SUNSET - Judy McCandless, right, enjoys one of the sunsets at her country home near Decatur while her housemate, Kathy, plays with their dogs.

DEALING WITH THE DISEASE - Judy McCandless, above left, gets a report from a doctor at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas last October. Her housemate Kathy, center, listens to the report, which was positive.

McCandless cradles two ducklings at her home. Her animals give her comfort, she said, as she battles ovarian cancer.

by Brian Knox

Her country home east of Decatur is located on a hill, a rare place that affords a spectacular view of both sunrises and sunsets. Even in the scorching Texas summers, it always seems to be pleasant in the shade when the slightest breeze is blowing.

A wooden ramp that runs from the driveway to the front porch is the only outward clue that intimates the health struggle of one of the home’s occupants.

From her back porch, McCandless can watch her horse Sugar and her new foal, Whisper, gallop around the back pasture.

Hummingbirds dart around the many feeders hanging in the backyard over a small rose garden.

Two ducks splash around in a small tub before waddling through the grass in search of a meal.

A couple of collie/blue heeler mix dogs, which are more likely to greet visitors with a lick on their hands than with a bark, relax in the shade nearby.

It is quiet here. Peaceful.

It will also most likely be the last place McCandless will see on this earth.

That’s the way she would like it.

“Raised in the city (La Marque), I never knew I would like the country so much,” McCandless, 44, said. “ ... The animals are so healing, for lack of a better word. I swear they can tell when you are not feeling good.”

McCandless has good days and bad days. These days, it just seems like there are more of the bad days. What started as ovarian cancer has now spread to other areas of her body, first to her periaortic lymph nodes in the abdominal cavity, then her liver. Doctors recently told her she has cancer cells in the dura, the covering around the brain.

She is terminal. Nothing short of a miracle will change that.
Thursday marked the five-year anniversary of her cancer diagnosis. It was a major milestone, she said, since many in her situation don’t make it to that mark.

When she first felt the stomach pains in February of 2000, she thought it might be her appendix. McCandless went to her general practitioner to have a pap smear. The doctor found a cyst.
“He said, ‘It’s no big deal. Women have cysts all the time,’ ” McCandless said.

Looking back, McCandless said she should have had a follow-up to see if the cyst had gotten bigger. Three months later, she started to feel bloated and dehydrated. She went to a gynecologist who saw a mass in her ovaries.

The test came back positive for cancer. Even worse, it was high-grade.

“That means it was outside of the ovaries, and there was a chance it was spreading,” McCandless said.

She began her first round of chemotherapy in September of 2000.
“I lost my hair, which was hard,” she said. “I had a real hard time with it. ... My son shaved his head also, which really meant a lot.”
Looking in the mirror, McCandless could not escape the reality of her situation.

“I don’t know if it is so much the loss of the hair as it is a blatant reminder every time you look in the mirror what you are facing. You can’t get away from it,” she said.

On “chemo days,” McCandless would have the toxic mixture injected into her body from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. When she ended her round of chemotherapy, she was considered in remission.

It was during this time that McCandless moved from Houston to Grapevine because of her job at Washington Mutual.
In 2002, doctors noticed her lymph nodes had become inflamed, but McCandless was not experiencing any pain.

“The longer you can go between treatments, the better your body is able to fight it,” McCandless said. “If you had chemo after chemo, it’s hard on the body. They wanted to wait until I was symptomatic.”

McCandless moved to her Wise County home in 2003. By October of that year, the abdominal pain had returned. McCandless began chemotherapy again and then radiation.

McCandless said she was the type who always liked to do things herself, but cancer has a way of taking some of that independence away. She credits her housemate Kathy Falcon with encouraging her to keep moving, even when she feels like staying in bed.

“Chemo causes fatigue, and the best way to handle it is with exercise,” she said. “If you stay in bed, it will zap your energy even more. ... One thing Kathy has always been good about is saying, ‘let’s do this,’ or ‘walk over here.’ ”

Falcon works as a physical therapist at two nursing homes in Bowie and is gone during the day. However, she calls her home frequently to check on McCandless.

McCandless is sick quite often now. She doesn’t travel much from her home, and when she does, she always carries a bucket because of the frequent vomiting.

If she does travel from home, it will most likely be to church.

“Church is my number one (priority),” McCandless said. “When we do an outing, and I get to pick the outing, it is still going to be church.”

McCandless said her faith and church have played a crucial role in helping her through this most difficult time in her life.
Last fall, McCandless talked about not knowing when her time would come.

In August, the words to “Happy Birthday” kept getting stuck in McCandless’ throat at a birthday party for her son.

“I was singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to him and just started to lose it,” she said. “I thought, ‘This might be the last time I get to sing it.’”
She hoped she would still be alive when her mare gave birth this summer. Her doctors could make no promises.

Two weeks ago, McCandless stood like a proud mother, taking pictures of the newest member of her family as Sugar gave birth to her foal.

Her life now consists of small milestones – a horse’s birth, the five-year survivor mark, her son’s birthday.

Quality of life, even in the face of death, is still important to her.
“I don’t want to be chemoed to death,” she said last fall. “I want a quality of life. I want to be able to walk outside if I want to walk outside.

“At some time or another, this disease is going to take me. I don’t want to be bedridden. At some point, I’m going to have to decide quality over quantity of life.”

That time has apparently come.