PICKENS - The day after Thanksgiving, LeJette Gatlin was sent home from the hospital with a nurse from hospice - a fate usually reserved for those with no hope of recovery.
So how is that now, more than three months later, she is up and about, considering running for another term as Pickens County Clerk of Court and most days, despite chemotherapy treatments, showing few outward signs of illness?
"I don't know," said Gatlin, who was diagnosed last summer with cancer on both lungs and her liver. "They sent me home in November with hospice. Then about four weeks ago, we went to Vanderbilt University to get a second opinion. They suggested two drugs that might help, and we started with those.
"I just got to feeling better," she added. "Right now, I feel like I've got a miracle."
Gatlin had worked for more than 20 years in the Clerk of Court's office before Oliver Nealy retired. She was elected to the office in 2000, then re-elected in 2004.
She was active in directing the modernization of the office as the Pickens County court system belatedly moved into the 21st Century.
Until ...
Until she and her husband, George, were at the Azalea Festival in Pickens last April when she got sick. She had earlier noticed a chronic lack of energy, but thought little of it.
The following weekend, she said, she thought she might be having a heart attack. Tests turned up nothing.
Two weeks later, she said, she felt the chest pains again.
"We went to the hospital," she said. "They told my daughter, Lisa (Bryant), and she told me to see my family doctor."
They discovered the cancer, and last fall she began chemotherapy treatments that led to the congestive heart failure that put her in the hospital for three weeks before she went home with hospice.
"I told them, 'No, no, I'm not ready for that,'" Gatlin said. "They gave me less than six months."
Now, the new treatments that may lead to her "miracle" have allowed her to go to work and to spend precious time with family - George, Lisa and her husband Mark Bryant, Renee and her husband Bruce Anders, and grandchildren Isaac, Gatlin, Mason and Emily.
"I don't how I would have done it without them," Gatlin said. "If it hadn't been for them, I wouldn't have made it."
She has also drawn strength from her staff, noting how they helped her when couldn't get to the office.
"I don't know if it's the chemotherapy or being told you have only a few months to live," Gatlin continued, "but some days you get so depressed you don't want to get out of bed. These people gave me strength. That's why I'm here now."
She's back at work full-time for the past month, other than the Fridays when she has chemotherapy treatments, and she is pondering running for re-election.
But first, she awaits results of an MRI to come in later this week.
"I'm waiting until after that to decide," she said. "They said if I they can just shrink it 30 to 40 percent, we can control it."
Whether she runs for re-election or not, LeJette Gatlin, having wrestled the toughest opponent of her life to a draw, is a fighter ready to take on all challengers.
"I told a couple of them who were talking about running to wait," she joked. "I said, 'I'm still here. I'm not going anywhere.'"
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