Re­tired pri­ma­ry school teacher Mary Phillip sur­vived her fight with pan­cre­at­ic can­cer al­most two years ago.

To­day, she re­mains con­cerned that her bat­tle is not yet over.

In Sep­tem­ber 2014, Phillip be­gan ex­pe­ri­enc­ing an itch­ing sen­sa­tion deep un­der her skin and what she thought then was acid re­flux.

Af­ter the symp­toms per­sist­ed for about three weeks, she went to her doc­tor who di­ag­nosed her con­di­tion as the mos­qui­to-borne dis­ease, Chikun­gun­ya, and treat­ed her for it.

A week lat­er, there was no im­prove­ment and Phillip vis­it­ed the phar­ma­cist who sug­gest­ed her con­di­tion may be as a re­sult of an al­ler­gy and rec­om­mend­ed med­ica­tion for it which, af­ter five days, al­so did not work.

The 64-year-old woman even­tu­al­ly went to a pri­vate hos­pi­tal to have some tests run to try to fig­ure out what was wrong. A blood test point­ed to an is­sue with her liv­er, which was lat­er con­firmed with an ul­tra­sound.

Mary was then re­ferred to gas­troen­terol­o­gist Maria Bartholomew.

“In De­cem­ber of that same year (2014) I did an en­doscopy and she (Bartholomew) said that there was tis­sue block­ing my bile duct…be­cause the bile was seep­ing out, I had to get some­thing—they called it a stent—that they would put in that would di­vert the bile back in­to the in­testines so that I would no longer have the itch­ing and the jaun­dice—and it worked,” she said.

Sev­er­al oth­er tests were run such as mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing (MRI), com­put­ed to­mog­ra­phy (CT) scan, which still did not re­veal what Bartholomew want­ed to see.

“So she asked me if I can go to Venezuela to do what they call an en­do­scop­ic ul­tra­sound (ESU) be­cause we have no ma­chines in Trinidad.”

In May of 2015, Phillip head­ed for Venezuela where the ESU was done and “the doc­tor said they are do­ing the biop­sy but what­ev­er the re­sult, I need to do surgery.”

“He said, lis­ten you all need to move quick­ly on this and if you want, I can or­gan­ise for you to do the surgery right here in Venezuela be­cause my good friend is a doc­tor in that area and he’s very good. So we did,” she said.

On her re­turn to Trinidad, she did eight more tests and sent over the re­sults to the Venezue­lan doc­tor. She re­turned to Venezuela in Ju­ly for the surgery where she spent five weeks re­cu­per­at­ing. Back home, she had to un­der­go eight cy­cles of chemother­a­py in Oc­to­ber 2015 and af­ter nine months, she was cleared of can­cer.

She con­tin­ues to vis­it the hos­pi­tal and un­der­go tests. To her hor­ror, can­cer was de­tect­ed again late last year.

“They rec­om­mend­ed right away that I do chemother­a­py to blank out what­ev­er it is. I start­ed back but it wasn’t go­ing well so right now I’m on a break…my body was not re­act­ing well to the chemo,” she said.

Phillip at­trib­ut­es all her suc­cess­es while fight­ing the dis­ease to God and puts her fate in his hands.

“I de­pend on God and he is not let­ting me down. I de­pend on him for fi­nance, I de­pend on him for prop­er at­ten­tion by the doc­tors and whomev­er. So he is lead­ing and guid­ing every­thing I am do­ing.”