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< March-April 2007
	In Person
Too Much to Live For When calamity picked a fight with Katie Hilleke, it engaged in a battle with paddlers across the nation. By Christian Knight

Tomorrow, Katie Hilleke would go wakeboarding in the Caribbean Sea with her best friend, Stacy Heer.

After wakeboarding and some lunch, the pair might go sea kayaking again, out to the reef, where they had snorkeled the day before.

She couldn’t wait for next week, when three more friends would be joining them on their month-long exploration of Honduras.

And after that trip had ended, Hilleke would travel to Mexico and later China as a World Class Kayak Academy teacher. She couldn’t wait.

That was July 3, 2006.

By the thieving hours of July 5, Hilleke’s only wish was for a drug vicious enough to knock her unconscious, to mute for a few hours the agony screaming in her bowels.

Six months later, Hilleke, 26, and her parents sank more than $300,000 in debt, her Honduras trip cut to three days and her dreams of teaching in Mexico and China postponed for at least a year, perhaps forever.

What happened on Independence Day was colon cancer. Hilleke isn’t sure when it first began festering inside her colon. But she definitely remembers when she could no longer ignore it.

Initially, she attributed her stubborn bowels to the Third World drinking water she had been consuming for a few days. Same culprit that plagues many other Central American travelers, she figured, just the opposite symptom. But then on July 4 she began vomiting. Uncontrollably. And the discomfort in her abdomen had escalated into the realm of unbearable. As bad, she imagined, as child labor. Perhaps worse.

Two days later, a Birmingham doctor removed the cancerous portion of Hilleke’s colon and with it, 25 lymph nodes. Those lymph nodes told Hilleke’s doctors how far the cancer had advanced.

“I remember him telling me it was serious and some people with this stage of cancer don’t make it,” Hilleke says. “I was telling him: ‘I’m a positive person, I’ll make it. I’m healthy. I eat well. I exercise.’ He was saying ‘That doesn’t matter too much.’ He never gave me a percentage (for surviving) and I was really glad about that.”

Tests revealed cancer had consumed five of those 25 lymph nodes. The health nut was now a Stage 3C cancer patient. Chance of survival: 44 percent. She’d have to endure 12 chemotherapy treatments—one on her October 30 birthday—to improve those chances.

In the months that followed her diagnosis, however, Hilleke discovered something else that spreads even faster than cancer: Benevolence.

It started with her family, her closest friends, and her parents’ Baptist church. It came in the form of paintings, flowers, cards, visits, phone calls. A childhood friend of Hilleke’s organized a Birmingham benefit in her name to help cover the costs. It raised nearly $5,000. It spread there from friends to friends of friends, friends of her brother; paddlers with whom she had once shared an eddy, paddlers she had never met.

Dagger donated a Nomad for auction. The winning bid was $1,800.

Tanya Shuman’s only memory of Hilleke occurred almost five years ago at the Gorge Games. Shuman had been fretting about the extreme race down the Class V White Salmon River. Hilleke soothed her nerves.

“In the kayaking world, that’s how it is,” Shuman said. “Somebody comes in. You may not know who they are. But you have a place on the couch for them.”

Instead of couch space, Shuman offered a kayak. The 34-year-old Wave Sport icon donated one of her three personal kayaks to an online auction. Shuman’s sponsor kicked in another kayak. Together, they raised $2,200.

Mike Brown, 55, had never paddled with Hilleke either. The Colorado-based paddler had, in fact, never even met her. As the American Whitewater membership coordinator for the Pike’s Peak Whitewater Club (PPWC), however, Brown knew her brother, Tommy from his presentations of slideshows and Lunch Video Magazine film premiers.

But Brown had discovered Hilleke’s plight through a blog. And his concern for Hilleke spread from there, first within himself. He organized a PPWC benefit, that—with the help of unsolicited donors, such as Kokatat, Teva, Dagger, Shred Ready, WRSI, and Tommy’s slide show—raised $4,200. From that point on, Brown shouldered the myriad of fundraising efforts.

The benevolence kept spreading. Pueblo, Colorado-based photographer Bryan Kelsen began selling “Katie’s Krew” T-shirts and donating the profits to the fight. Kyle Klovik announced on www.seattlekayaker.com the sale of his five kayaks and a carbon Werner Shogun bent-shaft paddle. Half would go straight to Hilleke’s fight. Extreme kayaker Tao Berman donated a Dagger kayak for auction. Colorado’s South Main whitewater project—siblings Jed and Katie Selby, and Andre Spino-Smith—mailed a $1,000 check.

So far, the Katie Hilleke fund has grown to more than $20,000—roughly the costs of her 12 chemotherapy treatments. Half, Brown estimates, has come from the paddling community.

“I couldn’t believe all the response,” Hilleke says. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I felt like I didn’t deserve it.”

Hilleke endured her last chemo treatment on January 29. Her insurance will likely absorb about 80 percent of the bill. That, she figures, will leave her with enough to make her own donation: To Lance Armstrong’s foundation and to Brad Ludden’s First Descents Cancer Camp.