Long before she took on America's embattled health-care system, Nancy Davenport-Ennis was riding high. She was a national speaker for the homebuilding and real estate industry, teaching classes at the University of North Carolina and writing a textbook about selling new homes. Her husband, Jack, ran a successful funeral parlor and they had two daughters in good private schools. Then, Davenport-Ennis got breast cancer.
"My diagnosis was probably the best thing that ever happened in my life," Davenport-Ennis said. "Until that diagnosis, I was so focused on my own family, my own community and my own career, that I really was not sensitized to what happens to you if you're diagnosed with a life-threatening illness."
But this isn't a self-help story. It's about a woman who got angry and decided to change the world.
Two years after her own diagnosis, a close friend of Davenport-Ennis was found to have advanced breast cancer. "She was told there were no options for treatment," said Davenport-Ennis. Cheryl Grimmel was 31 years old. "She had a 12-year-old son, and she essentially was making legal arrangements for what was going to happen next.
"I just felt there was a travesty, that a 31-year-old woman needed to have a second opinion, that a 31-year-old woman needed to have options."
Davenport-Ennis took charge of Grimmel's case calling hospitals, calling Grimmel's insurance company, calling her own doctors at Duke University Hospital and getting her into a clinical trial for an experimental drug.
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