9-time Cancer Survivor Gets Good News

In 2011, I wrote (and published) the book Never Leave Your Wingman: Dionne and Graham Warner's Story of Hope. Dionne is one of the most remarkable, inspiring, fun-loving, hope-filled people I know.

Author/publisher Deana J. Driver with Dionne and Graham Warner, June 2011 

When I met Dionne in June 2010 to begin interviewing her and Graham for the book, Dionne was battling Stage IV liver, lung, and bone cancers - her fifth, sixth and seventh cancer diagnoses. She'd already beat breast cancer, brain cancer, and two bouts of liver cancer. With these latest cancers, she had been dressing in different costumes each week and dancing into her chemotherapy treatments, with her wingman (her husband Graham) similarly attired and dancing beside her. They brought hope and laughter - and occasional looks of confusion - to everyone they met during the 77 treatments and themes that occurred by the time the book was published in June 2011.

Some of the "themes" Dionne created for her chemotherapy treatments in 2009 to 2011

Dionne's story has inspired and helped thousands of people around the world and it has been my honour to write and publish book to share our mutual goal of spreading that hope.

And her story continues.

A few months after the book was published, Dionne went into remission. No more Stage IV cancer in any part of her body. To say that everyone was astounded and thrilled is an understatement.

How could this be, you might wonder. For starters, Dionne has a remarkably positive attitude - before, during and after cancer. She lives her life to the fullest in every moment of every day and encourages all of us to do the same - whether we are ill or not. Dionne also has a body that responds well to therapy treatments. She jokes that Heaven is not ready for her yet, but when it is her time, she will be bringing her own radiation-lit, disco-ball body with her! Dionne also received some unique treatment therapies in a hospital in Tijuana in 2010 and she changed her diet as part of that treatment too. (You'll have to read the book for more details.)

Unfortunately, in April 2012, cancer returned to Dionne's liver and she began treatment again. 

A few years later, Graham was diagnosed with cancer in his abdominal area. He successfully underwent surgery to remove the tumour and was cancer-free at his one-year checkup. As Dionne would say, "Woo Hoo!'

Still, how much more can a couple take? Well, these are the Warners ... so the answer - even though no one wants it to be this way - is "a lot".

Dionne had been taking various treatments since her Spring 2012 liver cancer diagnosis, but about two years ago, tumours appeared in her hips and other parts of her body. She has since had several different treatment regimens for these tumours, with differing amounts of success. Hundreds and hundreds of people - whom she calls her Earth Angels - continue to send best wishes, prayers and love to help her fight this evil disease.

And now for the latest news of her cancer journey...

Earlier this week, Dionne received a phone call from her oncologist to come in to his office to hear the results of the latest CT scan. She had not expected a call so soon after the test, so she was nervous. Not to mention having to take her immune-compromised body to the hospital again during these COVID-19 times.

"My oncologist wanted to share the news he had for me sooner rather than later," Dionne reported. "He shared with me that all of my tumours have shrunk.   I had him repeat it more than once as I was in complete and utter shock. Not just one tumour but all and trust me, ,there are a lot. The new chemo regime along with your love, support and continued prayers, Earth Angels, are working. Woo Hoo! "

When I asked Dionne if I could share her amazing, fantastic news, she replied in the affirmative.

"Let's continue to give others H💜PE, I say."

Absolutely, Dionne. And Woo Hoo a thousand times over!

Dionne and Graham Warner in April 2020. Bottom left, she's wearing a handmade mask to go to the hospital to hear from her oncologist.

And just in case you need another dose of happiness and laughter during these uncertain times, here's a video I took in 2011 of their amazing "flappers" theme. Enjoy.

** You can purchase the Never Leave Your Wingman book from SaskBooks and pay no shipping in April 2020. All sales from this bookstore of our provincial publishing group organization will go directly to the publisher members - in this case, my DriverWorks Ink publishing company.

Happy Birthday, Never Leave Your Wingman book!

Five years ago, on June 10, 2011, at Relay for Life in Regina, Saskatchewan we unveiled the inspiring, life-changing book Never Leave Your Wingman: Dionne and Graham Warner’s Story of Hope. 

