Wendy Hansen and Russ Farnsworth.Photo:GoFundMe
GoFundMe
In less than 24 hours, Wendy Hansen’s life came crashing down around her in a trifecta of tragedies.
“I went from losing my home, to wrecking my motorcycle which I absolutely adored, to this lady standing in front of me saying I have cancer,” Wendy tells PEOPLE. “My head was spinning.”
Once she was able to sit down and absorb it all, she immediately tapped into her skills as an accountant, getting a notebook and jotting down everything from the insurance people she would have to communicate to the doctors who would treat her cancer.
“They say, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time,” Wendy says. “It is overwhelming and there are times I’m numb from head to toe and times I’m just bawling and hyperventilating, but you have to let the moments pass and start chipping away at it again.”
July 2 started as a pleasant Sunday morning filled with running errands with her fiancé Russ Farnsworth. The two hopped on their motorcycles and were just finishing the day with a pre-dinner ride when Wendy got an alert on her phone that a smoke alarm was going off in her home in Mitchellville, Iowa.
All she could think about was her animals — three exotics, her three dogs and 21 rescue sugar gliders — trapped in the home. As she raced back home, she zipped past Russ and went full-throttle. But as she headed for the off-ramp, she lost concentration for a moment and crashed her Victory Magnum.
“I landed on my shoulder and broke my clavicle and scapula and I ripped a big gash on my knee,” Wendy says. “I was stupid, I wasn’t wearing any protective gear so I was really lucky.”
Wendy Hansen and pets.Courtesy of Wendy Hansen
Courtesy of Wendy Hansen
Immediately, she grabbed her purse and ignition key and started to run.
Once she arrived at the Iowa Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines, the ER team began cutting her clothes off to treat her wounds. Joking with them, she recalls saying, ”Hey guys, my house is on fire and this is all I own."
“They said they would give me scrubs or something and I said, ‘This is not my life, this cannot be happening,'” she adds.
After treating her various bumps, bruises and breaks, the doctors ran a CT scan to make sure she didn’t have any internal bleeding. That’s when they found a mass on her kidney.
“The crash was lucky, because there wouldn’t have been any other reason to get a scan of her abdomen, and this type of cancer, if not found early, tends to become lethal,” says Dr. Jeannette Capella, the Iowa Methodist trauma surgeon who was her physician that day. “If you look at it, her house burned down, she was in an accident, but if none of that had happened, it would have been even worse for her.”
The initial diagnosis is renal cell carcinoma. The National Cancer Institutes estimates 81,800 cases of renal and pelvic cancer will be found in 2023 and a relative five-year survival rate of 77.6%. That percentage increases dramatically with early detection.
Wendy says Dr. Capella told her it was a miracle she came into the ER that day.
“She goes, ‘They are gonna remove your kidney. This motorcycle crash just saved your life,'” Wendy says. “I was sent home at one in the morning, told to come back in two weeks and they made an appointment with an oncologist.”
Wendy Hansen and Russell Farnsworth.Courtesy of Wendy Hansen
Sadly, it’s a journey Wendy knows all too well. Her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at 48 and died at 52. Her father is living with prostate cancer as well.
“So here I am at 47. I know what happened with my mom, and that’s what scares me,” Wendy says of her mom’s cancer treatment. “She did the surgery, the chemo, the radiation and was in remission for two years. Then she went in for a scan and it was in her bones and her lungs and her brain and there was basically nothing they could do at that point.”
Her follow-up appointment this week did offer some good news. The oncologist believes the cancer may be Stage 1 and that the left kidney may only need partial removal. But she will still probably need radiation and/or chemotherapy, depending on the results of a biopsy.
In the meantime, Wendy is dealing with a mountain of paperwork and debt in addition to her grief after losing most of her pets.
Two of her exotics died in the fire. The third was alive, but despite a vet’s immediate care, it passed away in Farnsworth’s arms. Her 12-year-old schnauzer Izzy and 7-month-old Chinese Crested puppy Niko died in the fire. Only their 13-year-old schnauzer Axle, adopted from an animal shelter as a companion to Izzy, was still alive.
He was suffering from smoke inhalation and was bleeding from the mouth from trying to escape from his kennel. Wendy was determined to give him every chance to survive, but Axle passed after two days.
“I was supposed to protect him, and I wasn’t there to do it,” Wendy says.
The couple lost everything in the fire—which she believes started under their deck, where flames ignited a propane tank—and now plan to rebuild from scratch.
Currently, they’re living with Wendy’s son Jacob, 20, who was born after she and her ex-husband struggled with fertility issues for years.
“We lost our first one. Jacob was five years in the making, but he’s pretty perfect,” says his proud mom. “He bought his house last December and he took me there from the hospital and said, ‘You are staying here.’“
Wendy Hansen and son Jacob.Courtesy of Wendy Hansen
And even though they’ve only lived in Mitchellville for a little more than two years, the community came out in force to help the couple.
“This is small town Iowa,” says neighbor Jerry Weeks. “We’ll do anything we can to help.”
One woman, whom Wendy didn’t know before the fire, organized a home-cooked meal train with neighbors, while a soldier about to deploy offered to let the couple rent her home.
“In a time like this when it feels so hopeless and then you have people you don’t even know helping you, it’s incredible," she says.
“Sometimes I feel like my life is pretty much over, but in the grand scheme of things, it did save my life," she adds. “My son is fine, my fiancé is fine. The animals are not, but I did give them a very good life.”
Wendy Hansen’s pets.Courtesy of Wendy Hansen
Through it all, Russ has been her rock.
“You don’t know the strength of each other until you have to. We’ve been together 12 years and I’ve never seen him cry until this,” Wendy says.
For his part, the taciturn Russ recognizes how large a burden has been placed on Wendy.
“She has been strong, and that’s a lot to go through at one time,” he says. “Everybody’s reached out to show support, and she’s been supportive of us as best she can. We’re all going to come together to get through it.”
Waste Management, the company Russ, 61, works for, has also stepped up to help.
“WM’s team members have rallied around Russ and Wendy, with dinners and monetary donations to help them get through these life changing events,” spokesperson Lisa Disbrow of WM of Iowa tells PEOPLE. “Russ has been part of the WM Family for 10 years and our team network has been quick to spread the word of their needs. We are also connecting Russ with the WM Employees Care Fund that manages employees’ donations across the enterprise, and which may also provide additional financial assistance to the family.”
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Wendy’s son’s girlfriend, Meadow Stephens, has set up aGoFundMeto help the family with medical, vet and other bills. At first, Wendy was reluctant to ask for help, but she knows she’ll need all she can get.
“It’s a godsend to have all these people,” she says.
source: people.com
