You knew Ray Burrow; everyone around here did. In fact, after a photo of his family went viral, people all over the world heard of him. Ray died in May after a two-and-a-half year war with cancer. And now his widow Christy wants two things: to make everyone aware there is a vaccine available to prevent the type of cancer Ray had, and to give Ray’s death at least some degree of purpose by providing a community scholarship in his memory. It’s her mission now, she says, because she promised him.
Ray died of throat cancer. He was only 40, and quite healthy, when he developed a sore throat. It was the first sign that something was amiss in their idyllic world, she says.
“Life was perfect; life was great. We were busy, constantly going places with our children, doing things. We just lived life to the fullest. Always had.”
Ray was a family man and adored his three children and lap dog. He worked for Unilever in Raeford. “He worked really hard,” Christy says. “Worked all the time. He loved being a licensed electrician. He enjoyed problem solving, trouble-shooting, and being able to repair the problem.”
In the fall of 2014 doctors thought Ray’s sore throat might have been strep or an enlarged tonsil—“It just didn’t scream cancer,” Christy says.
But then came Halloween and a crowd of friends and family gathered at the Burrow house—children central—where Zaidee was 13, Ava was 10 and Nathan was 6—for the usual trick-or-treating in the neighborhood.
“The house is full of people,” Christy says, “and I go into to wake him up, and he stands up and says, ‘I feel like somebody’s punching me in the neck. I feel like I’m going to pass out. Something’s not right.’
“We knew something was seriously wrong, but Ray asked me to carry on, and not disrupt the children’s enjoyment for the holiday. I put a poker face on, and shut the door, and told everybody he was still really tired from working the night before.”
The next morning it was off to the ER. “The ER doctor thought it was probably a salivary stone, but ‘let’s do a CT scan,’” she says.
“November third his cell phone was ringing about 8 o’clock. The ENT office in Pinehurst said ‘come up here now.’ He called me at work and I met him there, and they ran a scope down his throat, and saw the tumor and told us right away ‘you have stage four cancer.’”
“He was shocked. We felt like he was invincible. He could do anything; he could fix anything...nothing ever seemed to stop him. That stopped him in his tracks, for sure. He never imagined himself getting sick like that.”
Of course, the first concern, Christy says, was for the children. “We told the kids daddy is sick and he has cancer, but we were always very realistic,” she says.
Then they decided: “Fight or flight; we gotta do it. No turning back.”
They chose fight, and “Fight Durty” was born. The name stemmed from Ray’s Harley-riding days when he was nicknamed “Durty” because of his blacked-out bikes.
At first Fight Durty was a grass-roots mantra of support for the Burrow family as Christy posted updates on Facebook.
“I swear it was like we had a little army—a Fight Durty army of soldiers that just rallied and would send us messages and cards and always praying for us staying positive and encouraging us constantly,” she says.
“There are still so many good people left in this world. And we’ve had complete strangers we don’t even know do things for us.
“People step up when you’re in need—so many people have really, really just come in and helped carry this load and burden with us.”
People pitched in to care for children, to raise money, to help with household chores. Hundreds from all over the world followed the fight on Facebook: multiple rounds of chemotherapy, 40 radiation treatments, numerous surgeries, reports of hope, setbacks. There’s a picture of Ray wearing his Fight Durty t-shirt, his back to the camera, raising a middle finger to cancer.
In February 2016, Ray chose to have surgery, a radical neck dissection, to try to remove the tumor and prolong his life. This surgery resulted in a tracheotomy and a permanent feeding tube.
“They couldn’t get all of daddy’s cancer,” Christy remembers reporting to the children that day. “We went and cried along with my momma and his parents and sister.
“We dried our tears up, and we decided to fight again.”
Ray was spending a lot of time at UNC hospital. “Chapel Hill was amazing—his second home. You always knew they would pull a rabbit out of the hat,” Christy says. With every setback the staff there came up with a new plan.
Until early 2017. None of the clinical trials they had tried were working. It left only debilitating not-likely-to-work drugs as an option.
