RECOVERY MISSION
One woman’s incredible journey defying cancer
WHEN mother of four Edie Littlefield Sundby was diagnosed with Stage 4 gallbladder cancer in 2007, the first doctors she consulted gave her only three months to live.
With her cancer having spread to eight other organs, Sundby’s medical team said her chances of surviving beyond that point were a measly 1 percent — and began to talk of palliative care and hospice. But Sundby, then 55, was having none of it.
She sought a second opinion from Stanford University School of Medicine’s Dr. George Fisher, one of the world’s leading oncologists and a member of the team that treated Apple founder Steve Jobs for pancreatic cancer. Fisher encouraged Sundby to continue treatment, which ultimately included 79 rounds of aggressive chemotherapy and four extensive surgeries that entailed the removal of a lung.
It was the fight of her life — literally — with a long recovery and multiple setbacks. To celebrate beating the odds and entering remission, Sundby vowed to complete a challenge: She would walk the entire 1,600-mile historical El Camino Real, a trail connecting historic missions from Loreto, Mexico, to Sonoma in Northern California.
“I said to myself, ‘I might be missing one lung and part of my liver, but I still have two feet. I’m going to keep moving,’ ” Sundby, now 65, tells The Post. “I thought, ‘If I can move, I’m not sick.’ ”
Now, 17 months after returning from the grueling trip and with her cancer still “behaving itself,” she has released a memoir of the journey: “The Mission Walker: I Was Given Three Months To Live” (Thomas Nelson; out now).
In it, the deeply religious Sundby chronicles her painstaking trek, which followed in the footsteps of Father Junípero Serra, the revered Roman Catholic Franciscan priest who traversed the trail in the 1770s.
Sundby, who lives in San Diego, says she’s always held a fascination for the Californian missions, 21 of which are scattered along the dramatic coastline up to Sonoma, many in cities such as San Luis Obispo. An additional 14 missions — most languishing in ruins far from modern comforts — were built in what is now Mexico.
As “The Mission Walker” reveals, Sundby was forced to complete her journey in two stages. The first, a 58-day odyssey starting in February 2013, often saw Sundby walking alongside traffic on the perilous Pacific Coast Highway. She slept in a camper van — and often had company in the form of friends or her husband, Dale. Soon after hitting the 800-mile mark, however, she learned her cancer had returned.
Sundby was undaunted. The adventure picks up in 2015, when Sundby hits the 800-mile trail in Mexico after finishing treatment. Accompanied by a hired crew of machete-wielding cowboys known as vaqueros, Sundby braved scorching desert heat, narrow mountain passes and the constant threat of rattlesnakes and scorpions. Cactus plants tore mercilessly at her body as she negotiated the inhospitable landscape — even when she was riding a mule.
“[The wilderness] was the hardest part of the walk,” says Sundby, who mostly slept in a tiny tent during this two-month leg of the trek. “Every single thing in Mexico has a thorn. It’s no wonder the cactus has names like Devil’s Crawl and Devil’s Dagger.”
Nevertheless, Sundby was determined to pay her respects at each mission, no matter its state of disrepair.
“When you’ve had Stage 4 cancer, it puts things in perspective,” she says. “I prayed to God that if he had plans to take me, he’d do it on the mountainous mission trail, where there is nothing but an 18-inch ledge between you and a ravine.
“I’d rather die that way than have cancer kill me.”