From Tragedy to Action
During the long night as she was dying, drifting in and out of consciousness, Trish Phelps woke and saw her husband Dan. She smiled. To her husband, the moment was pure Trish.
"Until I met her I'd never known anybody who smiled every day, a genuine smile. Even the day she died, even in horrible agony. She was just a genuinely good person who lit up the room when she walked into it."
Dan and Trish met seven years ago. Her husband, a computer web designer, admits that to many people "Trish seemed like the man in the family." It was Trish who restored the '74 Bronco, rode a motorcycle, played and coached hockey and ringette.
It's for Trish that Dan will once again lace up for the Weekend to End Breast Cancer, even though Trish actually battled lymphoma, a disease of the immune system that can occur almost anywhere on the body. Dan says it doesn't matter - he knows from many days and nights spent at the hospital with Trish that the money helps all cancer patients.
The couple's encounter with cancer started innocently enough, with what looked like a pimple on her upper leg. Even when it grew, they both thought it was just a boil - so did the family doctor.
In just a few months the pimple had grown "to the size of both my fists put together" and they knew Trish was in for a fight with a relatively rare form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Still, she had a great response to chemotherapy and a few months later had a full body PET scan to check the results of the treatment.
Dan recalls the Monday when they went to get the test results. The doctor told them it was good news - she was cancer-free. But Trish wanted to know about the lump she'd discovered on her head over the weekend. The PET scan hadn't included Trish's head because this type of lymphoma typically doesn't appear there, and the doctor was confident there was no cause for concern.
But there was, and a few weeks later Trish was back in hospital waiting for a stem-cell transplant because the doctors were worried she may have acquired immunity to chemotherapy. Dan recalls that Trish was a "great sport" about the parade of doctors and interns who came in to examine the lump that was now 10 centimeters - almost three times larger than the largest lumps associated with this type of cancer. They were back marveling again when the treatment effectively made the lump disappear in less than two weeks.
Despite that, Trish's stem cell transplant didn't seem to be taking hold, and doctors weren't sure why. Dan has vivid and detailed memories of the night everything started to go wrong. He remembers the bruising that appeared suddenly and mysteriously on Trish's legs. He remembers the battle to control Trish's pain, the doctors who came in after-hours to take care of her. He remembers the smile. Her heart rate. The increasingly desperate battle. The time in the morning - 6:15 - when she coded. And finally the doctors who refused to give up CPR until 45 minutes had passed, "choked up and visibly distraught" to have lost their patient.
It was weeks later before the autopsy showed Trish's digestive tract had been invaded by an infection so rare it hadn't been seen in Calgary for almost 12 years.
It doesn't take a long meeting with Dan to know that he's the kind of person who is spurred to action when he sees a need. His first project was to raise almost $20 thousand dollars to buy small refrigerators for each of the rooms in the cancer ward. He says the wife who refused to cry in front of him was driven almost to tears when the communal kitchen closed and she had to call a nurse for something as simple as a drink of water. "She told me that it felt like she had lost her independence; that for the first time cancer had taken control. She didn't want anybody else to feel like that." The money is set aside until renovations to the unit are complete.
And Dan is preparing for his third Weekend to End Breast Cancer. He says the most stressful part of the experience they went through was the wait to get access to equipment, tests and results. He says the weeks of training and fundraising are worth it because the money raised will help buy equipment and facilities that will shorten the wait for other families.
"It's leaving a legacy in Trish's name. In her honour."
Trish Phelps died in Calgary on December 15, 2006. She was 28 years old.