It was a morning from hell. Literally.
Jason Angus raced to a landlord’s farm to put out a fire, while his wife Audrey put their boys on the school bus. From out of nowhere, the family’s 6-month-old Labrador puppy ran under the bus chasing after a corn husk and was killed instantly. As Audrey soothed her tearful boys and Jason fought a fire, neither felt prepared for the biggest battle they would face next.
Audrey’s first day of chemotherapy was not off to a great start.
“What we already knew was going to be a bad day had a series of follies that no one could have written a script for,” Jason says.
When the unexpected knocks
In fact, the entire situation was like that – unexpected. When Audrey turned 40, she was encouraged to get her first mammogram. She was young, healthy and active. Between balancing her most important job as mother to two busy boys – Alex, 7, and Theo, 5 – serving as a full-time swine specialist with Furst-McNess, and working as a full-time farm wife, Audrey says it was a few months before she actually found time to make the appointment.
“I thought nothing of it,” she says, recalling her mammogram on Halloween, and so she went back to her busy life. She was in Chicago touring the Field Museum with her sister on a Saturday morning when her doctor called.
She remembers bits and pieces of the conversation. Stage one, grade three. Highly aggressive. Oncologist. Treatment plan.
“Oh, that’s a big life change,” Audrey says. “You really don’t see that coming. I had stage one, grade three, triple negative breast cancer. Don’t google it. It’s nasty stuff and by far, the most aggressive kind with the highest chance of recurring.”
That’s hard news for a husband to take, Jason says.
“I was mad. My first gut reaction was that I wanted someone to blame,” he remembers. “I know it wasn’t justified, but I couldn’t get it through my head how this could be happening to her at 40 years of age.”
But he says with time, he realized that mindset was not going to do him any good. He couldn’t blame anyone for this. He began to feel a little selfish next as he wondered how he would be able to raise their sons without her. But he eventually got on board with his wife’s mindset.
“I told myself, ‘If she is willing to do whatever it takes to solve this problem and fight this disease, it’s time for the rest of us to adjust how we think, what we do and realize that mom is no longer going to take care of everything that we’ve always dumped on her shoulders. It’s time for us to become more involved in the day-to-day and prioritize what is important and disregard what’s not,” Jason says.
Telling the boys was the hardest part.
“We didn’t know what they would understand and what they wouldn’t,” Jason says. “We talked with a lot of people about how you tell kids this kind of news. The boys’ responses were drastically different. Alex was emotional and scared. Theo was like, ‘let’s move on and do this.’”
Audrey (pictured above with son, Theo) says cancer made her deal with hard questions. What if things don’t work out? What would happen to the kids?
Stepping into the ring
Chemotherapy started almost immediately. Audrey’s oncologist started her on a five-month plan. Despite all the treatments and appointments, Audrey says she refused to let cancer define her and told very few people about what she was going through.
In addition to family and close friends, only a few feed customers knew. She wanted to keep working and planned her treatments so she could work when she felt the best and crash on the weekends.
“I didn’t want to be looked at as ‘the cancer person,’” she says. “I just wanted to be looked at as Audrey.”
Audrey’s colleague and friend, Fredrik Sandberg, says Audrey displayed nearly non-human strength in continuing to work despite the severe chemotherapy treatments she had to have.
“It humbles me to think that she kept pushing on when a lot of people would have hidden behind closed doors,” Sandberg says. “I remember her saying, ‘I can’t just lay down and take it.’”
She didn’t want the Furst-McNess team to ‘let up’ on her either, he says. They honored her wishes by moving ahead with things like normal, even though they expected her to take some time for herself.
People in agriculture are special – they work extremely hard, they work when they don’t want to and they work when sometimes they should not. But they keep going, Sandberg explains, and many people gained strength by seeing how Audrey handled her challenge.
“Many, like myself, grew an even greater respect of her,” he says.
But the last thing Audrey needed or wanted was special handling – she just did what she had to do to get through it.
“It’s like being a farmer,” she explains. “The pigs still have to get fed. You just can’t opt out and say, ‘Yeah, I don’t feel like feeding the pigs tonight.’ You don’t get to opt out of a chemo session because you don’t feel good.”
And chemo wasn’t easy.
It’s hard to sit across from your wife and watch her be hooked up to tubes and IVs, Jason says. Sometimes they talked, sometimes they were silent. He let her direct what they did during those stretches of time. Although he was prepared for chemo to be tough, he says that wasn’t the most difficult part.
“It was 48 to 72 hours later when the effects of the terrible drug concoctions kicked in and she felt sick, lost her energy, and was completely worn out and tired,” he says. “That was so hard.”
Audrey admits losing her hair was tough, too. By the second treatment, it was gone.
“We were headed up to Christmas at my sister’s house and it was coming out,” she remembers. “So, I just let my hair fly out the window. That’s gross, but that’s what I did.”
An unusual twist
Not long after her diagnosis, Jason’s farming partner’s wife was diagnosed with a second case of breast cancer.
“Two business partners watching their wives suffering from basically the same thing…it was just ironic,” Jason says. “We made it through 2018 from a farming standpoint, but it did not go as we expected.”
Read the rest of Audrey’s story on Page 2.
