Helen Davidson

Contributing Writer
Julia Brabant
May, 2024

Date of Diagnosis: Jan. 11, 2017

One Step at a Time: 7-Year Survivor Helen Davidson Turns Love of Polka Into Funding for Pancreatic Cancer

Many people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer don’t know anyone else who has it, but that wasn’t the case for Helen Davidson. Unfortunately, Helen knew a number of people affected by pancreatic cancer ahead of her diagnosis, with her home state of Wisconsin having a higher-than-average incidence rate for the condition.

Determined to confront her new reality head-on, Helen turned adversity into opportunity, taking her lifelong love of polka and transforming it into an annual fundraiser for pancreatic cancer research. Her dance has since had three successful installments, drawn hundreds of attendees and generated thousands of dollars for the cause.

Helen’s first polka fundraiser took place in 2022, commemorating Helen hitting five years of survivorship following her own cancer diagnosis. While she didn’t experience any major symptoms ahead of it, she’d learned she had diabetes following a minor heart attack years before and had since paid close attention to the color of her urine. So, when she noticed it turning the color of Coca-Cola, she called her doctor to schedule a checkup.

A subsequent CAT scan revealing a blocked bile duct or a tumor. A biopsy followed, with an eventual diagnosis of Borderline Stage 3 pancreatic cancer coming on Friday the 13th.

Because of where Helen’s tumor was, she was not an immediate candidate for surgery. She hoped this could change with treatment and started exploring clinical trials to see if she might be able to join one.

“My husband died of esophageal cancer,” Helen said. “He’d done a clinical trial when his cancer came back a second time, so I knew about them and what they could do.”

Helen’s trial involved undergoing chemotherapy and radiation with the hope of shrinking her cancer. It worked as hoped, and Helen was able to have a Whipple procedure, an intensive abdominal surgery that required about 19 days of hospital recovery, in June of 2017.

Dr. Douglas B. Evans of Froedtert & The Medical College of Wisconsin performed the complex surgery. After, Helen had follow-up, or “adjuvant” chemotherapy, which helped target any remaining cancer cells and reduce the risk of a recurrence.

The adjuvant chemo regimen also worked as Helen’s care team had hoped, and she hasn’t had any follow-up treatment since other than regular check-ups to monitor her condition. That said, it wasn’t always easy – adjusting to life after a Whipple presents its own set of challenges, and Helen’s status as a diabetic made her necessary dietary adjustments even more difficult to manage.

Helen also developed Stage 3 kidney disease after her surgery, but, to date, she has managed it well and avoided needing to take medications or have dialysis to treat it.

“I’m very careful with what I eat at home,” Helen said, noting that, most of the time. “That way, if someone wants to go to lunch or something, I can treat myself a little.”

Despite these diabetes and kidney-related setbacks, Helen feels lucky to be doing as well as she is.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better team of doctors,” she notes. “And I’ve been so lucky to have my family and my dearest friend and dance partner close by, too.”

Once Helen started putting a few years of survivorship under her belt, reaching that five-year mark seemed more and more attainable.

“I told myself, if you hit five years, you’re going to have a big survivor party – and you’re going to use it as an opportunity to raise money for pancreatic cancer research,” she said.

Helen did just that, and her first polka fundraiser was a success, generating hundreds of dollars in donations from attendees for research. It’s continued to grow in size and scope in the two editions held since, with the most recent installment racking up almost $2,000 for the cause.

“When you have something that’s free or donation-based, you don’t always know what people are going to do,” Helen said. “I couldn’t believe how many donations we got. Now, we have long-range plans in place to continue to do this until at least 2030.”

While Helen expressed her appreciation for the donors and supporters of her fundraiser, she also expressed gratitude for the non-financial contributions of her own family as well as her “polka family.”

“When I was diagnosed, some people acted like I was facing a death threat,” Helen said. “But there were a lot of people in the polka family who’d faced something similar. One knew a guy who’d been living with pancreatic cancer for 10 years. Those were the stories I needed to hear.”

Helen urges other people facing pancreatic cancer diagnoses to try their best to also focus on the positive – and stay in tune with their own bodies so they can easily recognize when something is amiss.

“I tell people, ‘You have to be aware of your own body,’” she said. “’You need to know when something isn’t right.’”

In the years since her diagnosis, Helen has deepened her involvement in the national pancreatic cancer community, joining more than 80 other pancreatic cancer patients and survivors at the Seena Magowitz Foundation’s annual “Dinner on the Diamond” event in 2023.

“I couldn’t believe how much I got from that,” Helen said, about meeting so many other people with pancreatic cancer as well as some of the country’s top researchers and physicians leading the fight against it. “I went somewhere where there were people who’d actually survived this cancer and saw for myself how survivor rates have improved since seven years ago.”

These days, Helen continues to have annual checkups to monitor her condition. She’s also in the planning stages of hosting her fourth-annual pancreatic cancer polka fundraiser, slated for April 2025.

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