Battling cancer, Mary Fields asked God to heal her, thinking just maybe He had something else for her to do.
Twenty-nine years later, Fields, now 94 years old and living at The Springs at Mill Creek retirement home in The Dalles, she hasn’t forgotten that conversation.
She volunteers every Tuesday morning at the Celilo Center for Cancer Care, trying to provide the compassion and support that was sometimes lacking during her bout with the disease.
Fields was living in Ellensburg, Wash. when she was first diagnosed with colon cancer in 1986. She was 65 years old and had just buried her husband Doial, an electrician at Central Washington University who’d lost his own battle with mesothelioma. Doial was given a month to live. He made it only 22 days.
“I had just lost my husband and I thought there can’t be anything wrong with me,” Fields said. “I’d never been sick.”
After surgery and about a month in the hospital, Fields had chemotherapy every Monday morning for a year. But the cancer went away until five years later when she began having the same symptoms—dysentery, vomiting and walking into a room and smelling something that just wasn’t right.
The cancer was back and Fields again had surgery and another round of chemotherapy. But she at least knew what to expect this time.
“The second time was easy,” Fields said. “I was only in the hospital for 10 days and had chemo for three months. I really prayed a lot. I think God healed me from this. I really believe it.”
After beating colon cancer for the second time, Fields decided she would like to start volunteering and give patients the hope that she didn’t always feel.
“They would just put me in a room and shut the door until a nurse came in and I could lay there and vomit by myself,” Fields said. “I could ring a bell but why would I want to do that when all they’re going to do is wipe your face off anyway?”
Fields wants to make sure nobody at the Celilo Center has to face cancer alone. As a volunteer, she does whatever is asked of her and more, like getting the mail or serving coffee and snacks and taking lunch orders.
“If they don’t want to eat, I will sit down with them and see that they eat because the more you can get them to eat, the better off they are,” Field said.
She’s also there to just listen to patients and provide compassion and hope.
Sometimes that takes tough love. When a patient was walking around depressed, Fields told him to “buck up” because he wasn’t the only one that was sick.
The next Tuesday, the patient’s son came in and thanked Fields because his dad had a good week.
“You don’t like to tell someone who’s sick to ‘buck up.’ But if you’ve gone through it, then you know that sometimes it helps,” Field said. “[When I was sick] that’s what I needed to hear.”
Fields will also joke around. When one patient kept asking for whisky, Fields told the man she had some but wasn’t going to let him drink it, which brought a smile to his face.
Fields also believes cancer patients should have hope because treatment has come a long way since her first surgery in 1986. During a year of chemo, Fields suffered bruising in both arms because she had floating veins.
“Sometimes they had to put the needle in three times to get into a vein,” Field said. “Treatments are so much more wonderful now than they ever were. There’s so many different things they are doing now for cancer.”
Robin Eiesland, data management specialist at Celilo Center for Cancer Care, notices when Fields isn’t there.
“Somebody has to pick up the slack,” Eiesland said. “She really does work. She can show you how it’s done. She’s out there really to help. She can really relate to the patients. She trains the other volunteers because she’s so on top of it. She’d do anything for any of us.”
Eiesland also appreciates Fields’ sense of humor.
“She’s hilarious,” Eiesland said. “She’ll tell people I liked cancer so much that I got it twice. She’s pretty special and a heck of a lot of fun.”
Fields was born in Canada in 1921 and moved to Grass Valley in 1945.
After years of living in Washington, Fields came to The Dalles 10 years ago to be closer to her only daughter Mary Anne Justesen, who had stayed in Sherman County. Justesen had her own battle with lung cancer, which spread to her brain. She died last May.
When Fields was in high school, she wanted to be a nurse and would spend her summers and holidays working at a nursing home.
“I was going to be a nurse but we were on a farm and didn’t have the money for me to go to school,” Fields said.
But that desire to help the sick in any way she could didn’t go away. She visited people in the hospital in Ellensburg for 20 years before moving to The Dalles, where she works three days a month at the Mid-Columbia Medical Center gift shop as well as the Celilo Center for Cancer Care.
“I think that’s where God had me be because I had the darn junk twice,” said Fields, who’s a member of Lifeline Baptist Church in The Dalles. “I love what I do and I love to visit with the people.”
Commented