McDonald Family Battles Breast Cancer
Fighting the good fight against breast cancer
(Editor’s Note: October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Here we begin a series of articles relating to FLW families whose lives have been touched by the disease, and how they cope with it.)
Candy McDonald attends all of the home games of the Indianapolis Colts, but she’s never stood on the field of play. She will Sunday.
Candy and others will be special guests of the Colts as they dedicate their game with the Seattle Seahawks to Breast Cancer Awareness and those who suffer from the disease. After her on-the-field appearance to help greet the Colts as they boil out of the locker room, Candy and her husband, Billy, will be guests of Lucas Oil in its skybox suite.
Though appreciative of the honor, Candy would rather not be there, rather not be an embodiment of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which October is.
She and Billy, the Walmart FLW Tour pro, found out Candy had breast cancer in July, between the final Tour event on the Potomac and the day they left for the ICAST fishing tackle show in Orlando. Their reactions were typical and ran the usual gamut of emotions: shock, fear, anger. And then there was resignation, followed by a sense of determination that they could be just as stubborn as they needed to be to keep the cancer from winning.
So far, it’s working. After two surgeries and a couple of chemotherapy treatment sessions, Candy is making progress. She celebrated her 55th birthday last week and was told that her cancer appeared to be checked. Good news for her husband of 35 years, good news for her son and daughter, good news for her three grandchildren.
“This really made us big believers in regular mammograms, because that’s how we found out – through a routine mammogram,” says Billy, who, with Candy, lives in the Indianapolis suburb of Greenwood. “We were shocked, even though we had an inkling that something was wrong. After the mammogram they called us back in to do an ultrasound and a needle biopsy. They told us they would let us know.
“We had a gut feeling then that something wasn’t right,” he continues. “Then they called us back in and the doctor confirmed that Candy had breast cancer. At first you think ‘no, this can’t be happening to us; we’ve always been reasonably healthy,’ but then you understand that breast cancer is non-discriminatory. It doesn’t matter if you’re young or old or what your background is. It just shows up, and you have to deal with it.”
Originally, the oncologist diagnosed the cancer as being Stage 1, but further examination revealed that Candy had cancer in one of her lymph nodes and the diagnosis was upped to Stage 2. However, the doctor said other patients in her condition experienced a 90 percent survival rate.
Tiresome and painful as they are, treatments are progressing. Two of six chemotherapy sessions have taken place and after that six weeks of radiation treatments, five days a week, will follow.
“We feel really good about it,” says Billy. “We have a good cancer surgeon and oncologist. We’re going to a remarkable cancer hospital, St. Francis in Indianapolis, and it’s only 15 or 20 minutes from us.”
It’s always “we” and “us” when Billy McDonald speaks of Candy’s condition. It’s a family fight though, as cancer victims will do, Candy sometimes settles into that lonely place in her mind where only she can feel the intense uncertainty about the days ahead and deal with it as best she can.
“I’ve always been the type of person who fixed things myself, but I can’t fix this,” adds Billy. “The things that have helped us the most have been all the expressions of support and prayers from all over. You have to have your faith in God to get through this.”