Shandi Speedy’s Story

At age 22, Shandi Speedy asked herself what she was doing with her life.

Her father was a jet engine mechanic in the Air Force, a military lifer. Speedy had fond memories of waiting around the hangar at Forbes Field near Topeka, Kan., and giving him a big hug when he got off work. Her husband Billy was an Army medic who had previously served in the infantry. When she was working at a department store in Killeen, Texas, where Billy was stationed at Ft. Hood, she felt a call to do something “worth noting.”

“I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself,” she said.

In 2011 she joined the Air Force and two years later, she served a six-month deployment in the United Arab Emirates. On her return, she and Billy began trying to have a baby.

When she’d tried to get pregnant earlier, Speedy’s doctor found uid in her stomach cavity, but it didn’t seem to be a problem. She later began taking fertility drugs and the amount of uid increased. The doctor ran a biopsy on lesions found in her stomach cavity, and in October 2014, Speedy received devastating news: She had peritoneal mesothelioma, a rare and almost always fatal cancer caused only by exposure to asbestos.

She was 26, and her doctors said she had 14 months to live.

Her father had worked on old aircraft that had components containing asbestos. Speedy was most likely exposed through contact with her father’s work clothing—what anti-asbestos activists call “deadly hugs.” Her father, now

50 years old and still an Air Force mechanic, has shown no sign of asbestos-triggered disease, but he and the whole family know that symptoms often don’t surface until decades after exposure.

In January 2016, a month after she was medically retired from the Air Force, she had
a nine-hour surgery to remove tumors in her stomach cavity. A week later doctors found that the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes. She had six rounds of chemotherapy.

Since then, there’s been no sign of disease, but she worries about the future.

“I feel very optimistic,” she said, “but it’s always in the back of my head: When is it going to come back?”

Speedy sued the companies that used asbestos to make airplane parts with which her father came into contact, and she’s settled most of her claims. But she’s angered by proposals

in Congress and some state legislatures that would make it harder for asbestos victims and their families to receive timely compensation.

In a recent op-ed for the Fort Worth Star- Telegram, she wrote that such proposals
are “an absurd plan, and it should be
an embarrassment for the asbestos companies who are seeking to delay and deny what they owe.”

“It’s so unfair,” she said. “How long ago did we nd out that asbestos causes cancer and kills you? Asbestos is cheap and it works well, but at what cost? How many people do we have to lose?”