This is the 17th in a series of close encounters with death by Jamaicans, some of them in prominent positions of the society

EVERYONE who knew Latoya Jones, even the team of doctors gathered at her hospital bed last year, was convinced that she would have died.

“She had stage four cancer, which is the highest stage. She could not talk, walk, and there was no feeling in her right leg. She could only communicate by writing,” her husband Lloyd Jones told the Jamaica Observer last week.

“We thought that she was going to die when she was admitted to hospital last year June,” he added.

Latoya gave more details of her story, saying that while she was a patient in the University Hospital of the West Indies in Kingston she heard the doctors talking among themselves that she would die.

“One day… the doctors came by my bedside and because I could not talk, they felt that I could not hear also. So one told the others that I was not going to make it… that I would die, at which point I tapped my fingers on the rail of the bed, and wrote that I could hear them. They were shocked. One of them said ‘sorry, that’s not what we meant’,” she related.

But Lloyd and Latoya — who were not yet married — were determined that she would live.

“I prayed to God every day for her to get better and live even one more day so that we could get baptised,” Lloyd recalled, while Latoya — demonstrating a strong faith in God — asked that her pastor at Power of Faith Church on Grove Road in Kingston, Rev Troy Grant, come to pray for her.

“When Pastor Grant came with his wife and a counsellor, he prayed for her and said ‘Latoya, yu get yu healing, now move your foot in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. If you believe in the Lord, yu get your healing, now move your foot’,” Lloyd recalled.

“I also told her to ‘move your foot, babes’, and immediately after, her toes, which she had not moved for a long time, started to move,” Lloyd said, sobbing as he recollected the miraculous moment.

“The same doctor who said that she would not make it was amazed when she began to talk again. If you see her now, she walks, runs and jumps. She came right around and left hospital in July, a month after she was admitted,” said Lloyd.

“She has an indomitable spirit. We were planning to get married in September of last year, shortly before she went into hospital,” he added.

Latoya and Lloyd got married at the Registrar General’s Department in Spanish Town on September 29 last year. They were baptised on October 2 at the Power of Faith Church.

The 28-year-old primary school teacher’s battle with cancer — with which she was diagnosed at age 18 — was just the latest in a string of life-threatening events, she experienced.

According to her, she was left to die on a railway line three days after birth and has tried to hang herself twice.

“At three days old I was put on a rail line in Spanish Town and left for dead by my mother, whom I have since forgiven,” she said.

“A friend of my mother heard me crying. She said she heard something sounding like ‘a little puss’, listened again and when she moved toward the sounds, she said ‘but nuh ‘Sister’ pickney that?’ She took me up and when she reached back at her house, she called my mother and asked where is the baby, and she told her that I had died.

“I lived with that same lady in Niagara, near Maggoty in St Elizabeth until I was 11 years old when she died. The lady who found me died at age 84 on the same day that I found out I had passed the Common Entrance for Maggotty High. I had gone home and given her the result and later that night she passed away,” Latoya said.

She said she slept beside the dead woman and the following day she told a neighbour that the old woman had died.

The death of her guardian opened up another chapter in her gruelling life.

“I had no one to take care of me, so the police got involved and planned to send me to a children’s home,” she said. “I got away from the police station at Maggotty, reached Santa Cruz, slept on the piazza for the night until I was picked up by police the next morning.

“So as not to go to a children’s home, I told the police that I would go and live with my foster sister, whom they contacted and who promised to send me to school, but instead I had to work in her shop and bar as a bartender and I also had to wash, cook and clean, all at age 11,” she said.

When she was 14, Latoya said she ran away from Spanish Town to Montego Bay, based upon the prompting of a friend, who said that there would be adequate accommodation there.

But that was not the case, as when they got there Latoya — who had no high school education — soon had to fend for herself again.

She got a job in a wholesale store and lived in a rented house. However, the police caught up with her again when they went there to investigate a report of a rape that was filed by her friend, which, Latoya said, turned out to be false.

She was taken to a police station and was later ‘adopted’ by Montego Bay resident Brenda Williams and her husband Boris Williams, whom she acknowledges as her ‘real parents’.

The Williamses, she said, sent her to New Era Business Institute on Barnett Street, where she pursued nine CXC subjects and by age 15 got all nine in final examinations, inspired by Ben Carson’s book Think Big.

The achievement allowed her to enrol in Northern Caribbean University (NCU), where she said she completed an associate degree and later a bachelor’s degree in education. However, a falling out with her parents before she had completed the first phase of her education resulted in a parting of ways and another chapter in her life was about to unfold.

It was after that disagreement that she decided to end her life, a move that was thwarted by a faulty rope.

“I just bought a piece of rope and said that the best way to solve all of this was tie it in a tree and jump off. When I did that the rope burst, and I just cried and said that it wasn’t to happen,” she said.

