When she walked into the restaurant, I nearly swallowed my fork. I never expected to see Kama Winter again.
I had written of her a couple of times over the last two years, this beautiful, then-26-year-old woman who had thrown the health care dice figuring she was decades from needing any, but learned she had osteosarcoma, a nasty, deadly form of cancer usually diagnosed in teenagers.
The last time I saw her, she was lying in pain, sprawled atop a recliner in her Ballpark neighborhood apartment. I leaned over and kissed her goodbye.
Now she was dressed elegantly as she strode into the restaurant, her chocolate-brown hair trimmed in a neat bob.
“Kama!” I almost shouted.
She yelled my name. Remembering lessons of the past, I wrapped her in a gentle embrace.
Doctors over 10 hours, two years before, had removed tissue and muscle, plus four ribs and a goodly portion of her sternum to extract the tumor she likens to the size of a grapefruit.
They then turned her over and took muscle and tissue from her back to replace what they had tossed away. Turning her back over, they sewed in a metal plate, which they attached to the transplanted muscle along with a yard or two of mesh, and prayed the young woman would make it another year.
“I will be celebrating two years soon,” Kama said.
I asked her of Audra, her childhood friend, who put her life in Los Angeles on hold to care for her.
“She stayed with me for 10 months, until the doctors said it was OK to leave,” she said. “Best friend a person could ask for.”
A little more than a month ago, she went back to work full time, as a social director at an active- adult living facility in Capitol Hill.
The cancer, she said, went into remission not long after we last met. She is tested every three months.
I admitted I didn’t think I would see her again. She just smiled.
She is also now working with two nonprofit groups that help people like her — cancer-ridden and without insurance.
Friends and family staged a fundraiser two years ago to assist her, collecting some $12,000. It covered maybe six months to a year of medication she must take.
Her physicians donated their time, mostly because none had ever seen such a cancer in an adult. Yet Kama still owes more than $100,000 in hospital costs.
She does not complain.
She is a woman who had to learn to walk again. She still cannot lay flat or on her side to sleep.
“But I have tested clean for cancer for a year and a half now,” Kama said, adding it will be another three years before she knows if she has actually beaten it.
“I am just back from where I left off two years ago. I am now able to enjoy myself. You do learn not to sweat the small stuff. Enjoy every day. I’ve got a test on the first that will tell me if I am going to keep living.”
In some ways, she said, she is grateful she went through it.
“If not, I know I wouldn’t be helping people now. My illness gave me the ability to look outside of myself.”
When we were done, Kama and I stood, and I hugged her as tightly as I could without hurting her.
We agreed we would talk soon. And this time, I believed it.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
