Stories of Hope: After beating cancer, Game Nut owner ‘never wants to stop running’

Gene Nutt clearly remembers not knowing whether his wife, Dawn Villarreal-Nutt, would live and beat cancer. But she did. And there’s no stopping her now. “We’re just going to keep partying now,” she says.

Before being diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer in 2012, Dawn Villarreal-Nutt, 50, found plenty of joy in lounging around the house, watching movies and spending time with family, week after week.

But today, more than three years after an early morning trip to the hospital for what she thought was an overactive appendix frighteningly turned into a cancer diagnosis and surgery the same day, Villarreal-Nutt can’t stand still.

Since being deemed cancer-free in 2013, Villarreal-Nutt and her husband, Gene Nutt, constantly have been on the go, taking vacations, enjoying nights out with siblings and even volunteering one day a week at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, the place that saved her life.

“Now that she’s out of the woods, she never wants to stop running,” Gene Nutt says of his wife of 18 years. “This whole deal opened our eyes to the idea that we’re not going to be here forever, and we’re going to take advantage of the time we’ve got.”

Getting to that point wasn’t easy. But, boy, has it been worth it. In the past couple of years, Villarreal-Nutt and her husband have cruised the Caribbean, dined and danced at Mardi Gras in the Big Easy and have more fun planned for the future. This from the owners of Lawrence’s Game Nut stores who never took vacations unless they could tie them to business.

Stories of Hope

This profile provided by the Lawrence Memorial Hospital Endowment Association is one in a series of 12 about area cancer heroes. These survivors’ stories and photographs hang in the hallway leading to the LMH Oncology Center, offering hope to patients being cared for at LMH Oncology and their families. For more in the series, visit WellCommons.com.

After Dawn Villarreal-Nutt beat colon cancer, she decided she didn’t want to waste a minute of her life.

Complications ranging from a partially collapsed lung to a severely nicked artery, various infections and even a second surgery kept Villarreal-Nutt hospitalized for a month after the initial surgery to remove the lemon-sized tumor that doctors said may have been growing for 10 years. For Villarreal-Nutt, most of that time was a blur.

Her husband wasn’t so lucky. He remembers the entire yearlong battle, and his ability to recall even the scariest specifics helps keep the couple on the fast track to living life and laughing every day.

Nutt and a few LMH nurses who cared for Villarreal-Nutt admit now they were not sure she would survive. No one doubted Villarreal-Nutt’s toughness, and many said her attitude helped pull them through, but things were pretty scary at times. Nutt knew that. And it terrified him. But he never let Villarreal-Nutt in on the secret. Neither did the nurses.

“I just had no clue,” Villarreal-Nutt says. “I’m like, ‘Really? Was it that bad?’ I’m glad I don’t remember.”

Villarreal-Nutt’s husband, who refers to the day of Villarreal-Nutt’s first surgery as “straight shock,” remembers all of it. Thanks to the good outcome, he even can joke about it today.

“I got in trouble for not telling her how bad it was,” he says, laughing. “It was all about keeping her spirits up, and she did really well. She was a trouper.”

With the long days and scary nights of Villarreal-Nutt’s fight to beat cancer now behind them, life moves at a different pace for the parents of three adult daughters, Kadey, Ally and Jillian, and grandparents of 10-year-old Gaby. In addition to taking advantage of all of life’s pleasures, large and small, Villarreal-Nutt’s hospital checkups are becoming less frequent.

The couple does not spend a lot of time talking about her cancer, and her husband says Villarreal-Nutt was reluctant to share her story. But she says she gained strength from the stories of triumph hanging on the walls at LMH and wanted to be a source of hope and inspiration for her fellow warriors the way other survivors were for her.

“Those stories helped me,” Villarreal-Nutt says. “When I would walk by them, I was just so sick and I remember thinking, ‘These guys are done; I wish I was done.'”

She’s there now. And she’s getting stronger every day.

There was one time when Villarreal-Nutt and her husband openly talked with strangers about beating cancer, and it came on a cruise ship somewhere in the Caribbean on the final night of their first adventure following her treatment.

“People were saying, ‘We’re here celebrating this, we’re here celebrating that,'” Villarreal-Nutt remembers. “So I finally said, ‘We’re here celebrating that I just got done with chemo.’ That’s really the only time I talked about it, but I think about it all the time. It still kind of worries you. But I just have to keep on going. We’re not going to stop. We’re just going to keep partying now.”