San Juan Island-raised Jessica Oldwyn has been featured in “My Last Days,” a documentary series about “remarkable people facing one of life’s most difficult challenges: terminal illness.” Oldwyn, who has been fighting a brain tumor since 2010, shares on her blog, “I want to live. I want to live like most people want a new car, or a baby, or a vacation, or a new house, or a boyfriend, or wife. I want to breathe this sweet air. To feel the cool breeze. To hug. To laugh. To smile. To ride my bike with the sun on my face.”
Her passion for life resonated with “Jane the Virgin” star Justin Baldoni, the series creator and founder of Wayfarer Entertainment. The three-part “docuseries” premiered on August 17.
“My Last Days” profiles six “superheroes” facing terminal illness: Claire Wineland, a 19-year-old with cystic fibrosis; “Darth Vader,” a half-marathoner with leukemia; Kat Lazo, a 25-year-old self-described “proud lesbian” and foodie with stomach cancer; Isabel Bueso, an aspiring sociologist with mucopolysaccharidosis; Kendrick David Evans, a 25-year-old with a rare and fatal form of sleep apnea; and Oldwyn, a 35-year-old with brain cancer.
“These stories aren’t about death,” says Baldoni. “They are about life, and about the incredible people who choose happiness despite the difficult hand they have been dealt.”
Oldwyn just returned from visiting Los Angeles for the show’s premiere.
“It was so fun,” she says. “I’m so pleased; each episode is so true to each individual.”
Initially skeptical, she trashed the first email from Baldoni, but her then-fiance Danny encouraged her to continue sharing her story so that she could help others in similar situations. Jessica’s emphatic about patient empowerment and self-advocacy after a scary experience she had in Wenatchee, where an inexperienced neurologist pressured her to do immediate brain surgery.
“If I had listened to him, I would be dead,” she says, explaining that the Wenatchee hospital lacked the supplies that were used to keep her alive when she was eventually operated on by the head neurosurgeon at the University of Washington.
As the show was put together, Jessica quickly fell in love with the other participants, saying, “They’re quirky, unique souls – they’re friends. We’re family.” She adds, “Darth has this … he’s like a sour-patch candy, salty on the outside, sweet on the inside, so powerful in his presence. Claire is this mindful, wise, giggly, just hilarious; it’s perfect, in her kind of tornado of thought and talk and inspiration. Isabel – you will LOVE her; she just wants to dance; her family has moved from Guatemala to save her life. Kat has some sort of gastric cancer; she’s like, ‘F it, let’s dance!’ – wild and carefree – everything I wish I could just let my brakes off a little and just live. Kendrick is a gospel singer; he just has this gentle soul that takes a while to peel back the layers of him, and when he’s singing about Jesus, I just sing along.”
Oldwyn currently lives in Edmonds with Danny, who is an elevator/escalator mechanic, but they visit their island community frequently. She says San Juan Island will forever have her “whole soul.”
The Wayfarer Entertainment film crew visited the Oldwyns in Edmonds, then spent a couple of days filming on San Juan Island for the show. During the process of learning Jessica’s story, the producers asked about her top wish list. Her answer was a wedding for Danny, the love of her life, who had proposed more than once since her diagnosis. Three separate brain surgeries had left Jessica needing to relearn how to walk and talk, and so a wedding had continually seemed an impossible feat. (See photo above.)
With Wayfarer’s help, last August, Jessica invited her friends and family to what she said was a party for the 35th birthday she “wasn’t supposed to have,” based on doctors’ predictions. She gave it a Kentucky Derby theme “so people would be kind of accidentally dressed for a wedding.” While Jessica was initially horrified to discover that Wayfarer Entertainment had asked her island community to donate goods and services, she says the event was beautiful. The wedding was held at the home of Libbey & Nigel Oswald, and supported by Vinny’s Ristorante, Archipelago Trio, Flagship Rentals, Susie Wampler, Archie Brooks, Daniel Van Hamerseld and others.
“It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it,” she says, adding, “I’m in a better place right now where I can just accept the grace of these people who have helped raise me.”
Jessica is currently dealing with a recurrence of her tumor, which is both rare and slow-growing. Her doctors have yet to offer a definite hope for further treatment. She has already lived – exuberantly – six years past her diagnosis, passing her initial life expectancy of four and a half years.
“I could be so negative about my situation, but it would be such a waste, because I’m actually doing really well,” she says. Her ‘My Last Days’ co-stars share her zest for every precious day of life.
“Clearly they picked us ’cause we’re talkers,'” she laughs. “We have very similar spirits, all of us – if you stop moving, if you stop living, you’re already dead.”
Jessica’s blog is a way for her to share her spunky spirit with others faced with difficult illness.
“As a brain tumor blogger, I have shared my story in the hopes that I can be a resource, and advocate for patients and caregivers,” she says. Just recently, her blog statistics at jessicaoldwyn.blogspot.com showed just shy of 18,000 hits a month. “And I’m like, ‘Who’s reading this?!’ Jessica laughs.
She says she hears from about 15-30 people a day, often brain tumor patients or caregivers desperately looking for answers, hope or encouragement. These conversations turn into hundreds of emails, all on a volunteer basis as her blog is not monetized.
“I don’t want to tie my name to anything unless it’s something I believe in,” she says.
Not selling anything allows her to freely discuss every aspect of care without being swayed by other interests.
To support Jessica, two GoFundMe fundraising sites have been set up at https://www.gofundme.com/jessicaoldwyn and https://pages.gofundme.com/mylastdays/.
