lemoine said.
Technology remains a facet of the library’s future that Foster-Galasso and the staff are working on improving and mastering. In addition is having the library serve as haven for the public when it comes to civic needs.
“So many government agencies have cut back so much and that they expect people to come to the library to fill out their government forms,” Foster-Galasso said. “That becomes part of the mission of the library. To have the computer available for the people to come in and do that.”
The library also set up its mobile lab at the Ville Platte Civic Center following the flooding in August to help residents fill out forms for FEMA aid.

An unexpected
chapter to the story
During the holidays of 2014 and the early part of 2015, Foster-Galasso began to sense that something was amiss with her health. Foster-Galasso knew that there was something wrong with her health but was not prepared for what she would soon discover.
“I knew I wasn’t feeling well at all,” Foster-Galasso said. “I mentioned something to my sister Ruth who works at the Veterans Hospital in Pineville. So I went to see her and I told her that I had this swollen lymphoid under my arm. We felt it and her face changed and she said ‘we are getting you in to see a surgeon today.’
“I saw Dr. Darrell Aguillard and he felt it and he told me that I had cancer,” Foster-Galasso. “He told me that it was either Stage 3 or Stage 4.”
As the surgeon left Foster-Galasso and her husband in the examination room to process the stunning news he had just unveiled, Foster-Galasso turned to the man who had walked beside her for nearly forty years and told him how sorry she was.
“The first thing I did was apologize to Gary,” Foster-Galasso remembered. “Because I felt that we had so many plans for retirement and that I was blowing the whole thing for both us. It was devastating.”
With the support of her husband, who she refers to as her ‘rock’ and ‘hero,’ Foster-Galasso began to tackle taking on the disease with the same vigor and dedication she used to obtain multiple degrees, raise her family as a military wife, find the necessary medical assistance for her son and to get a new library building constructed.
During the extensive amounts of treatment at Cabrini Cancer Center in Alexandria, Foster-Galasso has learned many things, chief among them to limit what is on your work plate.
“Cancer teaches you that you have to let go of some things,” Foster-Galasso said. “I had to get my job back to the bare bones. Get the bills paid, get the budget running and keep the board meetings going. Make sure the technology is there and running, make sure we meet our deadlines for this, that or another.”
That new approach meant that Foster-Galasso could no longer go to all the civic events and community group meetings that she had long enjoyed taking part in.
“I had to cut out going to Chamber of Commerce meetings and Rotary Club meetings. I miss going to them but I had this fellow cancer patient tell me something once. She had this fake coin in her hand and she told me that it was like an energy chip. She said, ‘you need to understand that you only have so many of these to spend. And when you run out of them it is like being in debt and trying to pull yourself out of debt. It gets harder and harder. So you have to learn how to cut back.”
Foster-Galasso may have had to learn how to cut back but her staff at the library was more than happy to step in for their co-worker and friend.
“When the diagnosis came back,” Foster-Galasso said. “They sat me down and said ‘Mary you have had our back for 13 years -- we got your back. They did and they have been.”
“Because of our admiration, respect and love for Mary, stepping up to the plate when she was battling cancer was one of the easiest challenges ever presented to us and she continues to inspire us to live fully and make every single day count,” Lemoine said.
Foster-Galasso is back working full days at the library, and enjoys the sense of normalcy that the grind of a work week provides. As for the cancer, she still knows that is a battle she will still be fighting for years to come but one that she is more than ready for.
“It is not in remission but I am doing pretty well,” Foster-Galasso said. “They weren’t able to get it all but that is something that I have to live with. I will probably have to deal with it again but you just have to go on and move forward with your life.
“I have had an interesting life and looking forward to what is ahead.”