Woman beat cancer, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro
Ten years ago, Tobi Sample was dying.
She had stage 4 melanoma, and it wasn’t responding to treatment. Her family went on what they believed would be her last vacation. She and her husband discussed hospice. She wrote letters for her daughters to read at the life milestones that they would experience without their mom.
But Sample survived — and this month, she climbed one of the world’s tallest mountains.
“I’m kind of one of those patients who doesn’t follow the rules all the time, I guess,” she said Thursday.
Sample’s trek to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, previously reported by Louisville-based television station WDRB, was both a fundraiser for a charity working in Rwanda and an opportunity to show herself how far she has come since her diagnosis. Sample, 49, is among numerous people who have made the grueling journey after surviving a serious disease that forced them to confront the uncertainty of being granted each day.
Her own brush with mortality came in 2013, when she regularly endured excruciating pain. A tumor pressed on her spinal cord. Another started to erode her collarbone. The only drug available for her specific condition made one of her tumors quadruple in size.
By that summer, Sample was reliant on supplemental oxygen and could barely get out of bed. Her family thought she had months to live.
“It was just this weird twilight of doctors’ appointments and hopelessness and panic and grief,” said her husband, Stephen Sample.
Then, Stephen Sample found a clinical trial that sounded promising. He and his wife’s sister divided up a list of participating hospitals and started making calls. After a hospital in North Carolina said Tobi Sample could join its program, she traveled there from southern Indiana for treatment every three weeks for a year.
The new drug worked. In 2015, a scan came back with miraculous news: Sample showed no evidence of active disease.
Free of pain, she started to revive her pre-cancer life. She returned to running half marathons and burned the letters that she had written to her daughters. Then she decided to hike Kilimanjaro to benefit Africa New Life, a Christian charity through which she sponsored a Rwandan girl’s education.
Sample’s doctor was unamused by the idea. He warned her that the tumor erosion in her arm meant that she could break a bone by brushing her hair, much less by attempting to summit a more than 19,000-foot peak.
Her husband was less concerned. He said he knew she was tough, and he didn’t worry about her bones or her body. Instead, he said, he warned his wife not to let her stubbornness inspire her to push through debilitating altitude sickness.
“I’ve been married to her for 25 years, and one thing that I have learned is that Tobi will do what Tobi says she’s going to do,” Stephen Sample said. “If something goes wrong, she’ll deal with it then.”
Tobi Sample was initially supposed to hike the mountain in 2020, but the trip was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. With ample time to train, Sample said she went on runs and did interval training to prepare. She had not hiked extensively before, but she felt confident that she could handle the trip.
On Feb. 1, Sample and 17 other people began the trek up Kilimanjaro in northeast Tanzania. The group walked mostly uphill for six and a half days: five miles one day, 10 on another, seven on another. They carried backpacks stuffed with clothes for all weather while porters from a guide service carried their bigger bags from one camp to the next.
Each day felt like being on a different mountain, Sample said. Parts of the journey passed through rainforest, while other parts required basic rock climbing. Through it all, the guides encouraged the hikers by reminding them to move “polepole” — Swahili for “slowly.”
On summit day, the group woke up from a brief sleep at 12:30 a.m. They traveled through the night and reached the top in daylight.
Sample had a terrible altitude headache and was desperate to sleep. But she felt tremendous gratitude at what she had accomplished, despite doctors warning that cancer had worn down her body.
“I felt just so thankful that I could carry a 25pound backpack on my back that I shouldn’t be able to carry,” she said. “There’s no explanation for that.”
After the hike, Sample flew with the group to Rwanda for a celebration with the sponsored children. She had raised $13,945 for Africa New Life’s food program and was grateful to see the money go to a community that she had come to love.
Betty Davis, a spokeswoman for the charity, said knowing what Sample had endured bolstered other hikers’ motivation when they struggled to keep moving.
“Those days on the mountain are really hard,” Davis said. “And just knowing what she’s gone through and what she’s conquered and how God has helped her through it, it’s just really amazing.”
Tobi Sample, her husband said, is living a life that should not exist. He said she has spent much of the time that she got back trying to prove that not only can she live a normal life, but she can thrive.
With her Kilimanjaro trek behind her, Sample has an opportunity to decide on her next big move. One of her ideas is rooted in her experience of the past decade: Inspired by her journey with melanoma, Sample worked a few years ago as an oncology nurse, helping other people with cancer fight the disease.
Her next adventure, she said, might be returning to that role.