While battling cancer, couple counts their blessings
Geri Cochrane shows her husband Dave some photographs taken by their friends, Melisa and Todd Goe, during a visit at the hospital. The Cochranes have marveled at the continuing support provided through the years by friends, family and co-workers.
DESPITE the severity of Dave Cochrane’s illness, the family finds opportunities to celebrate the little things. On Friday at Kalispell Regional Medical Center, they enjoy a piece of cake to celebrate Geri's birthday. Their son Jason, left, just returned from serving with the U.S. Air Force in South Korea. Dave has battled a rare form mantle cell lymphoma for six years.
Geri Cochrane sits next to her husband Dave in the living room of their rural Columbia Falls home, which recently was equipped with a wheelchair ramp and railings by a crew from Plum Creek, where Dave worked for many years. “It’s been life-changing to learn to adapt to all of this,” Geri said.
A question lingers for Geri Cochrane as she curls up next to her husband, Dave, to watch him sleep.
“How do you say thank you?” she asks.
She asks the question again as she picks up a card that recently came in the mail with an anonymous gift of $200.
How do you truly portray the gratitude from discovering at Christmas time that unknown donors have paid $500 toward your electric bill, $500 toward your gas bill? Then there was that $500 gift left on the doorstep.
Grocery gift cards materialize, seemingly out of nowhere.
When her husband needed a wheelchair ramp, Plum Creek Timber Co., where Dave worked for years, sent a crew to do the job. Plum Creek has been a godsend, Geri confides. Dave’s co-workers continuously go the extra mile for him.
Neighbors plow snow off the driveway and bring food to the Cochrane home. Members of their church give tirelessly in so many ways.
And the prayers are constant.
Financially drained from six years of cancer treatments and a stem-cell transplant to combat Dave’s rare mantle cell lymphoma (an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma), the Cochranes have marveled at the steady stream of generosity from friends, neighbors and complete strangers who have kept them afloat while they’re anchored in a sea of uncertainty.
The couple has mowed through all of their savings and retirement funds to pay medical bills. Dave, 50, is now wheelchair-bound and hasn’t worked for two years. Geri had to give up her business to care for her husband.
Like so many families who deal with cancer and other life-threatening diseases over a long period of time, they know it takes an entire community to see them through the tough times.
“There have been so many angel moments,” Geri said. “God just keeps providing for our family over and over again. We’re so blessed.”
THE ROLLER-COASTER nature of Dave’s disease keeps the family in a perpetual up-and-down cycle. On Tuesday last week he was doing well enough to be interviewed for this story. A day later he was back in the hospital in tough shape. A Thursday entry on the Cochranes’ blog at www.carepages.com noted that he continues to struggle with low blood pressure and low oxygen caused by sarcoidosis in his lungs. Over the weekend, doctors were still trying to figure out the latest complication.
The prognosis for Dave is not good. His cancer is terminal; he will not survive this disease.
It makes each separate day precious, Geri said. And what else can you do, she asks, except take one day at a time.
“Please pray for my love’s weary body,” she wrote last week in a blog entry. She quoted a Bible verse that promises “My grace is sufficient for you.”
“I believe this,” she added.
Dave was lying in bed one morning in May 2004 when “it felt like something popped in my throat,” he remembered. He’d had no symptoms that anything was wrong, but doctors quickly found a lump in a lymph node in his neck. Soon they were off to Seattle for a second opinion and before they knew it he was undergoing an intense chemotherapy program, in the hospital for seven days and home for 14 days for six long months.
The treatment bought him a couple of years. Then in August 2007 he found another lump in the same area of his neck and the cancer was back.
“We were told that we could expect a remission time of about three years and to expect it to be back between years three and five,” Geri said. “They were right on the money.”
More treatment ensued. At one point doctors tried a new and promising drug called Velcade. Dave was allergic to it. But they kept the disease at bay until January 2008 when it took him down once again. More treatment, radiation this time.
By summer 2008 he was harvesting his stem cells at Virginia Mason Hospital for a stem-cell transplant that was completed at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.
As they prepared to be gone from their rural Columbia Falls home for up to four months, their son Jason was being deployed to Iraq. Their daughter Jena, who at the time was a high-school junior, stayed behind to watch the house and go to school.
Life had been turned upside down.
But they persevered, holed up in a 400-square-foot apartment in Seattle that cost them $1,845 a month from March to September 2008.
While in Seattle, they got word that Dave had been picked for the moose hunting permit he’d been wanting for 17 years. When the season opened Sept. 15, Dave was still too weak to hunt, but he was undaunted.
“The first day he couldn’t even carry his gun,” Geri recalled.
Every day they’d go a little farther — a mile in, a mile out. By the 11th day Dave bagged his moose. Friends congregated to haul out the trophy.
“Again, the community, the moment they got the call, were there for us,” Geri said.
Last year was a struggle.
Both of Dave’s lungs are full of scar tissue. Breathing often is painful.
In December 2009, still immune system-compromised from the stem-cell transplant, he got the chicken pox. It led to 29 days in the hospital when the disease settled in his nervous system and spinal cord, causing paralysis in his legs.
“I’ve learned to be an advocate for him,” Geri said. “I don’t want to be the pushy wife, but I want him to have the best care. It’s been life-changing to learn to adapt to all of this.”
The Cochranes have their “Bucket List” of things they’d like to still do if Dave’s able. Of course they have no money to do anything lavish, Geri admitted, but it’s still fun to dream. She’d love to take her husband, a real history buff, to the Smithsonian Institute. He’d like to skydive.
But for now, they’re grateful to make it through the day and so very thankful for generosity that “just keeps happening.”
A stone tile sitting in a corner of the Cochrane home, yet another gift from a friend, preserves a sentiment from Geri’s blog:
“Live each day and try to find a little joy in it. Then share it and be grateful for it. We are.”
Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com