When she rises each day and looks in the mirror while brushing her teeth Sandy Massey sees a meager thatch of hair perhaps two inches long. And yet the reflection leaves her fortified.
“It is starting to get too long for the flat-top look,” she said with a laugh. “I tried a wig and just said forget it. I didn’t like it.”
The hairstyle, even with a bed-head twist, is a constant and positive sign that she is steadily marching away from a trying and ugly time filled with chemo treatments, a bone marrow transplant and weeks away from home because of leukemia. She is well on her way back to the loved and missed life as a mother of two sons and the wife of Baylor football coach Phil Massey.
Sandy was in Nashville on Tuesday and Wednesday for a six-month post-transplant checkup, but already had formulated plans to be in Cookeville tonight as Phil’s Red Raiders go after the school’s first state championship in 37 years.
“I’ll be home tomorrow and ready to go to the game. I sure don’t want to miss this one,” she said Tuesday, with the understanding that such a trip tonight would probably force her to remain in bed until midafternoon on Friday.
The midweek poking and prodding were little more than an annoying interlude after the death threat a year ago and the agonizing weeks of chemotherapy and monthslong uncertainty as she and her family hoped and prayed first for a remission of the ravaging disease and then a bone marrow match.
Her life, one that hung by a thread last December, is still determined by doctors, the disease and ongoing recovery.
She got sick shortly after Thanksgiving of 2009 but nothing was detected through blood tests until Dec. 8. By then her blood count, she remembers, was off the charts. As they immediately began an initial round of chemotherapy, doctors told her husband very simply that she’d either make it or she wouldn’t.
“When she was diagnosed I had to really rely on my faith in God, and that is one of the things for which you don’t really have a concept until it’s tested. This test was quite severe because she was so close to death,” Phil said as he recalled the prelude to a disastrous holiday season. “I put my complete trust in God’s will.”
While Christmas 2009 is a recollection Sandy will never have, it is one her husband will never forget, and not just because he fumbled through the pre-holiday chores his spouse had always handled.
“There were times I looked at my wife and began to look at my priorities. Sometimes you begin to live life and take relationships, especially with loved ones, for granted. Because of what we have been through, and I’m talking about Sandy and the boys and myself, our family is much stronger,” he said.
She immediately underwent one type of chemo 24 hours a day for a week with two additional four-hour infusions of a different type of chemotherapy in the initial seven-day period. Her second biopsy confirmed that she was 90 percent clear, but she got only a week’s reprieve before another round of chemo.
“It was the only opportunity to give me even a chance to live and then I got in remission. I’m seeing what happened more and more as a miracle,” she said.
Still, she felt an unfamiliar helplessness.
“For the first time in my life I couldn’t help my kids,” she said. “After the initial shock of knowing I had this disease most of my thoughts were on fighting it for my kids. At first I thought, ‘Well, you’ve had a good 46 years,’ and then I started thinking about my children and seeing my grandchildren. That changes your priorities.”
While doctors prefer patients to have a bone marrow transplant after the initial remission, the family’s faith was tested again because it took months to find a suitable donor match. And though she spent three months at Vanderbilt waiting for a match she was able to stay in remission.
The match was found at the end of April and the transplant date, a date she’ll always remember, was set for May 21. And yet she shooed her husband away from the hospital and back to Chattanooga. She knew he wanted to be there with her but she also knew there were places he could do more good.
“I told him, ‘You’re not a doctor. You’re not God. You can’t help me here,” she said.
“Her courage and determination have brought her through some difficult circumstances and she has been a hero and an inspiration to [sons] Tyler and Houston and me. Here she was going through this ordeal with chemo and the transplant and she was always thinking of where we needed to be,” Phil recalled. “The day of her transplant she said, ‘You can’t be here. You have to go. You need to be with the team.'”
It was, he said, typical of Sandy, a woman who filled the days awaiting news of a donor and ensuing transplant date by making blankets for fellow patients or even cooking snacks for cancer ward nurses at her tiny apartment adjacent to the hospital.
“She never pitied herself. She was constantly thinking about other people and ways to make their lives better,” Phil recalled.
She has long carried the reputation of being feisty and competitive but it was that fight combined with her faith and love for her family that carried her through. A distance runner who qualified for the U.S. Olympic trials and set a 1,500-meter record that stood for two decades at Baylor University, Sandy shared her thoughts with her husband’s football team before the first Baylor-McCallie game this year.
“I told them every single moment matters and that you’ve cheated yourself and those around you if you give up on a play or take a play off,” she said. “I always loved a challenge whether it was in track or basketball or softball. I played to win.
“This has been a challenge. It’s been hard for me for the boys and Phil to take care of me and for the boys to see me still in the bed late in the day. I’m fighting to get back in shape now, and there are still days I have to talk myself into getting up and walking because I’m tired and my ankles hurt from some of the medication I had to take,” she said.
Though she has regained the 30 pounds that dropped away during the ordeal that began almost 12 months ago to the day, Sandy’s battle with leukemia continues.
“People look at me now after seeing me at Vanderbilt and think I’m fine. I’m much better but I’m still looking to the finish line, and you don’t just arrive. You always have to work for it. You have to be determined and consistent. Those are words I have lived by to reach the goals I set for myself,” she said.