Here’s Hats Off To Busy Teacher, Cancer Survivor

The second note Judy Bieze sent home with her waist-high students last September stunned parents.

The first covered student needs: No. 2 pencils and blunt-nosed scissors. Note No. 2 notified families that Judy had breast cancer, was starting chemotherapy and occasionally would miss school.

No big deal.

“The doctor said I could teach,” says Judy, who’s in her mid-40s. “If he thought I could, I thought I could.”

In June 1996, Judy took a deep breath to prepare for the emotional ride she was about to start. In the year ahead, her daughter would graduate from college and marry. Her twin sons would graduate from Coeur d’Alene’s Lake City High. Her nest would empty.

She had just begun work on her daughter’s wedding dress last July when the doctor called. Her annual mammogram had exposed a suspicious lump.

Judy’s quiet summer quickly disappeared in a whirlwind of medical activity. A biopsy and mastectomy followed within weeks of her diagnosis. Doctors believed the cancer was contained in her breast but prescribed chemotherapy as a precaution.

They scheduled six treatments spaced three weeks apart.

School started the week of Judy’s second treatment. The chemo hit her hard that time. She lost her hair faster than her Hayden Meadows first- and second-graders lost their front teeth.

“It fell out massively. It took 20 minutes to clean it out of the shower,” she says, automatically reaching for the graying inch-long hair that’s grown back since then. “It was so depressing.”

Her husband buzzed her head for her, then buzzed his own to match. Judy sewed herself hats to reinforce class lessons - a harvest hat for fall, a patriotic hat for election season.

“It was the one thing I could do for myself that made me feel good,” she says.

As entertaining as Judy’s hats were, her students begged to see what was under them. She bravely bared her head for them, but it wasn’t the magic moment they’d expected. They’d seen bald pates before and hers wasn’t much different.

Each treatment weakened Judy more. She left for the cancer center just before school dismissal on Thursdays, stayed home Fridays and returned to work Mondays, drained but determined to work.

By her fourth treatment, Judy’s co-workers urged her to stay home Mondays to rest. She finally agreed to a substitute teacher, but came to work anyway.

“She’d sit in the hallway and read to her kids,” says Shelley Rosenberger, a fellow teacher. “She’d help them with math. We’d walk by and there’d be a little person cuddled up next to her.”

Mondays were tough, but Judy couldn’t stay home.

“School was life,” she says. “To stay home was to look inward, be morose. To come to work got me up, going, back in business.”

Parents and teachers sent her food, checked on her constantly, helped where they could. Judy had prepared months in advance for the kindnesses she knew would come. She knitted mittens for the teachers who covered her playground duties during the winter.

At the end of January, she spotted a few hairs on her head and quit wearing a hat. A first-grader reading to her noticed.

“He’d read, look at my head, read, look,” Judy says. “Then he reached up and felt my hair and I knew I was back.”

She immediately applied for and won a $14,000 grant for books and reading workshops for parents and teachers. For most of her career, Judy had gone after grants tenaciously. But, she’d missed an important grant the previous fall because of her chemotherapy.

“Doing this one was important,” she says. “The opportunity to apply, present … it was like saying, ‘I’m back.”’ Her daughter married two weeks ago in the dress Judy made for her. Judy also made the three bridesmaids’ dresses and her own, stringing beads and sequins through most of her chemotherapy recovery.

On Saturday, she watched her sons - both valedictorians - accept their diplomas and a handful of scholarships.

Her last check-up showed no trace of cancer, and Judy’s blue eyes sparkle again with vitality.

“Quite a year,” she says, lost in thought for a moment. “God works things out in your life.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo