Last week, as she sat in the cancer center recliner for 2 1/2 hours, taking in the poison of her latest chemo treatment, she was on her cell phone planning a family trip to Branson. Last summer it was an Alaskan cruise.
Traveling, occasionally with family members but mostly on her own, is one of her therapies. She returned from a solo trip to Hawaii last week.
Another is reaching out to people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Miller is a volunteer with the Bloch Cancer Hotline, which connects cancer survivors with the newly diagnosed. She knows she is giving hope to people with little to hang their hope on: Surviving pancreatic cancer as long as Miller has — her diagnosis came in 2002 — is rare.
“I’m lucky to live as long as I have, and nobody knows why I have,” said Miller, who is 64 and who will celebrate with hundreds of other cancer survivors Sunday at the Celebration of Life Rally.
Her recent hot line “visits” include talking with a patient in Canada and, mostly by e-mail, with a patient in Israel. Miller doesn’t deliver medical advice, of course, but she listens and offers information about her own experience. And encouragement.
She recalls fondly a firefighter from Maine who was diagnosed at 38 and died at 41. They talked often over those years and even met when he visited the area to spend some time with an old friend.
“He told me that talking to me did him more good than any of the doctors,” she said. “He was young. He wanted to live so badly.”
Miller is a survivor but also a patient. She learned in January her cancer was back, the same news she got in January 2006. And so she’s undergoing chemo a third time.
“Some of the patients I talk to say, ‘I couldn’t go through chemo again,’ ” Miller said. “You don’t know until you get there. You don’t know what you can do, what you want to do.”
Her plans are to continue chemo and her travels. Last year she took a driving trip to New England and a Danube River cruise. Her scrapbooks from her many trips are so extensive that friends borrow them as guidebooks.
Where next? She has been all over the world but never to India or Thailand.
“I have my ‘bucket list’ of places to go, and I’m checking them off,” she said.
Miller retired in 1999 after 31 years as a teacher and librarian with the Center School District. She lives in Kansas City with her husband, Dean. They have two daughters and three grandchildren — her inspiration, she said, and the reasons for the family trips.
“Life goes on,” she said. “I figure the more time we spend together the better, not knowing what will happen tomorrow — for any of us.”
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