Since then, much has changed and nothing has changed.

I am Deana Driver, author and publisher of this amazing, laughter-filled true story. I continue to celebrate this book and the people I wrote about – seven-time cancer survivor Dionne Warner and her husband/wingman Graham Warner.

Left to right: Al Driver, Dionne Warner, Deana Driver, and Graham Warner - launching the Never Leave Your Wingman book at Relay for Life, Regina, Saskatchewan on June 10, 2011.

Never Leave Your Wingman has changed thousands of lives with its inspiring messages of hope, love, and living life to the fullest. Thousands of people have changed their outlook when diagnosed with cancer, using Dionne Warner’s first-24-hours approach of “Why Me?” and then shifting it after that first 24 hours to her remarkable “Why Not Me and What Am I Going To Do About It?”

Dionne is still here. In bold, beautiful, living colours! Since the book was launched, Dionne has beaten Stage IV liver, lung and bone cancers - with strength, laughter, courage, and costumes too! She is a walking miracle.

                     

In January 2012, she was pronounced in remission. In April 2012, Dionne went back to her volunteering at the Allan Blair Cancer Centre in Regina, to help give other cancer patients hope and encouragement. Unfortunately, in August 2012, cancer was detected in Dionne's liver. Again. This was the fourth liver cancer diagnosis for her. With typical Dionne feistiness, she was signing Never Leave Your Wingman books with me at the Pasqua Hospital gift shop the very next day. She had not even given herself a full 24 hours this time to let the diagnosis sink in. Her immediate reaction had been: “It’s only one cancer this time, not four. They did not say ‘Stage 4’, and it’s not in my brain – so bring it on!”

Dionne continues to fight this latest liver cancer while continuing to inspire others with her courage, strength, and her story. She celebrated her 50^th birthday last October! She’s been fighting cancer for much of the last 20 years! Dionne continues to inspire.

The book’s title comes from a phrase (and philosophy) spoken by Graham Warner, Dionne’s husband. Shortly after Graham wooed Dionne to Regina from Toronto in 2001, she was diagnosed with her third cancer – liver cancer. They were engaged to be married at that time, but Dionne told Graham he did not have to marry her now that she was sick again. She said she would return to her family and her oncologists in Ontario and he could carry on with his life. An experienced pilot, Graham quickly replied: “You never leave your wingman.”

They have soldiered on together since, through better and worse, beating her two liver cancers and her Stage IV liver, lung and bone cancers, and now fighting liver cancer again.

In August 2015, my husband and publishing business partner Al Driver was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer. On the evening of August 20, Al had an emergency operation for what we thought would be diagnosed as a ruptured appendix. It turned out to be a tumour. Al quickly adopted Dionne Warner’s 24-hour rule and he fought his cancer as long and as hard as his body would allow. Our family shared hope, laughter and much love with him for the next four and a half months. (See my December 2015 blog post about cancer, hope, and love.) Unfortunately, on January 4, 2016, Al passed away. His body could no longer fight. 

But the story and struggle and hope and love still go on.

Much has changed and nothing has changed.

This Never Leave Your Wingman book has been a blessing to many and will continue to be a blessing and a beacon of hope for as long as it exists.

I am proud to say that I wrote it. I am proud to say that I published it. I am proud that we launched it at Relay for Life. I wish everyone at Relay for Life celebrations everywhere the best event they could ever imagine!

Our family will not be participating in Relay for Life this year. It is too soon. Too raw. Instead, we will be gathering to scatter some of Al’s ashes in the Qu’Appelle Valley this Sunday, the day that would have been his 62^nd birthday, just a week before Father’s Day. We will celebrate our Al and we will hold dear to the principles in this book. Live life to the fullest, as Al did and as Dionne and Graham continue to do. No regrets.

Living with Cancer and Gratitude

It has been more than two months since I last posted on this blog. August 13th to be exact. The reason for that is very simple. And completely overwhelming.

