Only On 2: Nevada Woman Who Drove 500 Miles For Chemo Treatment In O.C. Finds Angels
ORANGE (CBSLA.com) — Traffic can be stressful enough, but what if your commute is 250 miles each way.
And on top of it, your commute includes chemotherapy treatments.
A Nevada woman found herself having to drive to the Southland and back for weeks to fight her cancer.
That is, until some local angels in the guise of her nurses stepped up.
It's a story that is Only On 2.
LeeAnn Brill has been battling a breast tumor she calls "the barnacle."
Brill was in a celebratory mood Wednesday reported CBS2's Michele Gile.
It was her final day of chemo after 12 tough weeks.
Her painful ordeal was complicated by the fact she had to drive 500 miles round trip from her home in Henderson, Nev., to treatment in Orange County.
Her nurses had a plan to make the ordeal a little less stressful.
"Our jaws dropped a little. We thought, how are we going to help this woman?" said Jennifer Higgins, a clinical social worker. "Every time I see LeeAnn she always has a smile on her face. And with the Angels Flights, she says she feels like a celebrity with them."
More than a dozen pilots donated their time as well as their money and their planes to ferry Brill and her husband Mike back and forth to her treatments via plane.
They were all strangers but they have become lifelong friends.
"It's just amazing to me that these men and women do this," says Brill. "And we have become friends with many of them because of this. They continue to call, email, text me."
While Brill is saying goodbye to chemo on this Wednesday, she's not saying goodbye to her California family.
She'll be back at UCI Medical Center in September for a mastectomy.