After the decision was made to call in hospice, Ray lived four weeks. During that time, he chose to put cancer aside and celebrate the life he had lived. One of his wishes was to get together with friends and family and have a big bonfire to burn his radiation masks, so that’s what they did. He told Christy, “Don’t cry over me. I have lived a full life.”
“We put our faith in God,” she says. “When you accept that man had done all that he can do and that truly your fate is in the hands of God and that it means you are going to pass, and that you can’t fight this any longer, and you’re going to leave this world, it’s putting your faith in action.
“It’s not just talking the talk; it’s walking the walk.”
They concentrated on living the last days to the fullest—taking pictures, like the ones of the children in wedding dresses and graduation gowns so Ray could have a taste of those moments; another trip to the beach.
“A week before he passed he said, ‘I want to go to the beach,’ and he meant it. He went right into the bedroom and started packing and getting dressed and I had to start making phone calls,” Christy says. “We went, and when we came home, he passed away four days later.”
Ray died May 11, three weeks shy of his and Christy’s 20-year wedding anniversary.
“Some people think that death signifies that the battle was lost to cancer; however, cancer never wins—love wins,” she says.
It’s been only a few months, but Christy is making good on her promise to him.
She’s already started the Fight Durty Foundation, Inc., and has events lined up at the Hoke Fall Festival and elsewhere. She’s has Fight Durty t-shirts, made to sell and raise money for the foundation. She’s working on setting up a scholarship.
But priority one is trying to make sure no one else gets throat cancer.
It all boils down to a vaccine.
“Oh my gosh, there’s a vaccine to prevent cancer!” says Dr. Christoph Diasio at Sandhills Pediatrics in Raeford. He’s joined forces with Christy to get this message out: “That, by God, every child ought to get this vaccine,” he says.
“This is an unbelievable gift from science, human ingenuity and God—that we have a vaccine against cancer—a leading form of cancer. And that if Ray had been young enough, that he would have been able to get this vaccine; he would still be with his family. We don’t have a time machine, but we can prevent cancer in all these young people.”
The vaccine is Gardasil 9, and it has proven effective in preventing cancers from Human Papillomavirus (HPV).
“When [the vaccine] first came out it was all about cervical cancer,” Diasio says. “As the vaccine came out, people started wondering are other cancers HPV associated. So researchers then figured out that many other cancers —oral cancers, rectal cancers, penile cancers, genital warts—all these things are tied to HPV.
Evidence over the last decade is that the vaccine works against them all.
“The fascinating thing about HPV,” he says, “is that...if you have a group of 30-year-olds, and you test them, you can find that almost everyone’s been infected with HPV by the time they’re 30. But what we don’t know is why some people go on and develop cancer. Since we don’t know who those people are our scientists were smart enough and by the grace of God figured it out so that we can come up with a way to use the immune system to teach it that as soon as it sees that virus, go destroy this and it basically never has a chance to get in and modify your DNA and you don’t get cancer.
“I mean it works!”
Diasio says there should be no reluctance for parents to have their children—boys and girls—vaccinated from 9 to 26 years old, and the sooner the better.
“My own boys got the vaccine—my youngest started at 9 or 10. I certainly don’t have any expectations my 10-year-old is going to go out and have sex with people this weekend but I have seen people that age and younger who have been sexually assaulted. And would I ever forgive myself if I missed the opportunity to protect a child against a terrible disease?”
Most insurance and Medicaid cover it, and only two doses are needed for children under 15 (three for ages 15 to 26).
“The plea, based on Christy’s experience with her family, is that no child should be deprived of this vaccine,” he says. “People are missing the big news that they can protect their child against cancer— why would you say no to that?”
Christy had already had her oldest child vaccinated before Ray’s diagnosis. She says as a health care professional (a dental hygienist), she had been aware of its importance. But, of course, it got personal.
One day, she says, Ray was watching TV and an ad for Gardasil came on. There was that standard wording beneath the person talking, labeling him as an actor.
“That should be my face,” he told Christy. “People need to see me. People need to see what it really does to you if you choose not to get vaccinated.”
She says, “And I told him I’d make that my mission.
“So we’re working toward it.”
