Susan Newton grabs some chalk and dusts her hands and wrists. She cinches a harness around her waist and climbs a ladder to a wooden platform suspended 21 feet in the air.
She grips the horizontal bar in front of her, waits for her signal, and then she leaps.
As she arcs through the air, Newton flips upside-down, dangling by her legs from a trapeze bar. Then, in a moment of utter trust, she lets go, and she’s caught by another aerialist. In seconds, Newton drops safely to the netting below.
“It’s freeing, freeing,” Newton says. “It’s magical.”
The club she’s part of, Get a Grip Trapeze, sets up its steel cables, ropes and mats in the old Broadway Armory, a 1916 brick building so unexpectedly cavernous it seems to be defying some law of physics — as if it shouldn’t be here.
Newton probably shouldn’t be here, either.
Almost eight years ago, surgeons removed a cancerous tumor the size of a softball from her brain. Today, she is cancer-free and flying. Which no one could have foreseen when her extended treatment left her needing to relearn to walk and talk.
She didn’t ask her doctors at Rush University Medical Center before taking up the hobby in December 2017.
“I probably should have,” she jokes.
Newton, 31, is only now getting back on the trapeze, after aggravating an old shoulder injury that required surgery and kept her out of the air for a little more than a year. But she kept coming to the armory to cheer on her friends and take videos of their aerial stunts.
“Susan is really inspirational for a million reasons, but [her cancer battle is] just one of them,” says Resa Lamont, a friend and fellow aerialist. “She is probably one of the most resilient people I’ve ever met.”
Newton was the kid who, when she took a hard tumble while learning to ride her bicycle, got back on and refused to get off till she’d mastered it, says her mother Tammy Newton.
When Susan Newton, a financial adviser who lives and works downtown, started getting headaches in January 2016 that felt like someone was bashing her skull with “an axe,” she mostly kept the misery to herself and tried to get on with her life.
Doctors told her they probably were bad migraines. They were so severe she’d sometimes black out when she bent over.
In the summer of 2016, she was hiking the Grand Canyon with her family when she suddenly told her mother she feared someone on the hike wanted to kill her. The paranoid babble continued for the remainder of the trip.
“I was in the Grand Canyon,” Newton says, but “mentally, I was on another planet. I had a complete nervous breakdown on the side of the canyon.”
Returning to her home at the time in the southwest suburbs days later, she went to a hospital, where an MRI showed she had a huge mass in her brain.
“I’ve never seen something this size before,” she says the neurosurgeon told her.
She ended up at Rush, where surgeons removed an extremely rare Ewing sarcoma tumor — a growth more commonly seen in children that accounts for fewer than 1% of all adult cancers diagnosed in the United States, according to Dr. Marta Batus, Newton’s cancer doctor.
Newton’s family gasped when doctors first uttered the word “cancer.”
But not Newton.
“I remember this feeling of absolute peace and calmness washing over me, a feeling like I was going to be OK,” she says.
She saw it as God’s presence.
“I can’t tell you how comforting it is, as a parent, to have your daughter saying those kind of things,” says Tammy Newton, who described that period as a “very scary time.”
Thirty-six daily radiation treatments and 11⁄2 years of weekly chemotherapy sessions followed. By August 2017, her daughter was cancer-free.
But months of inactivity had left her muscles withered. She was unsteady on her feet. She spent a year in physical therapy, relearning to walk and talk.
She later took up power-lifting. At her best, she says, she could dead-lift 375 pounds.
Then, for Christmas 2017, her parents surprised their thrill-seeking daughter by getting her an introductory trapeze class.
“Her hair was growing in,” Tammy Newton says. “She was ready to be normal.”
Batus, her doctor, says that’s important for someone coming off of treatment.
“Young patients, they can resume all tolerated activities after the cancer care,” she says. “Really, there was no restriction to her activity level as long as she felt up to it.”
In early January, after a year away from the trapeze, Susan Newton says she mostly worried that, on returning, she might find she’d forgotten all that she’d learned over the previous five years — the swing, the jumps, flipping upside-down.
After her first leap, though, it all came back.
“It was just as thrilling as the first time I did it,” she says.
Newton still has a hidden reminder of what she’s gone through — a U-shaped scar that runs not quite ear to ear that her hair hides. There’s a slight indentation, too, near her right temple — the result, she says, of surgeons having to replace the metal screws in her skull with plastic ones.
Otherwise, she looks and seems like any other 30-something woman thirsting for her next adventure.
Her face is flushed, she’s panting, her ponytail is askew. But that’s no surprise given that, at this point in the evening, she’s making her 12th climb up the ladder, ready for her next leap.
In mid-February, she’s planning a trip to Costa Rica for a jungle trapeze retreat.
Newton, who is a Christian, has the words “It is well” tattooed on her right bicep. She says she doesn’t talk much about her faith but that she chose that phrase from the Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament.
She says she also doesn’t talk a lot, unless someone asks, about her recovery from cancer. But, when asked, she says she can look at what she’s gone through — the cancer, surgery, the long recovery and then the year’s layoff from the trapeze — as some kind of sign from above. Maybe it’s that she should be doing something else with her free time.
Or, she says, “It could also be God saying, ‘Here’s a second chance.’ ”
