ANAHEIM – Vicki Schmidt was to make a plane trip yesterday she said would have been impossible six months ago because, “I didn’t have the strength to fly.”
It wasn’t the greatest idea yesterday, either.
She knew she would have to take at least one nap today to stay awake for a late-afternoon baseball game she was sure would drain her little remaining strength.
Yet Vicki Schmidt couldn’t be more determined or happier to be at Edison Field today. Her only son, Jason, is starting World Series Game 1 for the Giants against the Angels.
“Jason’s World Series is helping me stay positive,” Vicki said.
Vicki Schmidt has Glioblastoma multiforme Grade IV, the most malignant brain tumor there is. Last March 21, her surgeon took “two big tablespoons of tumor” out of her head. But how the contours of the brain work prevented the doctors from being able to get everything, the tumors having snaked into forbidden crevices.
Asked the long-range prognosis, Vicki Schmidt, 52, said, “The doctors have not given hope.”
They have told her 18 months is the best-case scenario and have counseled her to put her world in order, the sooner the better.
Yet the voice on the other end of the phone from tiny Kelso, Wash. – seven months into this death sentence – couldn’t have been more upbeat. Vicki Schmidt said she has put her life in God’s hands and actually is stunned by how good she feels.
And, she said, it’s funny how much the success of her son and her son’s team has helped heal her spirit, if nothing else. When Jason was 9 years old and attending a Mariners game, he told his mother that one day he would be a major leaguer. Today, she’ll sit next to her husband, Ray, and watch their fireballing boy open the World Series.
“That is why this feeling is so overwhelming, because he is living that dream he shared with me,” Vicki said. “And then when he called me from the locker room after they won the National League Championship Series, well, Jason is a very conservative man, not someone who says much. But the joy in his voice, it was the happiest I’ve ever heard him. He said, ‘Mom, I can’t believe we’re going to be in the World Series.’ “
Just as improbably, Vicki Schmidt will be there, too, taking the 50-mile drive north to the Portland airport for a trip to her World Series. In late winter/early spring, she had begun to feel headaches and figured perhaps her sinuses were flaring up. Instead, doctors found the worst. Jason had returned from spring training for the surgery, but he was told, eventually, to go back to the season.
Vicki was so weak “that I actually feel blessed the World Series is now, because six months ago I couldn’t even get up a flight of steps; there is no way I could have gotten on a flight. But now I’m amazed. I thought I would feel a lot worse. I wondered if I would ever get up and down those stairs. But in my seventh month I really started to pick up energy. I go to town and drive once in a while. I still get headaches occasionally and I get tired at the end of the day, but I feel like God is healing me.”
Having shunned more experimental therapies, Vicki recently finished a first round of chemotherapy and radiation, but the scar tissue from those treatments look like a tumor on an MRI. So it will be another 2-3 weeks before she will take an MRI to show whether her tumor has returned.
For now, though, she is trying not to focus on more tests, more doctor’s words. She attended all of Jason’s games in Little League and high school and no way was she going to miss World Series Game 1, with her son on the mound.
She said her ordeal probably moved Jason to work harder, concentrate better, but then quickly added, “That is probably presumptuous. He really has given me something motivational and positive.”
No pitch has yet been thrown in the 98th World Series, and we already have a hero.