The Survivor

Page Four

At each race, it’s become tradition for Brenden to scoop up Huguette and carry her across the finish line. He’s been known to wait patiently for her, regardless of what it might do to his finish time or place.

Huguette even has taken up running herself, covering one- and two-mile courses in the mountains near her Phoenix home. Recently, she completed her first 5-kilometer (3.1-mile) race. Her finish time, over mountainous terrain, was 68 minutes. It would have been faster, but she stopped to hand out water to other runners while the clock ticked on her own race.

Huguette’s daughter, Kathy, attributes her mother’s remarkable resilience to her relentlessly positive attitude. “She refuses to remember the bad things,” Kathy says. “It’s her survival technique. And because of it, she affects every person she meets. Mom says ‘I love you’ to everybody, and she’s completely sincere…It’s that unselfish love of hers that keeps her going and makes her so incredibly alive.”

Huguette traces that love back to OMRF, back to the battles with cancer she fought a half-century ago. “Cancer gave me real appreciation for life,” she says. “My family and friends, even those who didn’t speak my language, taught me to cherish every person and every minute. People here cared for me unselfishly. I was embraced and blessed in my time of need.”

This fall, Huguette returned to OMRF for the first time in 48 years. The research hospital is long closed, the doctors and nurses who treated her gone (although she still keeps contact with Dr. Robert Furman, one of her physicians at OMRF and now, like her, a Phoenix resident). Yet as she walked the halls of OMRF, Huguette wore an ear-to-ear grin.

“Mr. Payne would be so proud if he could see this foundation today,” she said on more than one occasion. “I wish he were here to share this moment with me.” She gave out dozens of hugs to the OMRF employees—“My new friends!”—she met.

Eventually, she settled into an OMRF conference room to visit about her days in the research hospital. From her chair, she looked out onto the same sun-soaked lobby where she first set foot so many years ago, a young girl in desperate need of help and hope. “People who give money for research don’t realize what their gifts mean,” she said quietly. “I’m just one of many whose life changed because of this place.” For a moment, she seemed pensive. Somber even. But then she smiled. And when she did, everyone else in the room smiled, too