The Pioneer

I met a woman in the bathroom at J’s company Christmas party not long ago. I was standing there washing my hands and I heard this lady at the vanity beside me sniffling and grasping for tissues off the counter. She had her back to me so I couldn’t tell if she was crying. I asked her if she was ok and she responded with the candor that you can only find in the ladies room after a couple glasses of wine: “Oh, I’m fine, I’m going through chemo and it makes my nose water.” She was almost laughing at herself, which took me by surprise. I mean shit, I can’t even get through infertility without tearing down the walls around me - and this lady is laughing over chemo. Before she even started her next sentence I had decided this woman was my new hero.

Without any prompting she started telling me her story – she had been battling colon cancer for years. When they found it the doctors told her she only had a few months to live, but she beat it into remission. In fact she spent several years toting her “Cancer Free” declaration. But it came back. And she said this was her last round of chemo – she wasn’t doing it again. And the cancer didn’t seem to be going away. She said she had heard about some experimental cancer trials going on at Johns Hopkins and she was trying to get enrolled in them.

Somewhere in the conversation I told her about my upcoming breast surgery. How scared I was. I told her about all the hormones I took for IVF and even though I thought I was ok, I couldn’t help but wonder if I hadn’t created the perfect storm in my body for cancer.

We probably talked for 20 minutes in the restroom. I can’t begin to describe how incredibly wonderful this woman was. How sympathetic, how outright, how bold, how calm, how courageous. How comforting.

I have zero religious belief in me, but I’ll admit there was a split second when we walked out of the restroom that I expected her to disappear – perhaps my guardian angel arrived right as I needed her? It seemed too coincidental to be true.

But she didn’t disappear. She met her husband at their table and 5 minutes later I glanced over to see this woman breaking bad on the dance floor. My fucking hero.

I thought about her a lot after the party. I wondered how she was doing – but I had no idea how to get in touch with her.

I didn’t have to. About a week after my lumpectomy – she found me. J called me from work and said he had just gotten back from lunch and had this bizarre cryptic message left on his voicemail from some guy at work that he’s never even met saying his wife met me at the Christmas party and wanted to see how my surgery went. He had left her number. So I called her back.

She was on the phone with a doctor at Johns Hopkins when I called. I offered to call her back, but she told me to hang on. A few minutes later she was on the phone. Chemo had officially failed and she was in the midst of trying to get approved for the Johns Hopkins study.

They claim to have a possible “cure” for cancer. But this is in no means just popping a pill and waving a wand over you. The “cure” was discovered by accident. A few years ago a man came into the hospital with a very large cancerous tumor. However, he came in for something different – liver failure. During the course of treating him for liver problems, he contracted some strain of strep and died. When they did the autopsy they discovered that this form of strep had completely destroyed the cancerous tumor. It was completely gone.

So after loads of research, they took this strep bacteria, stripped it of the pieces that are deadly and injected it into the cancerous tumor of a 78 year old man who volunteered to be a guinea pig knowing he was about to die anyway. He died a few weeks later – but not from cancer. He provided them with a huge amount of knowledge about how this bacteria works – how it kills the cancer, but the treatment got the best of him.

My friend from the restroom has volunteered to be the next in line for this experiment. And let me add that she has not only volunteered, she is doing so with the utmost enthusiasm. She is excited about a treatment that she may very well die from.

As I type, she is going through preliminary tests that will decide if she is qualified for this experiment. And her biggest fear is that she won’t. She is scared because (in her words) if she is going to die anyway – she wants to go out knowing that she has provided doctors and researchers answers that might keep somebody else from going through her same ordeal.

She wants to be a pioneer in the medical field. She wants to be the one that kicks cancer’s ass. She wants to be the one that saves lives. She wants to be the hero. She wants to move forward instead of waiting for the next bad thing to happen to her.

And she is. She’s already a pioneer – she’s conquering life’s hardest obstacles with enthusiasm and courage and a beautiful positive spirit. She’s also a hero. And I know just from the short time I spent around her, there’s no way this woman is just my hero.