Remembering Heather Burcham
July 24th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Heather Burcham, the woman who made multiple impassioned appearances at the Capitol to argue for the importance of the HPV vaccine, lost her battle with cervical cancer Saturday. She died in Houston at age 31.
Because of an initial misdiagnosis when she was 26, Burcham and her doctors didn’t discover the cancer until it was too late. She lived the final months of her life devoted to telling people about the dangers of HPV and cervical cancer, a devotion that landed her at the center of a political firestorm last legislative session.
“I don’t want to have lived in vain. I don’t want my life to have no purpose whatsoever,” she told ABC News in February, when she was named their Person of the Week. “And if I can help spread the word about cervical cancer, and the HPV vaccine, then I haven’t lived in vain.”
I remember seeing Burcham in the Capitol on several occasions. The first time I happened to sit behind her at a committee hearing, after she had just endured her first day in the media spotlight, doing photo ops with the governor and interviews with state outlets. The committee hearing started very late, and then the initial “expert” testimony ran for several hours. You could see the struggle Burcham was having with her body — exhaustion pressing heavier and heavier on her slender frame.
In the end, that night Burcham was outlasted by habitual sophists like Dennis Bonnen, whose bill led the charge against Perry’s vaccine mandate. Sometime around midnight, Burcham turned to the Perry staffers who had been accompanying and supporting her and indicated she just couldn’t hold out any longer.
(Whatever disagreements one can have with Perry over his handling of the vaccine or the cruelty of his beloved tort reform to limit the access patients like Burcham have to the judicial system, we respect the sincerity in his relationship with her.)
Hours later, hearing chairwoman Dianne White Delisi called out Burcham’s name to testify. It was early in the session at that point, but looking back I can remember no moment simply so sad as the silence when no response came. Delisi instructed the clerk to record Heather Burcham — against the bill, not testifying.
Near the end of the session, the governor played a personal message from Burcham at the press conference announcing he would not veto the bill blocking his vaccine mandate. The video is available on YouTube and embedded below. Observer coverage of the HPV saga is here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.
June 10th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Why was her cancer misdiagnosed. The trained cytologist who missed her cancer on the microscope analysis should be accountable, and not left to miss cancer cells of other young patients.