“I am determined to live my life.”
-Eloise Orr
Eloise Orr was able to complete school, travel the world and beat recurring metastatic breast cancer all at the same time. Photo by Dan Dry
A War of Wills With Cancer By Kadesha Thomas Eloise Orr had plenty on the horizon. As a 20-year-old junior at the University of Illinois in Champaign, she had finals coming up. Then she’d be off to Spain in the fall for a semester abroad. After graduating that spring with a degree in Spanish, she planned to celebrate in Puerto Rico. None of those plans included breast cancer. Orr, from Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, had never feared breast cancer growing up, even though AfricanAmerican women in Chicago are more than twice as likely as Caucasian women to die after being diagnosed, regardless of socioeconomic status. Orr’s mother died of the disease at age 35, when Orr was just 5 years old. In April 2002, Orr had to face her risk. She noticed a heavy discharge from one of her nipples. Nora Jaskowiak, MD, discovered that Orr had ductal carcinoma in situ, an early-stage cancer usually limited to the breast duct. But Orr’s breast cancer would be anything but limited. In fact, it would threaten her life for the next five years. “I didn’t have time for radiation,” Orr said, opting instead for a double mastectomy to avoid recurrence. “I was determined to go to Spain.” And go she did. “We tailored an entire regimen around her plans so this wouldn’t be an obstacle in her life fulfillment,” said
The Brain’s TheElectrical Brain’s Storm Electrical Storm Inside every person’s brain is an electrical storm. Billions of neurons fire lightning-like By Kadesha Thomas and Robert Mitchum
David Song, MD, chief of the Section of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, who placed Orr’s breast implants. “If you let the treatment process take over, it can diminish the patient’s sense of hope.” After the surgery, Orr juggled summer classes with weekly follow-up appointments. However, the final pathology showed that some cancer cells had escaped the breast ducts. “That’s when we knew we were potentially not out of danger,” Jaskowiak said. When Orr returned from Spain in January 2003, a tumor in her right armpit had grown large enough for Jaskowiak to detect by touch. The breast cancer had metastasized to her lymph nodes. Surgery was scheduled for March, but Orr had Jaskowiak postpone the chemotherapy and radiation until after her graduation trip to Puerto Rico. Summer 2003 was the closest Orr came to hitting a low point. “Losing my hair was the easy part,” she said of chemotherapy. “I was so sick that I prayed to my mom for strength to go to the hospital, like ‘Mom, I need you to get me there.’” The cancer was as stubborn about recurring as Orr was about beating it. The following year in 2004, the cancer came back a third time as two tumors — in her brain. And it kept coming back every year until 2007, leading to six diagnoses, all before she turned 26 years old.
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Throughout treatments, Orr refused to stop traveling abroad or going to school. Every treatment regimen had to consider her plans. “Her whole attitude is unbelievable,” Song said, choking up. “Imagine you’re 20 years old, and you get the same disease your mother died from. But with Weezy — that’s what I call Eloise — maybe she cried a couple of times, but she always picked herself back up. This kind of resilience is rare because most people don’t make it.” Song said the probability of mortality is exactly why accommodating a patient’s life plans during treatment is standard practice at the Medical Center. “Imagine if Weezy had never gone to Spain or graduated from college,” he said. “She would have survived the cancer, but she would also regret not having taken advantage of life.” Orr, now 28 years old, teaches English and Spanish at Francis M. McKay Elementary School on Chicago’s Southwest Side. She finished a graduate degree in elementary education in June 2010 with a 4.0 grade point average. “I am determined to live my life,” said Orr, who has been cancer-free since 2008. “I think that’s why I kept beating it. I’m just like my mom in that way. Whatever she wanted to do, she did, and you’d have to work around her schedule. I know she was with me to keep me strong.”
By Kadesha Thomas and Robert Mitchum
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