---

I was coughing and choking and my eyes were tearing up…. I was celebrating the New Millennium in Kaneohe, on Oahu, in Hawaii. If you've ever celebrated a New Year’s Eve in Hawaii, you’ll understand what I was experiencing. Everyone has fireworks and everyone lights hundreds of firecrackers at a time, thousands of explosions up and down the block. The smoke is thick, but the joy is thicker. This was a time of new beginnings and celebration and a time to acknowledge the joy in my life. That would change.

Soon after returning home to California I received a call from my family in Michigan, saying that my mom had been diagnosed with renal (kidney) cancer. Stage IV. No hope. No viable treatment. She was basically told to go home and die. My mom, so full of love, of life, and yes she was in her 70's but she still had a lot of living to do. It couldn't be time yet.

Mom had her cancerous kidney removed, but tests showed it had spread to her lymph system and lungs. Her doctor in Kalamazoo said she simply didn't see any hope beyond a very short while. There was a doctor in Chicago, she said, who was doing some experimental treatments but she didn't believe he would be able to help Mom even if she qualified for the program.

Mom was hopeful and persistent, and she qualified for the study. Twice a month my sister and brother-in-law drove Mom and Dad from Michigan to Chicago, for tests and evaluations and each night, Mom dutifully took her pills, not knowing if they were the "real deal" or a placebo. Her energy was limited, she spent a great amount of time in bed, and her appetite was ruled by her nausea but she held strong her belief.

Mom, believed in her doctor. She knew he had a cure. She believed her doctor was the most intelligent doctor she had ever met and that he knew how to treat her cancer. She believed she was taking the "real deal.” Yes, she had fear and sometimes she had doubts, but her belief was much stronger than her fear or her doubts.

After nearly a year on the experimental drugs, Mom learned that she had not been on the placebo and had been taking the true medication. Her monthly tests were showing no additional growth in her cancer. The size and quantity of her tumors were not increasing. The drugs were working. Or so we thought….

Several months later, nearly two years into the program, Mom's doctor told her that she was nearly the only one left in the program. Everyone else had experienced either severe reactions or had passed away. Finally she was the only one in the program and it was discontinued as ineffective. Her tumors still had not spread, nor had they grown; they had actually shrunk in size!

Update on Mom.
In June 2011, eleven and one-half years after her initial diagnosis mom fell and hit her head. She survived a surgery that the surgeon said was not possible for her to survive. She lived until we could all say goodbye (her last week was spent in a hospital bed in her living room with all five of her adult children and our dad taking care of her and sleeping in chairs and on the floor) and then she left peacefully in July, 2011, at age 84.