On August 20, my husband/soulmate/publishing partner, Al Driver, was admitted to hospital with a severe abdominal pain that turned out to be Stage IV colon cancer which had spread to a spot on his liver and was in 16 of the 38 lymph nodes the surgeon removed as part of the emergency surgery she performed that night. Al now has an ileostomy, and the last couple months have been spent in and out of the hospital as we figure out the right "recipe" of medications to keep him hydrated and strong so he can fight his cancer with chemotherapy, which starts next week and will continue for four to six months.

Al and I enjoyed a visit on Thanksgiving Sunday with five of our favourite people. Al's mom is beside me. Our three children are from right to left - Dave, Lisa, and Dani - and Dani's husband, Stephen, is on the far left. Our daughter-in-law, Kelli, and other son-in-law, Kyle, are not pictured.

Al is following the inspiring role modeling of our friend, eight-time cancer survivor Dionne Warner, whose story I told in our award-winning, bestselling book Never Leave Your Wingman: Dionne and Graham Warner's Story of Hope. Dionne is an amazing woman who recently celebrated her 50^th birthday – 20 years after receiving her first cancer diagnosis! When faced with each of her eight cancer diagnoses, Dionne Warner gives herself 24 hours to say “Why me?” and then she turns it around to “Why not me and what am I going to do about it?” Al immediately adopted that attitude and he is ready to fight, going into his first chemotherapy treatment next week. The latest CT scan shows two small spots on his bowel and one on his liver. His oncologist is hopeful, telling us that if chemo doesn’t take care of them, she will ask a surgeon to take the spots out. We share her optimism and we are thankful to family and friends, and many of our authors and readers who have supported us along the way so far.

We cancelled many of our craft and trade show booths this fall to be together at this time. Much of this information has been posted on our DriverWorks Ink Facebook page. That is where I will occasionally post updates as we walk this path, following Dionne Warner’s optimistic, hope-filled outlook. We have a long road ahead and we thank you all for staying with us and supporting us on this journey.

So it's not likely that I will be posting much on this blog for the next while. It has been a challenge for me to keep up with juggling work commitments and the appointments and other details in our changing personal lives.

Still, we have accomplished a fair bit in this past couple of months and I would like to share some of this excitement with you.


We released one new book - And It Was Very Good: Everyday Moments of Awe by Ed Olfert - in October. Ed Olfert has been a farmer, trucker, welder, and Mennonite pastor. He believes that glimpses of God surround us every day in every moment, and he has written about some of these glimpses, which require a new way of looking that leaves space for awe and mystery. Ed’s short stories – his own uplifting version of “Chicken Soup for the Soul” – have been published in the Prince Albert Daily Herald and are about neighbours and friends, and lives that we might not naturally connect to God, to awe and mystery. Ed's stories will make you think, make you wonder, and make you appreciate the people and the places around you.

We also have another new book coming out in November. Running the Riders: My Decade as CEO of Canada's Team is written by Jim Hopson with Darrell Davis. In 2004, Jim Hopson was hopeful that the board of directors of the Saskatchewan Roughriders Football Club in the Canadian Football League would hire him as the team's first full-time president and CEO. He believed that the team, with its incredible fan base, could become a successful business that consistently posted strong annual profits while playing in and winning multiple Grey Cups. And it happened. After a decade under Hopson’s leadership (2005 to 2015), the Roughriders became the CFL's strongest franchise, appearing in four Grey Cup games (winning twice) and selling more team merchandise than the other eight CFL franchises combined. They obliterated their debt and posted a record-setting profit of $10.4 million after winning a hometown Grey Cup in 2013, which has been described as the biggest moment in the 105-year-old team’s history. Hopson’s book, with the assistance of Darrell Davis (an author and long-time sports writer and Roughriders beat writer at the Regina Leader-Post), describes Hopson’s business plans, the resistance to change within the organization, the interplay with the fans of Rider Nation, difficult decisions made, and the euphoria of winning two league championships.
An emotional man with a firm disposition, Jim Hopson describes the highs and lows that went along with the job and the path he took, professionally and personally, to the biggest office with the franchise known as "Canada’s Team."

