Sara Capple Lawhorne accomplished a great deal during her 67 years and her children hope they can do as much in her name now that the former Nevada Regional Medical Center community relations director has fallen victim to pancreatic cancer.
Lawhorne died Oct. 22 after the city council proclaimed November Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month, and her son Marc of Nevada and daughter Mary Katherine Wilson of Fayetteville, Ark., took part in the NRMC Foundation’s recent sale of symbolic purple bracelets to raise money for research.
“The doctors only gave Mother three or four months and she lived 16 months and three days,” Wilson said Tuesday. “There was no hope at all. But through all this, she never complained, kept high spirits and tried to live life the best she could.
“This disease is horrible. I never saw anyone suffer the way she did.”
Tragically and almost inexplicably, Lawhorne’s former husband Ron, of Lamar, was diagnosed with the same malady about the same time she was. He is still fighting it and was honored on Thanksgiving Day by his children and other relatives.
Wilson said her mom had shown signs of pancreatitis, an infection of the pancreas, two months before her true condition was ascertained. “My paternal grandfather died of colon cancer a long time ago, but we hadn’t had pancreatic cancer anywhere in our family,” she said.
“We’d like to get more funding to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network at pancan.org. Something has to be done because only two percent of cancer funding goes to this.”
Known as “the silent killer,” the disease is so insidious largely because it is asymptomatic in the early stages and often isn’t discovered until after surgery becomes unfeasible, according to references. It is the fifth deadliest cancer after lung, colon-rectal, breast and prostate cancer.
A malignant neoplasm of the pancreas, the organ that produces insulin, it has been diagnosed in 43,140 Americans so far his year, 36,800 of whom will die before the year is out. fewer than five percent last five years.
Natalie Eberhard, NRMC assistant community relations director, remembers Lawhorne as “an amazing ball of light, always smiling, who put 110 percent into everything she did.
“Sara had good working relationships, clinical and non-clinical, with everybody,” said Eberhard. “She had made a great impression on the hospital staff, and her funeral was very touching.
“We would like to have more capability because we don’t have a lot here that is specific to cancer. a cancer center is something our community needs, but it’s a big deal to add one on.”
Lawhorne, whose parents Barney and Betty Lou owned Capple Hardware, was also a noted singer who had performed lead roles in operas and musicals with the Kansas City Philharmonic Orchestra, Kansas City Lyric Opera, Kansas State University Choir, Emory University Choir, Joplin little Theater and St. Joseph Community Performing Arts Council.
She became community relations director in 1993 at NRMC, where she was instrumental in forming the hospital foundation.
References say symptoms of advanced pancreatic cancer may include pain in the upper abdomen that radiates to the back; loss of appetite and-or nausea and vomiting; significant weight loss; painless jaundice with yellow skin and eyes and dark urine; Trousseau sign, in which blood clots form in the portal blood vessels, deep veins of the extremities or superficial veins anywhere on the body; diabetes mellitus, with many patients getting diabetes months or years before pancreatic cancer — an indication that new onset diabetes in an elderly person may be an early warning sign; and clinical depression before cancer diagnosis, although the nature of this association is as yet unknown.