Warrior Woman
Morrilton woman battles for herself, others against cancer
Phyllis Everette had never quit anything in her life, but she’d finally had enough.
The high school junior, a center on the Morrilton High School basketball team, couldn’t take the pain anymore, especially the throbbing headaches that stabbed at her like an ice pick, Everette said. No one knew about the episodes, and she didn’t understand what was causing them. All she knew was she’d finally crossed a line beyond her endurance to continue, she said.
“I actually ended up quitting because of the headaches, and I was throwing up and everything,” Everett said recently. “One day I just said, ‘I can’t,’ and ‘I can’t’ usually doesn’t come out of my mouth. I went into the locker room that day, and I was just in tears.
“That whole summer, you know, I had been really practicing, and it just hurt so bad when I put my jersey on [the coach’s] desk. Pretty much after that, it went downhill.”
Everette, 27, didn’t show a lot of emotion while telling of that day or of the diagnosis that would soon follow: medulloblastoma, a cancerous brain tumor that nests in the cerebellum, the lower back part of the brain. She didn’t wince recalling the harrowing treatment, either, from the 13-hour emergency surgery to remove a tumor she described as the size of a tennis ball to the chemotherapy and radiation treatments that followed.
Everette portrays quiet strength, personified by Phyl’s Warriors, a nonprofit organization she formed to help other patients and their families, and the kind of strength that attracts and inspires others, like her mentor, Shelli Crowell.
“You know how when you look at someone and see their body language and the way they speak back to you and look you in the eyes, you can just tell who they are?” Crowell said. “That was [Everette]. You just knew her heart and who she was, even though she was really quiet. She obviously had a lot going on, but I could always tell the goodness inside of her.”
Crowell said she first observed these traits in Everette when she was a shy teenager, but her mental toughness had been honed for most of her life.
“I was raised by my whole family,” Everette said. “My aunt raised me up until I was about 5, and I came here to Morrilton to live with my biological mother. She just wasn’t, you know, ready. So my whole life was in and out, in and out of things. I grew up fighting.”
Everette credits her grandparents, Velma and the late AJ Everette, for giving her a foundation and structure. What she didn’t get was a whole lot of slack — in schoolwork, household chores or brain cancer.
“[Doctors] said, ‘You have a brain tumor,’ and I just broke down crying, and my grandmother looked at me, and she said, ‘What are you crying for?’ and kept a straight face. Not a tear,” Everette said.
The moment galvanized into a mentality: Don’t just sit there — fight. And fight she did. Despite undergoing two years of rigorous treatment that kept her hospitalized for a month and temporarily paralyzed her from the waist down, Everette graduated from high school in 2010.
She also found a friend and confidante in Crowell, not because Everette was particularly public about her condition, but because such news travels fast in a town the size of Morrilton. The 53-year-old said she felt a connection with the young cancer patient from the start.
“My dad had lung cancer, and because of that, I did Relay for Life,” Crowell said. “I remember it was really one of the first times we spoke. I just thought, ‘I’m gonna make this baby talk to me.’ We didn’t have big conversations before; it was just in passing. But in Relay for Life, [Everette] was working on walking again, building up her strength. So I walked up and talked to her, and I don’t know; something just sprung that time. Finally, she gave me the real time of day.”
Despite everything she’d been through, Everette’s way forward was still tested at every turn. After earning an associate degree from the University of Arkansas Community College at Morrilton, she set her sights on completing a bachelor’s degree.
“I always said, ‘I’m going to the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff,” she said. “There were a lot of people who told me, ‘OK, you don’t need to go there.’ But when you tell me I’m not going to be able to do something, I’m gonna do it.
“When I got there, people were like, ‘Uh, she’s got a lot of issues.’ When I met with an adviser, she said, ‘How are you going to do this?’ and she was really disrespectful about it. I just looked at her and smiled, and I said, ‘I’ll do it.’”
Everette made good on that vow, then took on launching her nonprofit, a process she knew nothing about, she said, with similarly dogged zeal. As luck would have it, another Morrilton woman had already gone through the process, so Everette volunteered her time, in part, to learn about setting up her own group and partly to support the cause of brain-cancer research.
“[Everette] was quiet at first. She didn’t really know us,” said Julie Sessions, the brain-cancer survivor behind the nonprofit Going Gray for Julie. “I invited her to come to my cancer support group, Caring Hearts in Conway, and she came to that with me, and she came out of her shell pretty quick. She’s been [attending] now for maybe two years. We’ve become very close. We’re really good friends.”
Everette started working on Phyl’s Warriors in 2016; the group solidified in 2017 and received its 501(c)(3) status a year later. Everette devoted her time to scheduling small local events and creating things to sell, with the money raised going to cancer-research organizations. Her group’s logo, fashioned after Wonder Woman’s crest, speaks of the same strength that has sustained its founder.
“This is my job,” she said. “When I hit the pillow, all I’m thinking about is Phyl’s Warriors: We gotta get this done; we gotta get that scheduled; we gotta get this. I tell everybody I found my passion: to help somebody else.
“I would be the most selfish person of anybody if I didn’t, you know. How can I just survive cancer? I’ve gotta fight for others. That’s the whole idea where the ‘warrior’ came from. You can’t just survive; you’ve gotta fight. I’ve gotta go to war for other people.”
Everette didn’t know how close to home her campaign would come. About 18 months ago, Crowell, Everette’s mentor and the group’s biggest supporter, was diagnosed with breast cancer, reversing entirely the roles of mentor and mentee. In fact, the two friends laugh about how, when Crowell tearfully revealed her diagnosis, Everette channeled her grandmother.
“She was hard on me, but that’s what kicked me into place,” Crowell said. “She and Julie [Session] both said, ‘Stop your bellyachin’; it’s gonna be fine.’ I’ve always taken negatives and tuned them to positives. I just get knocked back for a wider span than they do.
It just takes me some time, but they got me through it.”
“There’s always somebody out there who has it worse than you do. You have to wake up every day and understand that and make the most of things. I feel more alive since I’ve been diagnosed than I’ve ever felt in my entire life.”
Though still in its infancy, Phyl’s Warriors raised enough money to serve 75 families at Little Rock’s Ronald McDonald House last year, as well as awarded its first scholarship to a student who has overcome a life challenge to reach college.
Everette lit up talking about these accomplishments and has big plans for the organization’s future — plans even her own tenuous health can’t curtail, she said. Last fall, Everette was again diagnosed with cancer, this time with breast cancer, kicking off another long road of treatments and surgery. On that subject, she just smiled and shrugged.
“You know, the day they called me, they were like, ‘We’re sorry we’ve got to tell you, but it’s breast cancer.’ I said, ‘OK, that’s fine,’” she said. “I told my auntie, and she said, ‘Are you crazy? What’s wrong with you?’ I said, ‘Oh it’s not a big deal. We’ve already done this before; it’s just another hurdle.’”
Everette then pulled out a beaded bracelet, the kind she makes and sells for the organization.
“The rough beads represent the road will be rough sometimes. These colored beads remind you that there’s always beauty, no matter what,” she said, then pointed to a small gold elephant. “The elephant is my thing. That means just keep pushing.
“It’s not like I’ll always be here. But one thing I can say is, I was here, and I made a difference.”
“I was here, and I made a difference.” Phyllis Everette CANCER SURVIVOR AND FOUNDER OF PHYL’S WARRIORS