• Cancer not the focus, Myrna McGee says
Laura Wilson - NewsPress
Myrna McGee, sitting with her husband, Jim, was diagnosed with breast cancer five years ago, about 25 years after she was diagnosed with first colon cancer and then liver cancer
When he learned that his wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer five years ago, Jim McGee said, “OK, Lord, here we go again.”
It was Myrna McGee’s third brush with cancer, and one doctors didn’t think she’d live long enough to have.
About 31 years ago, she was diagnosed with colon cancer. About a year after that, she was diagnosed with liver cancer, and doctors gave her only a year to live, she said.
She went through weekly chemotherapy treatments for three and a half years.
“Finally, I told the doctors, ‘I’m not taking any more,’” she said. “They gave me all the statistics that told me I should already be dead. I prayed about it, and that weekend all the symptoms of cancer that I’d ever had came back on me.
“The next day, the Lord gave me the back of an envelope full of promises that it was OK to come off of it.”
Thirty years later, she’s still here.
Five years ago, she was diagnosed with breast cancer after her doctor told her she was a year and a half late in getting her mammogram. She’d been receiving treatment for a torn rotator cuff, an injury she received falling off a ladder.
At the hospital, technicians positioned her, McGee said, but then one decided to reposition her because of how things were set up for the last person to come through.
“It caught one-quarter more of me, and that’s exactly where it was,” she said. “I see God’s hand in that.”
The size of the cancer, she said, makes her believe it had been there for at least 12 years. Even though she’d received regular mammograms — including the first one done at Stillwater Medical Center, she said — it had never been detected.
She was treated at Cancer Care of Stillwater and said the people there are “kind, friendly, caring and compassionate.”
She and her husband also received help from her church family. Members cooked food for the family, mowed lawns and did whatever they needed to do so he could spend time taking care of her, she said.
Cancer took the lives of Myrna McGee’s mother, father and brother, and her sister is fighting a recurrence of breast cancer. McGee said she has talked some about cancer with her two daughters and son, but they don’t focus on it.
“I find if I focus on cancer, I can become depressed pretty quick,” she said. “I focus on the Lord and in his word. That helps me.
“Through all that, Jim keeps me laughing. We laugh at things that aren’t even funny, but we’re laughing.”
Jim McGee added, “I can’t change circumstances, so there’s no need to fret or worry or get depressed about them. Just keep doing what needs to be done, cooking, cleaning, laundry.”
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