Battle Against Breast Cancer
Determined to leave the hospital and fight for recovery, she promised Jay that they could take a trip anywhere in the world he wanted to go. He chose Hawaii and Christa booked the trip for July. Before then, however, she still had to face a radical, double mastectomy.
"The entire office came to visit me in the hospital,” Christa says. “When I came home from the hospital, I could see that my whole street was lined as if someone was having a party. Everyone from my office was there in my house, getting it ready for me.” Her co-workers had been busy doing everything from cleaning the house from top to bottom, as well as the pool and deck, to re-hanging doors that had been taken off when the house was recently painted. “I didn’t even ask, they just did these things,” she marveled.
For the next two weeks her Keller Williams colleagues brought three meals a day and traded four-hour shifts to care for Christa. Two agents even went to the hospital to learn how to change her bandages and surgery drains. They gave her a wheelchair and took her to Jay’s graduation, even throwing him a party. “They made up for what I couldn’t do for him,” she said.
Still, more struggles were ahead. Six months later, at her post-operative check-up, Christa was told that the cancer was back and she should cancel the Hawaii trip to start chemotherapy again immediately. Stunned, Christa refused to give up the trip of a lifetime with her son. “We left the very next day and had the best time,” she remembered. “We went parasailing and diving with sea turtles; we made a lot of great memories.”
Christa’s doctors kept an eye on the cancer, but chemotherapy treatment was postponed because her body simply couldn’t take it yet. “We just waited,” she said. During the next year, she continued working her real estate business and moved to the Atlanta-Roswell market center. Finally, in February 2007, she began chemotherapy again, followed by radiation treatment that so aggressive that it gave her fourth-degree burns. But at her check-up four weeks later she was told again that the cancer was back.
On December 19, 2007 she underwent the surgery that finally removed her cancer. Christa is still overwhelmed at her Keller Williams family’s response to her crisis. “I’m nobody – not a superstar agent or owner or anything – but Keller Williams and KW Cares helped save my life. I was important enough to them.” This seems even more unbelievable to her because of the fact that she had only been with the company two months when her battle began.
“Since I went through this, I made up my mind I was going to do things,” she says. She recently traveled to China with a contingent accompanying the governor of Georgia to open an economic development trade office in Beijing. “I would never have been able to do things like this if it hadn’t been for Keller Williams.”
By: Shelley Seale