Constable: Cancer devastating, but truth, love, humor keep her grounded

During her ambulance ride to the hospital near her home in Seattle, Katie Weber makes a phone call to her parents, Stephen and Charlotte Weber, in Arlington Heights.

"Do you remember some of my best basketball games?" she asks her dad. He rattles off games where she logged double- or triple-doubles, played great defense or made a spectacular block during her years at Prospect High School.

"I was pretty good, huh? Like, I was a good player," she responds through her tears, as her dad provides confirmation.

"I needed this information. Anything to ground me in reality," Weber writes in her new book about her life with brain cancer. "I needed truth, and love, and grounding."

An active and healthy 23-year-old when she first was diagnosed with brain cancer, Weber endured surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation on her way to recovery. She loved her career with not-for-profit agencies, including a stint as a GED teacher for homeless youth, and earned her master's degree in education at the University of Washington.

Approaching her five-year anniversary of being cancer-free, Weber rode her bicycle to the hospital in July 2016, where a routine checkup revealed something didn't look right and more tests were needed. Her boyfriend, Wilson Bull, the love of her life she met when they volunteered with a service organization in college, proposed that September.

"We do a lot of crosswords together," says Bull, who brought along an elaborate puzzle he designed to the park that Saturday. The secret letters spelled out, "Will you marry me?" A happy Weber fell to the ground before she answered "yes."

"It's a memory I'll cherish forever," Bull says.

A December surgery confirmed brain cancer, and the couple married on July 8, 2017, while Weber was going through more chemo treatments. With all the married couple has been through in the years since, they don't make plans. "I'm to a place now where I'm OK and can try to find happiness in the moments we have," Bull says. "I try to focus on what's possible today."

For Weber, that meant compiling the emotions and details of her cancer in a raw, funny, angry, funny, painfully honest, funny book titled, "When Life Hands You Lemons ... and other trite bull(blank) we tell ourselves to get through cancer." It's available on amazon.com and half the proceeds go to charity.

Now 32, done with treatments that didn't work, and waiting to see if she qualifies for anything new and promising, Weber writes, "My cancer has turned me into someone I don't totally recognize when I look in the mirror."

She uses a walker or wheelchair to get around, and facial paralysis makes it difficult for her to talk, eat, smile or kiss.

"What kind of monster doesn't smile at babies and puppies? This kind of monster!" Weber writes. Her husband uses his finger to lift her mouth into a half smile.

The couple met as students at Kenyon College in Ohio. Bull graduated in 2008 and moved to Seattle, and Weber followed after her graduation in 2010. A year later, Weber noticed a lack of motor skills in her left hand, and a doctor thought she probably had a pinched nerve. She started bumping into walls and felt "out of it." An extreme headache and nausea sent her to the emergency room, where doctors found a kiwi-sized mass on her cerebellum near her spine.

"There was risk that the mass was cancerous. Surprise, surprise, it was," Weber writes. "There was a lot of fear to go around, and I know people I love (and who, I'm grateful to say, love me) really feel that. It will always be something I wish I could undo."

Weber was diagnosed with desmoplastic medulloblastoma, which is very rare and generally found in young children.

"The only time I Googled my disease, my husband was out of town and I cried until I could not anymore because the internet told me that I had very bad chances," Weber writes.

Using email, because cancer and side-effects of the treatment make it difficult for Weber to talk and be understood, she says she was "shocked" when, after four-and-a-half years of checkups that found "no evidence of disease," she was told again she had brain cancer.

"I am angry, and I would be lying if I said that I never ask, 'Why me?'" Weber says. "But I guess I just realized that anger doesn't help anyone, least of all me. I've mostly been blessed with an amazing life. I had this great childhood, a great family, good education, LOVE - and (bad) things happen all of the time to good people. Why me? Why them? What can I do about it? Not a whole lot, except try to spread love and understanding."

At a time when her peers are rising in their careers and starting families, Weber says she's not planning to get pregnant and isn't healthy enough to adopt a child now. "I think Will would be an amazing dad, and I hope that if he ever gets to stop taking care of me, he'll consider taking care of a kid!" Weber emails.

While her parents, brother, godmother and other loved ones and friends stay positive, Weber says she and her husband have talked about "worst-case scenarios," and he knows her wishes.

"I do not want to be defined by cancer, but I would be lying if I said that it hasn't affected my psychology or my life in any real way," Weber writes. "I hope this book provides a modicum of a resource for young adults who get cancer and feel totally alone in a world of new job opportunities, partying and dancing all night, endless energy, and the changes and hopes that bring young people to adventurous places."

Her book has details on MRIs, chemo, radiation, lumbar punctures, shunts and other grueling medical procedures. But she also touches on spirituality, perseverance, friendship, death, love and humor. Lots of humor.

"I mean, I KNOW I am seriously sick," she writes. "But not laughing at the funny things doesn't make me better, it just makes life worse."

The ingredients of "grace, tenacity, humility, and some luck here and there" are what is needed to get through life, says Weber, who tends to take a big-picture view of hers.

"I only get one chance to be young; there isn't a redo, and much of my youth has been defined by hospitals and tubes," Weber writes. "I have to also remember that a good chunk of my youth is defined by coloring books, and bike rides, and cookie dough, and LOVE. 'Cause even though RIGHT NOW sucks, I've been a pretty lucky duck in this one life."