Cancer Camp Sparks Hope For 11th Year

East Texas Health
By LAUREN GROVER
Staff Writer
Like old war buddies, they gathered Wednesday and recalled battle stories of persevering, of wounds mended and of looking death in the eye and living to tell about it.
Cancer is what the 60 campers attending Great Getaway this week at Pine Cove have in common, but among these veteran survivors, hope is as contagious as their smiles and bold attitudes.
"Fifteen years, ovarian cancer, and you're not supposed to survive that one," Nancy Eckert, of Athens, says with a nod of triumph. "At camp, you see the same people each year, and that's rejoicing."
Next to her sat friend Louise Shelby, who traveled from Austin to attend.
Ms. Shelby was diagnosed with a rare childhood cancer at 9 years old called rhabdomyosarcoma and was one of the first three child patients to be successfully treated for it at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston in 1971.
A patch covers her right eye above a scar on her right cheek where doctors removed cancerous sinus and ocular tissue. She received two primitive chemotherapy drugs and radiation and has had no relapse.
"We were the first generations (to survive rhabdomyosarcoma)," she says. "No one knew what was going to happen. We were telling them with our bodies."
Each year longtime cancer survivors mix with those recently diagnosed to create a supportive hope-filled three-day retreat.
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