In early 2001, Mom (Inge) was diagnosed with Stage 3 ovarian cancer. She had surgery and then grueling chemotherapy. Already a gourmet chef, she changed the food she bought and how she cooked it. And she held off the cancer for a decade.
In around May 2010, the periodic tests she underwent revealed three new growths in her pelvis, lung, and neck. She responded by even more radically altering her diet, lost fifty pounds, and, six months later, saw one growth disappear and another grow smaller. One stayed the same. In July 2011, she had the tumor in her lung removed; a biopsy showed it had shrunk yet again, from 12 to 9 millimeters, but that it was cancerous.
In the weeks before her surgery, though, Inge had decided she wanted to walk the Camino de Santiago, in northern Spain. She began training on the trails around the Black Canyon, and convinced her son, Cameron, to go to Spain with her.
Inge was born in Erlangen, Germany, in 1944, and, after stints as a governess in Bavaria and England, as a student at the Cordon Bleu School of Cooking, and as a flight attendant in New York City, she emigrated to the United States, in 1963. She now lives in Montrose, Colorado.
