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Busy with life

Posted on August 28, 2009August 28, 2009 by Staff

By Valarie Schwartz
Columnist

Survival sometimes makes death look easy.

Catherine DeVine, the Carrboro writer, organizer and frequent WCHL commentator, didn’t say as much, but after learning what she has survived since cancer rocked her world in 2007, the thought arises.

She and her husband, Berkeley Grimball, owner of Grimball Jewelers in Chapel Hill, moved to Carrboro from Durham in 1997, and DeVine immediately immersed herself in the mill town’s activities.

“We liked Durham,” she said while sitting in the dining room of the mill house that they converted into flowing open spaces. “We moved because we could.”
They had lived in a Morehead Hill mansion.

“We liked it, but a lot of our friends lived here.”

One day she was visiting Carrboro, when Rick Hermanson (a sand sculptor well-known for Weaver Street Market lawn installations) told her about a house on Oak Avenue rumored to be for sale. He didn’t know the address, only that it had a new foundation and needed a lot of work. DeVine found it and fell in love.

“It was on the brink of collapse,” she said, but undeterred, she walked around the property and left a note on the front door. The owner called and an offer was made the next day, which resulted in DeVine and Grimball renovating and restoring the now purple house with the yellow front door.

“Frail” may best define DeVine these days, but so does “feisty” and “funny.” She’s a straight-talker, with few filters when talking about the cancer that changed her life even more than her figure.

She first became aware of running “into this freight train of cancer” during Christmas week 2006.

“I rolled over on my side in bed to get more comfortable,” she explained. “I felt something under my arm.”

It was a lump the size of an apricot.

“It was flat and hard and didn’t hurt. I kept it totally to myself,” through Christmas and family visits.

On New Year’s Day, she told Berkeley; the next morning, she was at Carrboro Family Medicine, where her doctor, Bruce Wilks, saw her first thing.

“He got that look on his face,” which was the look she had dreaded.

Before the first week of 2007 was history, so was her right breast.

She declined reconstructive surgery.

One year later, symmetry was again achieved, when her left breast had to be removed.
But for DeVine, the worst part of the worst year of her life came midway, on July 24, when she had a stroke.

“I was home alone making a grocery list from a recipe book,” she said. “I had trouble turning the pages. I felt queer. I went to my (in-home) office and checked email. There was a message from Kirk Ross. I went to answer it and my hand fell on the keyboard.”

She picked up the phone and called the UNC on-call person in the oncology department. When they answered, she learned that she could not speak. She called Berkeley and managed to say, “I can’t talk,” which was enough for him to call 911.

“They say the stroke was a lightning strike,” she said, and that it had nothing to do with the cancer treatments. “It was a really bad episode. I was SO MAD!” DeVine, 57, said, her color rising at the memory.

She could not talk, so she cried and cried and cried and cried. “I had not lost my mind, but they thought I might have.” It took several months to recover her speech.

Though the health professionals insisted the stroke had nothing to do with her cancer treatment, they had plenty of other warnings about what the chemotherapy medications might do to her body.

“They said it would make me sick. It did not. They told me my feet could crap out. They did — it’s very painful to walk. And they told me my heart could crap out.”

With that, she pulled away the strap of her tank top to expose the square box implanted under the skin where her left breast once was. It was a defibrillator. She calls it “the doorknob on my chest.” During the second stage of chemo, her heart failed, and the March 2008 implant prevents sudden death.

So, for those who might wonder where Catherine DeVine disappeared to after a failed run for Carrboro alderman in 2005, she’s been busy staying alive. Though she considers herself retired from a career she loved as a corporate video scriptwriter, her community involvement continues through the OrangePolitics blog, and she’ll coordinate the Carrboro Centennial Celebration next year.

“Catherine has been an active part of the Carrboro arts scene for many years,” said Jackie Helvey, who drove DeVine home from the UNC Cancer Center after every chemo treatment.

“She is one of the founders of the Carrboro Music Festival, put together the fantastic opening-week festivities for the Carrboro Century Center and has volunteered for Carrboro Day in many capacities over the years.”

“When I started treatment at UNC, the people were so wonderful I assumed they must all be good actors,” DeVine said. “Gradually, I realized they’re not acting; they really are wonderful. We didn’t move to Carrboro for health care … but everything about living here makes us feel lucky.”

Contact Valarie Schwartz at 923-3746 or valariekays (at) mac.com

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