Plane ride lifts cancer sufferer’s spirits

With a pilot and two wide-eyed passengers, the small plane leaped from the runway at the Coeur d’Alene Airport. It circled, gaining altitude, and headed north toward Sandpoint.

For 23-year-old Casey Pangle, the June 3 flight was only the second time she had been in a plane. The four-seater gave her an intimacy with the sky and the landscape she had never experienced before. Below, the countryside spread out in all directions. The mountains crimped the ground around open fields, and the cars and people “looked like ants” crawling along the threads of roads.

“It was awesome. It was not at all what I expected,” Pangle said. “I definitely had a smile on my face the rest of the day.”

Smiles come easily to Pangle, despite what she’s been through. In January of last year she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer that invades the lymphatic system. At the time, Pangle was working full time, saving money, and had just met her boyfriend, Dereke Weaver.

Pangle smiled when she talked about Dereke, and she smiled in another way – sad, without the light in her eyes – when remembered how she first heard she had cancer.

It began more than 18 months ago with heartburn, something Pangle thought was a passing thing. But it continued and got worse, and then the night sweats began and the fevers. Her boyfriend’s mom, Charlotte Weaver, looked through her nursing books and found the symptoms. Then Pangle showed her stepmom, Margie Jo, who has raised her since she was 3 years old, the lump in her neck.

Two weeks later, they had the diagnosis.

“It was kind of ‘This is a dream; I’m going to wake up,’ ” Pangle said. “It wasn’t until a couple of days later that it sunk in: ‘Oh my God! I have cancer!’ When you say that word, it doesn’t seem real.”

While Pangle had waited “longer than I should have” to seek medical advice, they’d still caught it in Stage II of the disease, when it hadn’t yet spread throughout her body. Pangle began immediate treatments, including a full chemotherapy routine. After that, she moved to Seattle to receive stem cell transplants to bring her immune system back online.

“She’s an awesome girl. She doesn’t have a mean bone in her body – a real full spirit,” Charlotte Weaver said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard her say ‘Why me?’ or ‘I can’t take this anymore.’ And she’s been through a lot.”

After almost a year of treatments, Pangle moved back to Coeur d’Alene last December. Three days before Christmas she got the news that her cancer was in remission. The family celebrated the present, but in the back of her mind, Pangle had a shadow of doubt lurking.

“I knew. I knew I was going to have another battle with it,” she said.

The cancer fought back. In February, Pangle’s doctors told her it had re-invaded her body.

“And this time it came back with a vengeance,” Margie Jo said.

More treatments. More chemotherapy. And this time radiation therapy for a lesion that appeared on her skin. Her hair that had been growing back in from the previous round started to fall out again. She had trouble keeping food down. Even water was difficult. The family started keeping bags in the car for all the times she vomited.

The money Pangle had dutifully saved up while working evaporated. Her family stepped in, and her dad, Perry, took over running the paperwork, figuring out insurance, co-pays and how to balance all the bills.

“That’s another thing you have to fight through along with your cancer,” Pangle said.

Every day, Pangle makes other sacrifices. On good days she can go out with Dereke and shoot pool or go to a movie (“I have a 100 favorite movies”). On bad days, she stays in bed while Charlotte Weaver or Margie Jo sit at her side. She’s put off her plans for going to school and studying marine biology. She’s put aside her desire to have a baby. A trip to New York City this summer, set up by friends to celebrate her recovery, has been put on hold.

“She’s really been a trouper. She does not falter,” Margie Jo said.

And that’s when Joe McCarron, a pilot and a licensed marriage and family therapist, came in with his flight. He met Pangle through therapist friends. McCarron, who beat cancer 15 years ago himself, was more than willing to give Pangle and Dereke seats in the graduation flights for his SOARING program. The program primarily caters to troubled youths and their families but is used as an “aviation meataphor for life” for anyone dealing with emotional problems, according to McCarron.

The flight exhilarated Pangle. Coasting through the air, the horizon expanding on all sides, seeing the world tiny and insignificant, was an eye-opening experience for Pangle.

After the flight and the heat, Margie Jo said Pangle was exuberant but tired.

It’s a description that seems to fit Pangle every day. After 18 months of fighting cancer, she’s tired of the day-in, day-out. She knows she has at least five more months in Seattle for stem cell transplants ahead of her. But she keeps her spirits up. She keeps smiling.

Her attitude earned Pangle the SOARING Youth of the Month Award for June. Her name was added to a trophy topped by an eagle taking flight in a presentation June 23. The award was sponsored by the Rotary Club.

“She qualifies for the Youth of the Month 10 times over,” McCarron said.

McCarron said the flights, which use volunteer pilots, teach kids responsibility, courage and initiative. But for people like Pangle, it’s not just about dealing with emotional issues.

“It’s about hope,” he said.

For Pangle, the flight helped.

“It’s kinda nice to forget about it, at least for an hour or two – or a day,” she said. “It made a huge difference. It makes you look forward to the future.”