Craig Thomas

cthomas2@jacksonsun.com

Bethany Herr struggled to keep up with her kids playing pickleball in the backyard.

More than two years removed from a breast cancer diagnosis, she had trouble breathing sometimes and a mild cough every now and then. But fatigue didn’t make sense for a runner like her.

Doctors found a spot on her lung and ordered a biopsy. Correcting an early suggestion of lung cancer, doctors at Vanderbilt and M.D. Anderson confirmed last summer the breast cancer had returned and spread to Herr’s lungs. Cancer that spreads that way is automatically labeled Stage 4.

Ottillia Plunk found out on Facebook. A senior at Crockett County High in 1996 when Herr was a freshman, she didn’t know Herr well but as a breast cancer survivor herself, she was upset by the news.

Then two months later, Plunk learned her cancer was back, too. It had spread to her spine, lungs and breastbone.

Herr checked Facebook and read Plunk’s latest status: “Why does life have to be so unfair?”

Plunk, 38, is a nurse at Tennova Healthcare – Regional Jackson. Herr, 34, is a respiratory therapist with West Tennessee Healthcare. Cancer Survivors Day was earlier this month, and the women met with The Jackson Sun last week to discuss their fights to this point and the uncertainty ahead.

They are more than Facebook friends and fellow Cavalier grads now. They both started chemotherapy treatments last fall, and they set their appointments at Kirkland Cancer Center on the same day so they’ll be there together.

Without even being asked anymore, the hospital staff make sure both women’s appointment dates line up.

Each woman has a loving husband, children and helpful friends, but Plunk and Herr can appreciate more clearly than anyone else the other’s physical and emotional burden.

Together they talk — and fight.

Song for survivors — cancer survivors

Herr and Plunk sat together on a couch in the hospital lobby last week. Crazy as it sounds, they say, they’ve had fun with each other as they’ve done treatment together.

“She’s the one person I can talk to that completely understands everything that I am feeling,” Herr said last week.

“It’s the same way with Bethany,” Plunk said. “If I’m angry that day I can say ‘I am so angry. Can you believe what blah blah blah said to me?’ She totally understands. Or ‘I am just in the pits today. I woke up, looked at my babies and just cried all morning.’ I mean, she understands.”

Sometimes children do not. Herr’s older daughter, Leah Cate, is 10, and Herr has noticed Leah Cate brings most questions about cancer to Bethany’s husband, Jeff.

Plunk’s older child, Jack, is 8 and has mentioned he’s heard people die from cancer. What does she say? One day after a shower she had not put her wig on yet, and when Jack saw her he covered his face.

“It just killed me,” Plunk said. “I mean it absolutely just broke my heart.”

Plunk called herself “the bitter one” of the two, unrewarded for following diet and exercise instructions after the first cancer bout. She questions a lot of what’s happened, wondering why people who do bad things again and again go seemingly unpunished.

Two sides of cancer

“Here I am, I’m trying to be good. I’m good to everybody. I’ve got these two little babies. I’m trying to raise them right,” she said. “And then you’re hit with a ton of bricks.”

Herr said even though she might not seem bitter, sometimes she is. Her second marriage was going well.

“Everything was perfect in our eyes,” she said.

But now life seems far from perfect and that hasn’t gotten easier lately. In the last four months, three of Herr’s friends have died.

It’s not lost on the women that some of those people had the same thing they have.

“You meet these new people, and they’re dying,” Plunk said. “And that hurts.”

There is no cure for metastatic cancer, and the five-year survival rate for Stage 4 cancer is 22 percent.

“I look at my kids and … you want to try to teach them everything, everything that pops into your mind,” Plunk said. “You think ‘Oh I want to make sure they know this, this, this and this.’”

Both women are thankful for their doctors (Dr. Archie Wright for Plunk and Dr. Brian Walker for Herr) as well as their families for the help they’ve gotten in recent years.

They laughed often and easily together last week. They like to joke about the way people always mention how good they look.

“What are we supposed to look like?” Herr texted Plunk one day. Perhaps others don’t hear about incurable disease and picture fit, 30-somethings with easy smiles and confidence in their appearance.

The two don’t want to be defined by illness, and Plunk said that’s part of why embracing reality is so tough. She does not want to be “Ottillia with cancer.”

“I just want to be Tilli from Crockett County,” she said.

Aside from leaning on each other and their families, the women both cited their faith as essential for handling each day.

Plunk said the second cancer diagnosis, bad as it is, has made her family the Christian family they always aspired to be.

Carrie Knox, a community outreach coordinator for West Tennessee Healthcare, told the women they have no idea how many people they’ve inspired.

“I kind of feel like this is a way God has allowed me to kind of show Him to other people,” Plunk said.

Herr recalled her mother “dragging” her to church years ago and “helping me build a relationship with God.” She remembers one time since the diagnosis praying harder than she ever had before, knowing what she faced, then taking a shower and deciding she had washed her fear down the drain.

The women have no control over what happens next. What else, they’ve decided, can they do?

Plunk started writing encouraging messages on her bathroom mirror in dry-erase marker. But she found one message that she’s kept up there for the time being.

“Sleep well tonight because God is bigger than anything you’ll ever face tomorrow,” it says.

Plunk reads it each night, then goes to bed and gets ready to fight another day. Herr heard that Wednesday and said she should write it on her children’s mirrors, too.

The two families can read it together.

Reach Craig at (731) 425-9634. Follow him on Twitter: @JSWriterCraig

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