It took five years to find time to paint Mick and Pat Schurer’s Lawrence home. The paint cans had already been shaken twice, they said, but cancer had always postponed their efforts.

But during the weekend, about 20 family members, friends and co-workers finished a job that had been postponed when Pat Schurer was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997, and her husband was diagnosed with celiac sprue in 1998.

By eliminating four grains from his diet, Mick Schurer is able to live normally with celiac sprue, which doesn’t allow the villi in his digestive system to absorb nutrients. But his wife  who was diagnosed with cancer for the third, and most likely final, time in March  can only hope chemotherapy works.

Pat Schurer, 60, will receive her most aggressive chemotherapy treatment Wednesday. If the combination of three treatments doesn’t take, she said she won’t continue to receive therapy.

“There’s more than a possibility of me dying, but to go in pain would be horrible,” she said. “I don’t want to be out there sick. I want to be home when I die  with my family.”

Several friends had offered to help them out in the past, Mick Schurer said, but he and his wife had always done everything on their own. But a friend, Bill Smith, said the Schurers didn’t have a choice. Their house was going to be painted.

“I’m just glad we could help out and do something for them, because I know it’s trying times,” said Smith, who coordinated the effort with Frank Dehart, another friend of the Schurers.

Her family surrounds her in this hard time, Pat Schurer said. Her three double beds are always more than full, and she never has to put away the extra chairs around the table anymore. Cancer is a lonely killer, she said, but being surrounded by family, prayers and her loving husband helps.

Though Mick Schurer said he could fix his home with a fresh coat of pain, he can’t help his wife.

“I’m known as the fix-it man,” he said. “I fix everything, but I can’t do anything about this. I haven’t had this much heartache in my life.”