North Carolina State University Athletics
Fighting a Familiar Battle, With Hope
1/28/2011 12:00:00 AM | Pack Athletics
Jan. 28, 2011
RALEIGH, N.C. – The first time Heidi Humphrey stepped foot on NC State’s campus was on Jan. 12, 1991, when her middle school basketball team visited Raleigh to see the No. 3 ranked Wolfpack women’s basketball team play No. 2 Virginia in Reynolds Coliseum.
NC State lost that thrilling triple-overtime game, 123-120, in the highest-scoring game in ACC women’s basketball history, but the impression remained on the 12-year-old girl from Jacksonville, N.C. She picked her path then, right down to the dormitory where she wanted to live.
But living has been difficult over the last three years for Humphrey, the director of athletic equipment for the Weisiger Brown Building, which serves soccer, track and field, cross country, swimming and wrestling.
In 2008, at the age of 29, she was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer, something so rare for someone so young that doctors at UNC Hospitals really didn’t know where to begin with her treatment.
“They sort of made it up as they went along,” she said.
They came to her with a seemingly never-ending list of bad news. She tested positive for the hereditary BRCA gene mutation that prevents formation of cancer tumors. It was also a triple-negative breast cancer, which is more aggressive and less responsive to treatment. And during her first chemotherapy treatment, she discovered she was allergic to the drug, forcing doctors to use an newly approved drug that cost $12,000 per dosage.
But the combination of the new chemotherapy, a double mastectomy and radiation had positive results on a cancer that typically has a poor prognosis. Since September 2009, Humphrey’s doctors have declared there is “no evidence of disease,” which is as positive as it gets for a Stage IV survivor.
“That means there is no detectable amount of cancer in me,” Humphrey said. “It’s just sort of sitting there dormant, though it’s not in remission. They say I'm stable.”
That’s something Humphrey will celebrate this weekend at the sixth-annual Hoops 4 Hope, the event begun by late women’s basketball coach Kay Yow to raise money and awareness for the disease that she had fought since 1987. Humphrey is one of the featured participants in the Walk 4 Kay, in which fans have made donations to the WBCA/Kay Yow Cancer Fund to walk with various NC State personalities before and during Sunday’s event.
She’ll join quarterback Russell Wilson, head football coach Tom O’Brien, men’s basketball coach Sidney Lowe and women’s basketball coach Kellie Harper, among others, in spending 15 minutes walking on a courtside treadmill.
For Humphrey, it’s a small way to help raise awareness for the disease she has spent three years successfully fighting and to remember the coach whose open invitation to every junior high and high school in the state for that game 20 years ago first brought her to campus.
Humphrey eventually fulfilled her dream of coming to NC State, where she has studied and worked for more than a decade. She began her association with athletics as a manager for the women’s soccer team in 2000, and maintained her association after her graduation in 2002, first as an assistant in the equipment room in Reynolds Coliseum. In 2005, she was named the director of athletics equipment for Weisiger-Brown when athletics moved most of its administrative offices and some sports there.
It’s a job the parks, recreation and tourism graduate loves so much that she scheduled her chemotherapy treatments around the women’s soccer schedule in the fall of 2008. Though the treatments were tough, the only time Humphrey was miserable was when she had to stay home, in her recliner after the double mastectomy.
“I can’t really sit still,” Humphrey said. “But I wasn’t able to come to work after my surgery. And I wasn’t really able to work as much during the chemotherapy. Before, if I needed to be here 12 or 14 hours to get stuff done, I could. With chemo, you will be lucky to get eight hours in.”
But she’s more than able – and plenty willing – to walk in the Parade of Survivors at halftime of Sunday’s game against Florida State. Even now, at 32, she’ll be one of the event’s youngest participants.
Her cancer might be rare, but Humphrey has advice for anyone who might have tested positive for the breast cancer gene.
“If you have any kind of lump, demand a biopsy,” she said. “They originally thought what I had was a hematoma, so we waited about three months before we did a biopsy. By the time the results came back, I was Stage IV.”
One of the many things that helped Humphrey get through her treatments was the support she got from her co-workers and student-athletes. She allowed the women’s soccer team to help shave her head just before the start of her chemo treatments. And she spent many hours talking to others in the department who were battling similar diagnoses.
Nothing, however, was as inspiring as the phone calls she received from Yow, who knew Humphrey through director of equipment Brenda Keene and from women’s basketball camp, which Humphrey worked from 2000-2005.
“She’d call just to let me know she was thinking about me, even though she was going through the same thing,” Humphrey said. “
It meant a lot to hear from someone who had been fighting this same thing for so long. That was just Coach Yow, how she was.” And that’s what Humphrey will be thinking about as she participates in Sunday’s Walk 4 Kay and Hoops 4 Hope.
• By Tim Peeler, tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
