HER DOCTOR SAID HER CANCER WAS HOPELESS. SHE HAD ANOTHER IDEA.
Camille Moses was diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer in 2012. Today, she's doing great
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When she was 23, Camille Moses gave birth to her first child, a girl. Her kidneys immediately began to fail.
“The doctor came in,“ she recalled. “I said, ‘Am I going to die?’ He said, ‘Yes.’”
She burst into tears and pleaded to be allowed to see her newborn baby.
“They let me hold her for a minute and then they took me to ICU and I thought, ‘This is it,’” she said.
Camille spent the next three days in Intensive Care in the Florida hospital, clutching her grandmother’s Bible in Italian that she couldn’t read and praying.
“Miraculously, my kidneys began to work,” she said. “They don’t know why.”
Camille (center) with friends
Thirty years later, in March, 2012, Camille, now divorced, was living in Florida and working as a property manager. She was happy and physically fit, thanks to regular biking and daily long walks with her two dogs. Then she began to experience back pain and, after that, shortness of breath. Finally, she developed pain just above her abdomen that got worse and worse, so she went to an emergency room. The doctor who examined her ordered a CT scan. Later, he came to see her.
“I’ll never forget because the look on his face was just complete shock,” she told me last week by phone. “He sat on the chair and he rolled it up to me and he said, ‘You have spots on your pancreas, liver and lungs.’” I immediately thought of my mother (who had died of pancreatic cancer) when I heard pancreas. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die.’”
Camille was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. The Johns Hopkins Medical website says the five-year survival rate for that cancer is one percent. Camille’s oncologist told her it was hopeless. Chemo wouldn’t help. Nothing would help.
After her initial diagnosis, Camille was referred to the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami for a second opinion. Accompanied by her daughter, Jessie, and boyfriend Peter, she arrived in a wheelchair. By now, she was in so much pain she couldn't walk.
The doctor came into the examination room, told her he’d viewed her scans and wrote on a piece of paper some basic information about cancer stages.
“He put stage 4 — ‘this is where you are’ — and I got really scared because I didn’t know anything about stages,” she said. “I didn’t know anything. Nothing. I started crying. He came and he grabbed my face and he goes, ‘Stop crying and listen to me now.’ I was like, okay. He said that(this?) will work. I’ve seen it work before. As long as your body can handle it, it will work. And I said, ‘But Doctor so-and-so told me (it was hopeless), and he said, ‘Is he God? No! Then he doesn’t know. We’re going to treat you and you’re going to get quality of life while we’re treating you.’”
For the next 17 months, Camille would undergo a tough regimen of chemotherapy every other week. She was treated with Folfirinox, a four-drug combination that is a first-line treatment for metastatic pancreatic cancer that comes with a high incidence of debilitating side effects.
In September 2012 when I received a Facebook message from a stranger named Camille Moses. At the time, I was an ABC News correspondent and the newsreader for the weekend edition of Good Morning America.
The message read: “Hi Ron! I am battling stage 4 pancreatic cancer. I am trying to do fun things with my daughter. We will be in NYC Dec. 7th to Dec. 10th. Is there any way we can come to GMA to meet you? It would be the highlight of my trip.”
I replied that it would not be a problem. And that December, she and Jessie came to the GMA set. Camille was tiny but seemed physically sturdy. She had a generous, wide smile and a big personality. And, man, she could talk! Jessie was very nice. Together, mother and daughter seemed comfortably at ease with one another.
Camille, with Jessie and me, 2012
It was a good visit. Everyone on the set was welcoming and friendly. If you’ve never been on a TV news set during a live show, that first visit can be pretty dazzling.
Afterward, we said goodbye. I never thought I’d see them again, not least of all because Camille had a terrible, terminal illness.
But the next year, she contacted me again. She was back in town and wanted to visit the set again. I said sure. Then, it happened again the next year. Camille was not just alive, her cancer was in remission. Incredibly, she said, the scans she got every six months were coming up clean. No cancer was detected.
In the following years, Camille and I would become good friends. For several years, we took part in the annual fundraising event in Prospect Park in Brooklyn sponsored by the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network. I emceed the events. But when Camille spoke, people paid attention. They listened.
PanCan Action Network 5K Walk, Brooklyn, 2016
Stories about Camille's remarkable recovery, her public appearances and her videos on YouTube began to put her in the public spotlight. She was deluged with emails, texts and social media messages from cancer patients or their families seeking advice or just the comfort of the hope she inspires. She responded and soon found herself becoming what she calls "a coach," counseling and comforting people whose lives were affected by cancer. When we walked in the 5K PanCan Action Network event in Brooklyn's Prospect Park in 2016, a group of people came up to her, asking if she would visit their friend, who had pancreatic cancer, and was holed up in his apartment nearby, weak and despondent. Camille didn't hesitate. Sure, she said she'd visit him.
"I remember he had the most beautiful blue eyes and he was really tired and he had his head on the table," she recalled. "I told him I'd been where he was right then. I've been really sick. I've been really weak."
He called her a few months later, telling her the chemo had been unsuccessful.
"I just listened to his fears and at that point, you don't talk a lot," she said. "You listen to people. I've listened to that unfortunately a lot of times, the fear."
He died a few months later.
In addition to telling her story and listening, Camille refers cancer patients who reach out to her to medical resources, sources of useful information and often urges them to get a second opinion. She is adamant that they should avoid doing their own on-line inquiries because the internet is filled with misinformation and horror stories. ("Are you in a lab? You didn't research. You looked on Google. Get it?")
Rick, a man from Rochester, New York with stage IV pancreatic cancer, contacted her to tell her to tell her about his condition and treatment plan. and seek her advice. She suggested he get another opinion. Rick did and the second doctor put him on the same chemo Camille had been on. Eight months later, his scans are clean. "He's doing amazing," she said.
On occasion, she plays matchmaker, connecting a cancer patient with another she knows in the same geographic area, like the two 40-something mothers in Rhode Island she introduced to each other.
"They became friends and they can share their fears because they're in it right now," Camille said.
Her cardinal rule of advice to all cancer patients: Don't fixate on survival statistics. Everyone is different.
Camille has heard it said about her again and again that she is a miracle. It makes her a little uneasy.
"That's where I struggle," she said. "Am I a miracle? And if I am, do I have the right to try to help others? Or should I just be my miracle and stay over here?"
She added, "Maybe I am a miracle, but I feel like I'm not important enough to be a miracle."
She's wrong about that. But what matters, I believe, is not whether she is or is not a miracle, but that she provides comfort, inspiration and hope to people bearing the weight of cancer. For all that she's courageously endured and for all she gives back to others, Camille Moses is my hero.
.(cover photo and photo below: PanCan Action Network event, Brooklyn, 2018)