FAST DOWNLOAD
When Catherine Crews’ doctor told her in May that she had six months to live, she cried.
Then she asked her husband to call the courthouse.
A politically active Democrat, Crews had been watching the presidential election closely and was looking forward to voting for President Joe Biden in November. But diagnosed with a terminal illness, she wanted to know: How soon could she vote?
“I’ve been living on borrowed time for 11 years,” said the retired yoga instructor, who has a rare, aggressive form of cancer. “I’ve had to face death.”
Crews already had defied the medical experts and lived longer than any of them had thought possible. Now, death seemed determined to win.
Crews started to take stock of all the things she wanted to do. She wanted to spend time with her family. She wanted to make the necessary end-of-life preparations. Concerned about the future of the country, she added one other thing to her final to-do list.
She wanted to be ready when early and absentee ballot voting started, which was last week in a handful of states.
She wanted to cast her vote for president one last time.
‘This will be your Mt. Everest’
Crews – artist, wife, mother of three, grandmother to six – got the diagnosis on Sept. 4, 2013. She was standing in the kitchen of her home in Oxford, Mississippi, when her oral surgeon called. Biopsy results showed a malignant tumor in her upper right jaw and sinus cavity.
This will be your Mount Everest (to climb),” the doctor told her, apologizing for not delivering the news in person.
Doctors at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore removed the tumor, which tests showed was NUT carcinoma – a genetic cancer so rare that her medical team had never seen it. Though it can grow anywhere in the body, it is usually found in the head, neck and lungs. In Crews’ case, the cancer had literally eaten through the bone of her upper right jaw.
Treatment involved two excruciatingly painful jaw transplants, multiple mouth surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation and more than two dozen trips to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. The surgeries left scar tissue so disfiguring that Crews, self-conscious about her appearance, started wearing a face mask in public to avoid curious stares. A growing hole in the roof of her mouth required a mouthpiece to plug the cavity so that she could talk clearly and so that, when she ate or drank, the food or liquid didn’t run out her nose.
Doctors gave her a 3% chance of survival.
She did. And life went on.
She painted, worked in her garden, picked up litter around town and baked bread, cakes and cookies that she gave to others. She walked more than 10,000 steps a day. She set up a Facebook support group for others battling NUT carcinoma. She and her husband, Billy Crews, a former newspaper publisher, got involved last year in the unsuccessful Mississippi gubernatorial campaign of Brandon Pressley, a friend and the second cousin of Elvis Presley.
“I’ve tried to make the most of my ‘bonus’ years,” Crews wrote in a Facebook post last September, the 10th anniversary of her cancer diagnosis.
A natural successor:As President Joe Biden steps aside, is America ready for President Kamala Harris?
In late February, she faced another health crisis. More oral surgery was required, followed by more complications, including osteomyelitis, a serious bone infection. After she was hospitalized again in May, an MRI showed the infection had eaten away a good portion of her lower right jaw, just as the cancer had done to her upper right jaw 11 years earlier.
Surgery was no longer an option, the doctor said. She was dying.
In the hospital, Crews, 67, broke down when she heard the news. She wept. She took some time to sort through her feelings. She started thinking about the time she had left and all the things she still wanted to do. One of them was voting. The election was still six months away, so Crews wanted to know her options. From the hospital, she had her husband call the Lafayette County circuit clerk’s office to see how soon she could vote.
Not until Monday, Sept. 23, when absentee voting would begin in Mississippi, came the reply.
Her heart sank.
“I said to myself: ‘I don’t think I’ll make it,’” she recalled.
Prosecutor vs. convicted felon:How Democrats believe Harris’ background changes the election
A vote for ‘honesty, decency and integrity’
On Monday morning, the first day of absentee voting in Mississippi, Crews met with the hospice nurse who makes a weekly visit to her home. Once that was over, she and Billy set out on foot for the Lafayette County Courthouse. The walk would take no more than 10 minutes.
