‘Your legacy . . . is the love you leave behind’
Aurora mom battled through cancer getting PhD
Of all the school-related headlines in 2017, the story of Precilla Veigas stands out for embodying the ideals that education is supposed to represent: perseverance, a lifelong passion for learning, and using knowledge to make a difference.
Veigas was immersed in medical research for her PhD in 2015 when she was diagnosed with a rare form of abdominal cancer and told she had six months to live. “I had a decision on my hands, to do or die, literally,” was how she later described it.
Medical leave was the obvious option. But the Aurora mother of a teenage daughter took the opposite approach. Instead, she drew on her lifelong academic dream as a source of strength to help focus her mind and keep moving forward in the face of gruelling pain, treatments and side effects.
“I had a decision on my hands, to do or die, literally.” PRECILLA VEIGAS
Eighteen months later, she captivated a panel of experts and successfully defended her dissertation last March to earn her doctorate. So momentous was her accomplishment that two months later, Canada’s largest university did something it had never done before.
The University of Toronto held a private ceremony for Veigas in May, a month before the official start of convocation season. Given her prognosis, the faculty of medicine wanted to make sure she had the chance to walk across the stage and celebrate with family, friends and colleagues.
News of the special ceremony, accompanied by images of her radiant face, lit up social media and generated reactions from around the world, including headlines in India, her birthplace.
Members of her family travelled from there and New Jersey to be among the audience of about 45 who cheered and wiped away tears as she collected her sealed parchment.
Veigas died five months later, on Oct. 24, with husband Joseph D’Souza and daughter Jadyn,16, at her side, and surrounded by some of those same family members who again came from afar.
Her research at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto saves lives, in the form of guidelines that help trauma physicians match patients with the most effective blood products to use in transfusions to control bleeding.
But according to her family, her personal legacy is just as powerful, because Veigas was as attentive to her personal relationships as she was to her scientific research.
Behind a fierce dedication to her professional life, there was never any doubt that family came first, says Jadyn, a Grade 11 student who wants to study pharmacology and be a researcher like her mom.
“She loved her family on both sides and she always spent time with them,” Jadyn said recently. She rarely went a day without calling her sister Maria, who lives in the GTA, or her cousin in New Jersey, and was in constant touch with family back in India, including her mother.
Despite the physical toll of her illness and the demands of her work, she made time for others, whether they were Jadyn’s friends or the students she mentored.
“She was always ready to help,” says D’Souza, an engineer who worked in information technology and was home caring for his wife for her last four months.
The couple immigrated to Canada when Jadyn was a toddler. Veigas, who had earned a master’s degree in medical microbiology in India, spent 11 years pursuing her ultimate academic goal, completing two clinical research programs and then going on to manage a massive clinical trial involving 75 hospitals before beginning her PhD in medical science.
The importance of education was instilled in her at a young age as one of seven children growing up in the southern India town of Karkala, and it’s a value she passed along to her daughter.
While Veigas delighted in helping her set an academic path, she was equally enthralled with the other parts of Jadyn’s life — her friends, her volunteer jobs, the latest drama on the high school scene and her daughter’s flair for doing makeup.
Having Jadyn do her makeup became a treasured ritual, including before graduation last May.
Amid the grief of losing Veigas, that day is a cherished memory that brought together everything most important to her — the people she loved and the career she was so passionate about. “She was extremely happy,” Jadyn says. “I think it’s important that people know she made an impact because, as an immigrant mom and a person of colour, especially a woman who got so far and did so much . . . she is a role model.”
Veigas’ own written words captures what motivated her most in life.
“In the end, all we have is one another,” she said in the piece, published on the website of the Hindustan Times. “When you leave this life, your legacy is you as a person, the love you leave behind.”