Cancer vaccine trial patient alive 22 years after being given 6 months to live

By Justin Berger

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    ASHEVILLE, North Carolina (WLOS) — It was Christmas 2001. Mary Carol Abercrombie had melanoma for a year and it was about to get worse.

“My doctors called me and I was like, ‘Ooh, this is really bad isn’t it, this is not good,'” Abercrombie said. “Both of them said to me, I’ll never forget this either, ‘You just enjoy Christmas.’ I guess that was the first time that I thought, OK, I might not be there to see my son get married. I’m a very positive person and that was like the cold water in the face.”

Abercrombie’s year-long cycle of alpha interferon, a treatment for her melanoma, had just ended.

“The side effects were horrendous,” she said. “It was hell, actually. As soon as I got off of it, my cancer metastasized, and I found out about it two days before Christmas.”

Her doctors told her she only had months left.

But at the time, her oncology surgeon was working on a melanoma trial vaccine with Dr. Tom Wagner in Greenville.

“I went in to see him, and I’ll never forget, he had a picture of Einstein over his desk. And I thought, ‘Oh, no I’m way in out of my league,’” Abercrombie said. “What he told me was he hadn’t had anybody survive yet, but the people that he had under his trial, they had lived longer and they’d lived without many side effects. And I was like, ‘Sign me up,’ because there wasn’t anything out there.”

Abercrombie was patient No. 3. She got a shot every other month for a year and a half.

Suddenly, her terminal timeline transformed.

“With Dr. Wagner’s vaccine, I was able to go and do, just tired, that was it,” Abercrombie said.

She said Wagner told her a story about when he spoke at a convention with other oncology doctors.

He asked his peers a question.

“How many of y’all have a patient that has survived 20 years? And they said, ‘Oh, that’s easy, none,'” Abercrombie said of Wagner. “Then, he puts my folder in front of them.”

More than 20 years later, she’s had no reoccurrences and was able to attend her son’s wedding.

Now, she has four grandchildren. They call her Big.

“I’m called Mary Carol, MC and Big, and Big is definitely my favorite name,” she said.

So, 22 Christmases after she was given three to six months to live, a grateful patient still exchanges Christmas cards with the man who changed her life.

“I’m still here, which is very humbling, to say the least,” Abercrombie said. “There’s so much hope out there, and I do think that people like Dr. Wagner, that there is going to be a cure for cancer with early detection and with immunotherapy.”

Abercrombie said during her first round of treatment she started viewing frogs as more than just an amphibian.

“Frogs can only jump forward,” she said. “They can’t go backwards; they can’t go to the side. They can only go forwards. And I was like, that’s a direct message, that’s going to be my thing, that’s going to be my thing, Lord. I’m just going to go forward, no matter what’s happening. No matter what’s happening, I’m just going to take a step forward, a step forward, a step forward.”

Then, she said a couple weeks later she went through her jewelry drawer looking for a pin.

“There was one of those braided bracelets, like What Would Jesus Do, but it had F R O G, Fully Rely On God,” Abercrombie said.

“FROG, I was like, ‘Woah, woah and woah.’”

In the hospital, without knowing, her friends brought her a stuffed frog.

And when she took the call about her cancer reoccurrence in 2001, it was on her daughter’s Kermit the Frog phone.

“He’s telling me this bad news, and I’m on the phone going, like, this is OK, I’m talking on a frog phone, it’s going to be OK,” Abercrombie said.

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