UCLA Journal of Radiation Oncology Issue 4 - Flipbook - Page 29
Grit" Copyright Carol Felix
UCLA RADIATION ONCOLOGY JOURNAL
TRUE GRIT
1923
F
TO TODAY
or nearly a century, she has gone to bed each
night saying her prayers. For at least the last 2
decades, she has added wondering what will
hurt the next morning. My mom is a contradiction,
full of despair and hope. A worrier and a warrior.
I am blessed to have her genes. Anyone would be
blessed to have even half her grit.
as operators for ITT. It was there, in San Francisco,
where she met my father who was working for the
United States Navy Shore Patrol and assigned the
patriotic task of walking the female operators from
their place of work to their hotel when their shifts
ended. That was the proverbial hen guarding the
chicken coup and is a story in and of itself.
She is a middle child, born to German immigrants,
as Joyce Mary on December 20, 1923. She was
reared, along with her older brother and two
younger sisters in a small house in a suburb of
Detroit. The house had no hot water and the only
toilet was in an out building in the back. Her father
was a mail carrier and an alcoholic. Her mother was
a hardworking homemaker. Joyce was only six when
the Great Depression gripped the United States, and
while her family was poor, they made do. Her father
was lucky to have a job and a steady income. Many
of her neighbors were not so lucky and her mother
and father showed compassion, feeding neighbors
during those tough times when they could not
feed themselves. My mom tells stories of putting
cardboard in her shoes to cover the holes she had
worn in them so that she could continue to wear
them to school, and of her allotment of only 2 new
dresses per year. This humble beginning forged a
real steeliness in my mom.
But the focus here is on my mom and her grit. She
lost my dad in 2007 (they had been married for 62
years) and for the first time in her life, had to learn
to navigate the world on her own. Now at 98 ½ she
has crippling arthritis in her knees and uses a walker
to ambulate. She has Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma,
diabetes, hypertension and myriad other problems,
and while she complains about it all, she knows how
lucky she is to be here, greeting me every day with
“good morning.” She loves to have an audience and
to tell her life-stories. She never wants to go to bed if
there is something fun or interesting to do, whether
it is playing Bananagrams or just socializing.
I have worked as a coordinator in clinical trials at
UCLA for many years. The last 10 of these years
has been at UCLA Radiation Oncology and I love
what I do. I have seen patients with various cancers,
through many different kinds of treatments and
research protocols. I am reminded daily of
the importance of attitude in healing. A glass
half-full means there is hope, maybe just one
last game of Bananagrams or cards, or one last
story to be told. ☐
A little over a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor,
Joyce turned 19, and took a job with International
Telephone & Telegraph as a telephone operator. She
moved to San Francisco where she was housed with
several hundred other young women, all employed
Contributed by: Carol Felix, Clinical Trials Network
Operations Manager
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