Overcoming Leukemia was Barbara Wright's First Triumph

Barbara Wright is a runner, educational sales consultant, wife, mother of triplets and a cancer survivor. She spent three of her high school and college years receiving chemotherapy for leukemia, but determined that her life would continue with few skipped beats.

“I was a junior at Cor Jesu High School,” she recalled over a cup of coffee between sales calls. “I lost a lot of weight and I was tired all the time. I started getting really high fevers that would strike up in the middle of the night. My mom took me to the doctor and they ran some blood tests. The next day I was in the hospital.”

Barbara was diagnosed with leukemia on March 23, 1985, at Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital. She was 17 years old. “The first question I asked my doctor was, ‘Am I going to die?’ The second question was, ‘Will my hair fall out?’”

This was Barbara’s second hospitalization at Cardinal Glennon — when she was six years old she fell off a bicycle and spent six days in a coma.

Barbara had a form of leukemia that was highly responsive to new drugs that had just become available. “They told me I had the good kind of leukemia. Everybody was so excited. I did go into remission right away. I did very well.”

But chemotherapy treatments then were harder on patients than those used now.

“At first I was angry,” she said. “On one hand they’re telling me to lead a normal life, and on the other hand I was throwing up all the time and my hair was falling out.”

Unlike most pediatric cancer patients, she was old enough to drive herself to the hospital for treatments. “I remember looking around at all these little kids who had no hair and could care less,” Barbara said. “I thought it would have been easier if I had been diagnosed as a little kid rather than a teenager. But then I probably would not have made it, because the advances in science and treatments from the time I was 10 to the time I was 17 were just amazing.”

Barbara graduated with her class at Cor Jesu then went to Saint Louis University, where she worked on a bachelor’s degree in marketing and journalism. While she appreciated the support she received from her friends and the sisters who taught at Cor Jesu, she tried to keep her illness a secret from classmates and dormitory residents at Saint Louis University.

“There were times when I was sicker and I’d stay at home. For the most part I stayed at school,” she said. “The one thing in my life I could keep control over was my grades.”

Her chemotherapy course ended successfully while she was a college student. After earning her bachelor’s degree, she attended Washington University and earned a master’s degree in education.

Annual checkups at Cardinal Glennon continued for another decade. Barbara became close friends with her doctors in the division of hematology and oncology — Albert Chu, Gordon Gale and Dennis O’Connor — and nurses Pat Codden and Karen Imperiale.

“There was always somebody there who knew your name and was happy to see you,” Barbara remembered. “They were friendly people, good people. They cared about me and knew my sister and my family. They watched me grow up.”

Barbara taught sixth grade for a few years then found a job marketing social studies curricula for an educational publishing company, Nystrom. In 1994 she married Daniel Wright, who owns a trucking company, Dancel Transportation. She kept up her health as a runner, and six years ago ran a marathon on Catalina Island off California to raise money for the Leukemia Society.

On the first day of the new millennium, Barbara and Daniel became the parents of triplets.

“They were born at two in the afternoon on January 1, 2000. From what we know, they were the first triplets of the millennium born in the U.S.,” she said.

The two boys, Max and Alec, and a girl, Danielle, are now three years old and keep their parents and grandparents on the run. “They are wonderful,” Barbara said. “They’re healthy, and a little small for their age, but they are a handful.”

She always sends her doctors and nurses at Glennon a Christmas card and tries to visit when she can. Her father, Don Weis, has done volunteer work at the hospital one day a week since he retired in 1993 from Anheuser-Busch, where he had been an accountant for 38 years.

“When I walk into the new Costas Cancer Center, it is so bright and cheery and amazing. I don’t remember it being like that when I was there!” Barbara said.

“It’s amazing that my doctors and nurses are all still there. I took the babies in to visit when they were about a year old. It is probably time to visit again.”