When Katherine Cruz’s doctor told her in May that she would be alive for six months, she screamed.
Then she asked her husband to call the court.
Cruz, a politically active Democrat, has been following the presidential election closely and was looking forward to voting for President Joe Biden in November. But diagnosed with a terminal illness, she wanted to know: How soon could she vote?
“I’ve been living on borrowed time for 11 years,” said a former yoga instructor with a rare, aggressive form of cancer. “I’ve had to face death.”
The crew had already defied medical experts and had lived longer than anyone thought. Now it seemed like death was determined to win.
The crew began taking inventory of all the things she wanted to do. She wanted to spend time with her family. She wanted to make the necessary preparations for the end of her life. Concerned about the country’s future, she added one last thing to her to-do list.
She wanted to be ready when early and absentee voting began in a handful of states last week.
She wanted to vote for president one last time.
“This will be your Everest.”
Cruz, an artist, wife, mother of three, and grandmother of six, was diagnosed on September 4, 2013. She was standing in her kitchen in Oxford, Mississippi, when she got a call from her oral surgeon. A biopsy revealed a malignant tumor in her right upper jaw and sinuses.
“This will be your Mount Everest (climb),” the doctor told her.
Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore removed the tumor, but tests revealed it was NUT cancer. This is a rare hereditary cancer that her medical team has never seen before. It can grow anywhere in the body, but is usually found on the head, neck, and lungs. In the crewman’s case, the cancer was literally eating through his right upper jaw bone.
Treatment included two excruciatingly painful jaw transplants, multiple mouth surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and more than 20 trips to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. The surgery left the scar tissue so unsightly that Cruz has become so concerned about her appearance that she has started wearing a face mask in public to avoid curious eyes. The hole above her mouth has grown large and requires a mouthpiece to close the cavity so she can speak clearly and to keep food and liquids from flowing out of her nose when eating and drinking. It was.
Doctors gave her a 3% chance of survival.
She did. And life went on.
She painted, worked in the garden, picked up trash around town, and baked bread, cakes, and cookies that she gave to others. She walked more than 10,000 steps every day. She started a Facebook support group for others battling NUT cancer. Last year, she and her husband, Billy Crews, a former newspaperman, participated in the unsuccessful Mississippi gubernatorial campaign of their friend and second cousin of Elvis Presley, Brandon Presley.
“I have been trying to make the most of my ‘bonus’ year,” Cruz wrote in a Facebook post last September, marking the 10th anniversary of her cancer diagnosis.
Natural successor: With President Joe Biden standing aside, is America ready for a Kamala Harris president?
In late February, she faced another health crisis. More oral surgeries were required, followed by more complications, including osteomyelitis, a serious bone infection. After she was hospitalized again in May, an MRI scan showed that the infection had eaten away at a significant portion of her lower right jaw, just as the cancer had eaten away at her upper right jaw 11 years earlier. It turned out.
Surgery was no longer an option, doctors said. She was on the verge of death.
Cruz, 67, broke down in tears when he heard the news at the hospital. she cried. She took a moment to sort out her feelings. She started thinking about the time she had left and all the things she still wanted to do. One of them was voting. The election was still six months away, so Crews wanted to know her options. From the hospital, she had her husband call the Lafayette County circuit clerk’s office to see how soon she could vote.
There was no response until Monday, September 23, when absentee voting began in Mississippi.
Her heart sank.
“I said to myself, ‘I don’t think I’ll make it,'” she recalls.
Prosecutors vs. convicted felons: How Democrats think Harris’ background will change the election
Vote for “honesty, decency and integrity”
On Monday morning, the first day of absentee voting in Mississippi, Cruz met with a hospice nurse who visits her home every week. Once that was done, she and Billy started walking toward the Lafayette County Courthouse. The walk would take no more than 10 minutes.
Mississippi residents age 65 and older are allowed to vote absentee under state law. Inside the courthouse, Cruz stepped behind a small electronic voting booth set up for people who wanted to fill out absentee ballots in person. She marked Democrat Kamala Harris as her choice for president. She then handed the ballot to the clerk, who placed it in a sealed envelope. There was only one thing left to do. Mr. Cruz signed his ballot and walked home with Billy.
“I cast the last vote of my life to protect democracy in the United States of America and around the world,” she wrote.
She voted to protect the Constitution, she said. She voted for honesty, decency and integrity. She voted for an immigrant who wants to live and serve her country, but who is the subject of political rhetoric and hatred. She voted for women to have the right to make decisions about their own bodies and to foster the poor and the middle class.
The crew had planned to vote for Biden, but were worried about whether Biden could beat Republican Donald Trump. Mr. Cruz was thrilled when he withdrew from the race in July and Harris announced herself as the Democratic nominee. She said Biden’s decision was selfless and made her respect him even more.
As for Harris, “she’s smart and she’s pushing for what I believe is thoughtful change,” Cruz said. “She represents what our country should be: fair, free, and inclusive, and I believe she will work for the common good.”
Can she keep this up? Kamala Harris energizes the Democratic Party and shakes up the presidential race.
National polls show Harris and Trump in a close race with the election just six weeks away. But in ruby-colored Mississippi State, Harris’ chances aren’t great. No Democratic presidential candidate has carried the state since 1976, when Jimmy Carter narrowly defeated Republican Gerald Ford by 14,000 votes.
Mr. Cruz said Mr. Trump would be “very concerned about our country” if elected. “I think he’s just a terrible person. He’s done a lot of damage already. If he were elected again, I would be concerned about how much damage he could do. ”
Cruz feared backlash from her Facebook posts. But the response so far has been all positive, she said. Presley, their friend, sent the message to Harris’ vice-presidential running mate, Tim Walz. “I don’t have words to express my emotions,” he wrote back.
At a campaign event Tuesday night at a French restaurant in Minneapolis, Walz read Cruz’s message to a small crowd of supporters. “I was thinking about it all day,” he said.
Crews’ next goal: To be alive on Election Night. She’s looking forward to getting a return and wants to see Harris elected. But if fate has other plans, she’ll be content to know she did her part by voting one last time.