A tale of two cancer battles in Iowa, Oregon

LAMONI, Iowa — Two sharply contrasting stories of brain cancer played out in Iowa and on the West Coast.

Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old woman, moved from California to Oregon to end her own suffering with a lethal pill. She was stricken with stage IV glioblastoma multiforme. Doctors in April gave her only six months to live.

Maynard had planned to swallow the pill Saturday in her bedroom, two days after her husband's birthday. But in a video last week, she said she would delay her death for a little while.

Maynard died Sunday, confirmed Sean Crowley, spokesman for the non-profit organization Compassion & Choices.

Oregon is one of five states where "death with dignity" laws allow terminally ill, competent adults to kill themselves. Maynard had become an advocate and a symbol for passing such laws nationwide.

Meanwhile, Bethany Gruich should be dead by now, according to her initial cancer diagnosis.

She nearly died in May as her brain tumor — a tumor she named Phillip, to give you a glimpse of her irreverent sense of humor — had regrown to the size of a fist.

Gruich, a high school senior, turns 18 this month.

In October 2012, Gruich collapsed at home. The next month she was diagnosed with an inoperable tumor on the right side of her brain and given 14 months to live.

Obviously she has defied that prognosis.

This Iowa brain cancer survivor is literal, living proof that the best medical prognosis is far from a neat and tidy death sentence.

What does Gruich want to do in life?

"Make people happy," she said without hesitation.

Why keep attending school?

"I just like being around people."

Gruich's tumor in March crossed the "midline"; in other words that villain Phillip had seeped into the other, left half of her brain.

Her parents Michael and Lori asked about experimental treatment at Duke University, where a live polio virus could be injected directly into the brain tumor. But that trial wouldn't accept minors as patients.

They placed their daughter on home hospice treatment.

Gruich's uncle learned of a new laser surgery for brain tumors at Saint Luke's in Kansas City. Soon Gruich's mother was on the phone with a neurooncologist, and then the family visited the hospital to be scheduled for two procedures. The first surgery would carve out the original, regrown tumor on her right side, followed by a second surgery to sear away the new growth on the left side of the brain with a laser guided by MRI (magnetic resonance imaging).

Two other teams of surgeons had told the family that Gruich's brain cancer was inoperable. But the Kansas City doctors reassured them that they had the specialty and cutting-edge technology to give them a fighting chance.

But suddenly, fresh worry: Gruich was unresponsive on the morning of Mother's Day (May 11) — just three days after she had impressed her Kansas City doctors with her robust condition, and just two days before she was scheduled for the surgery.

Her mother administered steroids, but they weren't reviving her daughter as they had before. Gruich was rushed to the county hospital and then to Blank Children's Hospital in Des Moines.

She had been to the emergency room before, but this was something more dire as Gruich was put on pain medication in a dark corner of the children's ward.

Lori Gruich wondered whether her daughter's condition was a sign that the Kansas City surgery was the wrong decision.

"We thought that was it," she said.

Gruich's siblings and other family members gathered. The family's minister from their local Baptist church, Joseph "Woodie" Ladnier, also joined them.

"She was so weak," Ladnier said of his first reaction upon seeing Gruich, "I thought, dear God, there's no way she's going to be able to make (the trip to Kansas City)."

Gruich's father asked Ladnier: How far should we go? Are we wrong to want to save our daughter at this point? Are we being selfish parents?

"You feel like you're walking through a minefield," Ladnier said of the moral choices that confront the responsible relatives of cancer patients in their darkest moments.

The parents almost had reached a "crumbling point," Lori said, as they debated with doctors whether or not to reinstate a do-not-resuscitate order for their daughter that they had removed at the county hospital.

Gruich was mostly uncommunicative but also wept. Lori asked her if she was ready to let go. Gruich finally whispered in her mother's ear that she was scared — and no, she wasn't ready to die.

The Kansas City doctors recommended an unconventional drug to their colleagues in Des Moines, a head-trauma drug that would work within six hours if it worked at all.

It was nearly six hours later when Gruich finally bounced back and even remarked that she was hungry.

Before the incident Lori had wondered: What if the surgery turned Gruich into a vegetable? What if she died on the operating table?

But now the surgery seemed to be the only viable option.

After the surgery later that week, her parents saw an immediate difference. Gruich flashed them a full smile that hadn't been possible before with her partially paralyzed face.

"It looked like she had been back from the dentist almost," Michael said. "She was smiling and radiant and joking. It was real nice."

When the Gruichs see the stories about Maynard's decision to kill herself, they recoil.

"My faith goes against that on all levels," Lori said.

At least you have to try to beat the cancer, said Michael, 46 — who at age 10 was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and was told he wouldn't live to see his 40th birthday.

This family has more than a few things to say about faith and perseverance.

Not that Gruich's path makes everything easier.

It has been a good autumn and school semester. Gruich now travels to the county hospital every two weeks for a lower dosage of chemotherapy.

Nearly all of the tumor on both sides of her brain was removed. Her latest prognosis is another two or three years of life.

Gruich might be able to graduate high school and attend her older sister's wedding next summer.

What would she tell other brain cancer patients and their families?

"Don't ever think negatively," Gruich said. "I would think positively every day. Just day by day is how to look at it.

"I'll wake up tomorrow, then I'll just think the exact same thing."

Contributing: Jessica Durando, USA TODAY Network