The disagreement led to Latoya moving to Kingston with a male companion, whom she did not like, but ended up marrying shortly after she turned 21.

Her knowledge of hairdressing, learned from her adopted mother, allowed her to engage in that vocation part-time and helped her fund her way through NCU.

“I started NCU when I was 16 and found out that I had cancer by 18. I had a lump in my left breast from I was a little girl and it felt nice to feel it and suck my finger at the same time,” she said.

“But one night the breast got swollen and the nipple turned red and I had to go to the doctor the next morning. They had to cut the breast and remove the lump. I got the mammogram in less than two days. The result showed that I had cancer.

“I asked, ‘why me God’?

“My boyfriend was playing around in the relationship. Things like that stressed me out. The doctor said that it was a risk for me to have a child, but I went ahead and got pregnant.

“When I found out that I had cancer, the doctors said that I had to do chemotherapy. It was in stage one at the time. I had my son at age 21. He was born with the rare blood disease G6PD deficiency, which affects male babies only. It breaks down the red blood cells easily,” she said.

Further problems in her marriage, she said, increased the stress that led to her supporting another hardware store.

“I went and bought a piece of rope and this time I tested it to see if it would break again. I was living at Duhaney Park and while thinking of committing suicide I rode my bicycle towards Duhaney Park Primary School. At the time they were having a church service out there at the New Testament Church of God and I walked in there, sat down and the pastor was saying ‘somebody is going to hang tonight’,” she related.

“My eyes were filled with water, because I did not tell the pastor anything. He said again ‘somebody in the house is going to kill himself or herself, but the devil is a liar’, and he talked and talked and preached, and I got up and went outside to sit. He sent for me outside, but I didn’t go in. The pastor came outside to me and said ‘I am going to pray for you tonight, you are not going home with the problem’. I just started crying. He prayed and I felt much lighter. He said ‘don’t make the devil overcome you, don’t give the devil a chance to win’.

Her marriage, she said, worsened, so did her cancer, and she prayed to God for a man who would love her.

That prayer was soon answered with the arrival of Lloyd Jones, whom she had met at age 19 in Duhaney Park where his mother lived.

Latoya said she moved out of the matrimonial home and went to live briefly with a friend in Spanish Town. Before long, she met up with Lloyd again and began to form a stronger bond, which grew firmer by the day, even after she admitted to him that she had cancer.

Soon after, the cancer got even worse. It spread to her lungs, brain, kidney and blood.

“She is a strong woman,” Lloyd stated proudly last week.

“I thought that he would not want to take me up with that responsibility, but he stuck around. He is such a sweet man,” Latoya shot back about the divorced 56-year-old who is the biological father of six children and two others whom he looks after.

Her stress level increased, she said, when someone at her job told her that she was only pretending that she had cancer all the time and that nothing was wrong with her.

“That messed me up,” she said. “It sent me to hospital and I had a stroke the next day. I could not walk or talk. When they scanned me, they found this huge tumour in my head and wanted me to do surgery to remove it. There was a 20 per cent chance of my surviving and if I survived (the prognosis was that) I would be a vegetable,” she said.

Describing her recovery as “miraculous”, Latoya said that in-between chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment, she feeds on a liquid concoction of guinea hen weed, soursop leaves, and ball moss (a weed that is often seen on electricity wires and which is also known as old man’s beard).

“Right now she is an inspiration to the cancer group Reach to Recovery. She speaks… and livens up the gathering by speaking about sex and relationships. We have a lovely relationship,” said Lloyd.

Latoya last spent 11 days in hospital in March this year, as her kidneys got infected, but later tests showed that the tumour in her brain had shrunk.

“The doctor said that the reduction of the tumour had nothing to do with the treatment that I got for my infected kidneys,” she said.

“It was God who did it. I also believe strongly in the mixture of guinea hen weed, soursop leaves and old man’s beard. I feel great now, compared to a year ago. I feel in excellent shape. I tell myself that I do not have cancer,” she said.

Latoya said she is feeling so good nowadays that she participated in her school’s sports day in April by running a relay leg for her house that ended in victory for the quartet.

“I believe that she has got her healing,” Lloyd said. “I believe that the guinea hen weed and soupsop leaves mixture has worked and we will continue with the conventional treatment. If she is to do chemo, we will not give her the mixture at the same time.”

Added Lloyd: “I dote over her. I care for her and we love each other. She has an indomitable spirit. What has happened to her is a miracle. One of the things that has kept her going is the love that I have for her. She is off pills for some of the seizures that she has suffered from in the past. She has even said that if she hadn’t met me she would have died already.”

Latoya, the woman of steel, said that having survived so many battles, she is convinced that cancer will not take her out.

“Something else will kill me, but not cancer,” she stated.