Give thanks to the LORD, for He is good, for His love endures forever!" ~ P107:1-3
When cancer struck Ellie in 1976 at
age 7, her ghostlike pallor masked the pain raging inside her. She’d been
diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma, a type of childhood bone cancer that cruelly attacks
the long, large bones of the body.
Most days her Mom would read her
a “Junie B. Jones story” - something light and humorous to help escape the
painful side effects of chemotherapy and radiation. Her screams left no doubt about
the agony she suffered.
On the worst days, Dr. Dempsey carefully
increased her pain meds, sliding her into a dreamlike state. Her body remained
so motionless that visitors wondered if she’d passed on.
Even at her early age, Ellie
knew that death remained a constant threat. Dempsey frankly laid out the risks. Survival
rates even following amputation were less than 20 percent. Possibly terminal,
hospice, comfort care only.
The best alternative was a bone
transplant that would require endless reoccurring and debilitating surgeries as
she grew.
To Ellie’s young mind, survival
meant soccer, prom, and eventually walking down the aisle. She’d risk anything
to save her leg!
Though terrified, Ellie trusted
Dr. Dempsey, with his colorful bow ties and engaging smile. “He looked like such
a Southern gentleman, so warm and gentle. I wanted to get better for him.”
At 12, Ellie, Dr. Dempsey
performed a bone transplant at Mass General. She survived. The cancer cells
died. But for the next thirty, she felt the damage cancer had done to her leg
and hip bones.
He saved her life. Ellie
trusted no one else.
In her 50s now, Ellie walks with
a cane, and at the beach, her legs bear the scars of her journey. “But I’m
proud of myself; I’m a warrior,” she confided. “I owe every scar to him.”
“As a child,” she said recently,
“I often worried that I’d never get married. I wondered how difficult it would
be for someone to sign up for my life. They’d have to understand that I might
still lose my leg one day and there would be rough hospitalizations.”
But the fairy tale actually
happened a year ago. She got married in June, some 40 years after her first
surgery. And at her wedding, Ellie chose Dr. Dempsey for her first dance. “That
was just a way of celebrating the fact that a lot of what I'm able to do today is
because of his loving care," she said gratefully. No one, it seems, was
better suited for that honor.
