Published: November 02, 2007 09:34 am         

LeAnn Watkins refusing to let cancer win

By Libby Cluett
lcluett@mineralwellsindex.com

PALO PINTO COUNTY – “I should have been gone a long time ago,” claimed 46-year-old breast cancer survivor LeAnn Watkins.

“I’ve had too many doctors look at me and say, ‘why are you here?’” she said.

Watkins attributes the fact that she is still around to, “The grace of God and things they have been able to do [with cancer therapy].”

On her fourth battle with cancer, Watkins has fought the disease longer than many she has known. She was first diagnosed with breast cancer after a suspicious lump was confirmed by a mammogram.

The only sign she had was during an exam in the shower, when she felt something the size of a pencil eraser.

“Two weeks later, I had an itch,” she said, adding that the small pencil eraser grew to the size of a larger square eraser, “like the kind children use in school.”

“It didn’t feel right. In two weeks, it doubled again,” she said.

She was 34 and was treated with three different kinds chemotherapy drugs and a mastectomy to her right breast, which was later reconstructed.

“I swore [the doctor] was trying to kill me. He used the biggest, baddest drugs for breast cancer,” she said of her first treatment.

The second time, Watkins lost 10 pounds and noticed her reconstructed muscle did not feel right. This came shortly after her mother died; however the cancer was not confirmed until a year later.

“I thought, ‘If I have to deal with this now, I will lose my mind,’” Watkins thought because the second finding coincided with her mother’s death.

“It was the same cancer, but was the only one that has not been as aggressive,” she said of the tumor that gave her a little time before requiring treatment.

At this time she had her reconstructed right breast removed and was treated with chemotherapy and radiation.

Her third tumor, which doctors found under her left arm, in her lymph glands, came when she went in for a routine annual mammogram.

“It ended up being the size of an apple within two weeks of finding it,” she said.

At this point, Watkins had her third mastectomy and radiation. She said she likes to see people’s reaction when she tells them she has had three mastectomies.

“I like to lighten it up a little bit. Cancer conversations can be so serious and down beat,” she said.

Only when the surgeon removed the tissue and had it analyzed, did they find where the cancer started in her breast. “It was so tiny,” said Watkins.

“Whenever you’re doing your self-exam, always follow the tissue up your armpit,” she warns.

A year ago in June, Watkins thought she pulled a muscle leading to her hip. “It wouldn’t get better; it got worse,” she said.

Last February, she finally went in for scans, which showed cancer “in the bat wing of my hip, in two spots on my liver and under my left arm,” she said.



***

At 46, she has learned to pace herself.

“I learned to slow down. Little things don’t stress me out as much. I learned to let go some,” she said.

Now a vice president in charge of computer information, Watkins grew up at her family’s business, Wes-Tex Vending Company.

“I was eight when I first filled a snack machine,” she recalled.

She said the last 16 years she has had “real employment” at the company that also supplies her medical insurance. If she did not have adequate insurance coverage, Watkins said, “We would have been bankrupt.”

“Staying here ain’t cheap,” she admits.

Watkins said she is grateful for good medical insurance through her business. Currently, she takes $15,000 worth of medication every other week. She said that without insurance coverage, she would have to choose whether to take it.

“It’s the people who don’t have insurance and have to decide whether to stay alive.”

Watkins said she is blessed she does not have this decision to make.



***

Watkins is thankful for her family and church and the support others, especially her husband, Donnie, and son, Colton, have provided.

During her first bout with cancer, she had to relinquish some of her primary parenting duties for Colton, who was 6. She said that was one of the most difficult things she had to do.

During her last chemotherapy treatment, Watkins felt a little low until she sat down between “two ladies sicker than me.” One was a single mother who has been getting worse.

“I was wondering how long my family was going to put up with this,” she queried.

“All the other times I’ve had a timeframe; that’s not the way it’s going now.

Through aggressive treatments and a doctor who has seen her through each of her four battles over 11 years, Watkins’ blood work is inching closer to normal.

The cancer is “not gone, but not growing,” she said.

***

“Eleven years ago I was naive, now I understand what is going on,” she said.

Time seems to have worked with Watkins. New remedies come around with each bout, like the use of a new hormonal drug called Avastin, which is supposed to cut off the blood supply to a tumor.

Occasionally, Watkins finds herself asking, “Why am I OK and others are not?”

She said she hopes that today people realize “cancer isn’t a death sentence like it used to be.”

Family members say it’s her positive attitude that works on Watkin’s side.

Her nephew Morgan Murphy, a high school freshman in Bryan, Texas, wrote about his aunt LeAnn in an assignment on heroes.

“She is an amazing woman and has always faced cancer with a fight. She lives each day by doing everything that is in her normal routine,” he wrote.

“I can’t just drop out of life and sit at home and do nothing,” said Watkins, who does needlework and, with her husband, volunteers at Southside Church of Christ by helping coordinate dinner for 100 for Wednesday night tutoring sessions.

“Everyone has to have a purpose. I will do what I feel like I can do. I’ve tried to still do for others and be the servant God wants me to be.”

“I know I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t the Lord’s will,” she said.

“She knows God is the only one that will get her through these troublesome times,” stated Murphy about his aunt who he said he admires “for fighting the biggest fight anyone can take on.”