Battling Cancer With Courage and Conviction
The voice I heard on my answering machine was unfamiliar and tentative. But Nikki Kilgore’s message was painfully clear: “I don’t know how to say this, but Joyce is in her last days--maybe her last hours--with us here, on this planet.” If I wanted to say “goodbye,” she said, I’d best come by the house real soon.
Joyce is Joyce Thompson, a Moorpark woman I wrote about last spring who battled cancer for seven years and raised thousands of dollars for cancer research as a participant in the annual Revlon Run/Walk for Women.
For years, she beat the odds and defied her doctors’ predictions, making her presence in the past two Revlon races--riding in a bright, purple jogging contraption, pushed by her husband and 11-year-old son--a testimony to strength of spirit and will.
“I got years of life that I wouldn’t have had, because of cancer research,” she told me last spring. “If I can do something so that some other woman can live long enough to watch her child grow, as I have . . . well, I have to do it now, because I might not have much time.”
In 1994, she had been diagnosed with a form of breast cancer so aggressive that it kills most women within 18 months. Two years later, doctors discovered the cancer had spread to her brain. Two years after that, a new brain tumor appeared, this one of a type so pernicious that only 5% of its victims survive for a year.
Still, she persevered, through endless bouts of chemotherapy, rounds of painful radiation, a debilitating steroid regimen and brain surgery so drastic that she lost the vision in one eye, portions of her memory and some of her ability to read, write, count and speak.
She continued to work on her doctoral dissertation, hiring a college student to read to her and help her commit thoughts to paper. She kept cooking dinner for her husband, Jim, and helping with homework and volunteering at her son Jackson’s school. She drew strength from her faith, and the circle of friends, that even now, sustains her family.
“I learned a lot from Joyce and from our situation,” says Jim, an executive with a computer firm, who has put his life on hold these past few years, to tend to his wife’s medical needs. “I’ve learned to trust life a lot more. There are just some things you can’t control. This is not a medical issue anymore; this is about God, about spirit, about faith.”
*
No one knew quite what to think when Joyce went back to the hospital just after Thanksgiving, wracked with pain. Doctors said the prognosis was bleak; the cancer had spread to her liver this time.
They stepped up her chemotherapy until the treatment left her so weak, she could barely stand, couldn’t eat, couldn’t move without searing pain. Two weeks ago, she said “enough.” “When she wouldn’t go for that last chemo treatment, I knew she was done,” Jim said. “She wasn’t going forward anymore.”
They hospitalized her, and by last Wednesday, the doctors were predicting she wouldn’t make it through the night. On Friday--fading, but still alert enough to muster a weak smile for a visitor--Joyce was taken home by her family to die.
More than 100 people streamed through their Moorpark home Saturday and Sunday, sharing memories and prayers, saying goodbye to a woman who had touched their lives in so many ways.
Many were the same friends who’d sent contributions in her honor, when she decided on a lark two years ago, to participate in the Revlon fund-raising campaign. “We opened up her phone book and just called all her friends,” Jim said. More than 220 of them sent money, raising more than $17,000 each year and making her one of the race’s top fund-raisers for two years running.
Last week, Jim went back through that phone book again, this time collecting the numbers of friends who might like to see her for one last time.
*
For the past few days, Jim has slept on the floor next to his wife’s bed, listening for signs that she might be in pain, for any clue to her state of mind. And every night, he sits and talks to her, about her visitors, funeral plans, dreams they have for the son he’ll be left alone to raise. He’s not sure anymore how much she hears, “but that’s still our time--when everyone is gone and Jackson’s asleep--when I feel her spirit here.”
On Sunday night, Joyce’s husband and son sat down beside her and shared their questions, their fears, their memories. That night, she slept more peacefully than she had in weeks. “I think,” Jim said, “she’s ready to leave.”
Joyce may be gone by the time you read this. Her friends and family have accepted the finality of her illness this time around. But then again, her friend Nikki Kilgore jokes, “with Joyce, you never know. She could be up, playing tennis this time tomorrow.”
*
Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.