We participated in a few trade and craft shows in October and I was again pleased by the number of people who purchased our new books, including our new nonfiction book of short stories (Cream Money: Stories of Prairie People, compiled and edited by Deana J. Driver) plus our two new fiction books (Pure Baseball: The Carl Jaxsom Legend by Ryan Thaddeus and Catherine of Cannington Manor by Shirley Harris) and our adult coloring book (The Zenimaginarium Garden: A Coloring Book by Saskatchewan artist Jeanne Burbage). This coloring book - the first one published in Canada by a Canadian artist - is so popular that we've already reprinted it and it is being featured in the online Holiday Gift Guide by Canadian Living magazine this fall!

 

Please continue to enjoy the work of our many Saskatchewan and Prairie authors. I will be working on some new manuscripts of some other authors as time permits. Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers.

I'll return to this blog as time and energy permit.

Take care, everyone.

Viewing The Little Coat at the Military Museums, Calgary, Alberta

In the fall of 2008, I was contacted by a Saskatchewan man, Alan J. Buick. He heard me being interviewed on a local radio station about our then-new book Prairie Pilot: Lady Luck Was On My Side; Stories of Walter D. Williams and he called the radio station to ask how he could contact me.

Alan had been working on a manuscript for a nonfiction book and he asked me to consider publishing it. I had just started DriverWorks Ink that January. I fell in love with the story and decided to take a chance on publishing the book, which came to be called The Little Coat: The Bob and Sue Elliot Story. Alan will tell you that after our initial meeting, I sent him home with three months of work to do in rewriting and tightening up the manuscript. We are both glad that he did that extra work because the book has gone on to become a national bestseller, sold to customers in many parts of the world. The Little Coat is also an award-winning book, receiving an Honorable Mention in teh Biography category at the 2010 Hollywood Book Festival, honoring books that would make a great film or movie). Here is a video of Alan Buick talking about his book.

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Other great things have happened because of Alan's book:

• The little coat, given by a Canadian soldier to a little Dutch girl in Holland on December 25, 1944, was donated by Bob and Sue Elliott to the Canadian War Museum. In their discussions with Alan Buick, Bob and Sue recognized that their little coat could be a worthy Canadian artifact.
  
• Bev Tosh, a Calgary artist, was inspired by Bob and Sue's story in The Little Coat book and painted Sue's wedding photo in her exhibit honoring Dutch War Brides.
  
• DriverWorks Ink has donated more than $4,000 to the Royal Canadian Legion's Dominion Command Poppy Trust from sales of this book. A further $1 per book sold since 2013 is being donated to the Canadian War Museum.
• In 2013, Al and I were privileged to meet Sue Elliott in person while we were enjoying a once-in-a-lifetime vacation to Europe. Read my blog about that great visit.
  
• Earlier this month, Al and I were pleased to make a special trip to Calgary, Alberta, to see the little coat itself on display at the Military Museums. The coat was on loan from the Canadian War Museum, to accompany Bev Tosh's Dutch War Brides exhibit.

Here are some photos of the museum and the coat, plus a video I shot of us seeing the coat for the first time:

This Mural of Honour mosaic in the foyer of the Military Museums has 240 panels representing Canada's military history from 1812 to present day.

 

 In these displays at the front entrance area, I imagined a young Bob Elliott, the Canadian tank commander, and his crew making their way through Europe during the Second World War.




This was the reason we visited the Military Museums - The Little Coat:
         Here's the video of us seeing the coat for the first time:

And here is the coat at the Military Museums, Calgary - on display there until August 16, 2015:

I was in awe of this beautiful coat.

The buttons on this coat, made from a wool Canadian Army blanket, came from the tunics of the Canadian soldiers.

This is the description for the artifact.

Copies of our book, The Little Coat: The Bob and Sue Elliott Story by Alan J. Buick, sit on a table with other items related to Bev Tosh's exhibit, below.

 Outside, on the grounds of the Military Museums, were other interesting exhibits.

This piece of metal came from one of the World Trade Towers destroyed on September 11, 2011 in New York.

 

Al stood by this collection of tanks to show their actual size. Al is 6'3" tall.

We were glad we had the opportunity to visit this fascinating museum and to see, first-hand, this special little coat. 

Thank you to all who take the time and care for these artifacts that remind us of our history which, in some cases, we never want to see repeated.