Andover woman still running for her life at half marathon

Six thousand miles from home, Megumi Taniguchi sat in a mundane doctor’s office trying to comprehend what the oncologist was telling her.

She had left her parents in Tokyo when sho moved to Wichita in 1995. And now she found herself in a foreign country, being told there was a 33 percent chance she would still be alive in five years.

“I was devastated,” she said of being diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer when she was 42 years old in 2004. “One day you’re living your normal life, then a doctor is saying you have cancer. I had no hope.”

Twelve years later, she is preparing to run in the Prairie Fire half-marathon on Sunday.

Since that fateful day she has undergone chemotherapy, shaved her head, married her best friend (she now goes by Meg Russell), grown her hair back, started working as an accountant, out-lived her five-year window, and is cancer-free.

Running, she says, saved her.

“I knew I was going to beat this cancer by running,” Russell said. “As I ran, I felt stronger and stronger. Every run was a gift to me. I could have just died 12 years ago, and now I’m running in races.”

Russell was initially diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2003, but doctors caught it in stage one and believed the surgery to remove a basketball-sized cyst successfully removed the cancerous cells. Exactly one year later, the cancer had returned and advanced to stage three.

The next day she had her daughter shave her head. They cried as the black strands of hair fell to the bathroom floor.

Russell was adamant about maintaining a normal life. She didn’t tell anyone outside of her family she was dealing with cancer. She wore a wig to work. She started eating healthier, cutting out fast food. She will make the same apple-carrot juice Sunday morning that she has the last 12 years.

But the biggest change was the running.

When her family from Japan visited her in Andover during her chemotherapy, Russell sensed how worried they had become about her health. She desperately wanted to prove to them that she would be all right. The best way to do that, in her mind, was to run.

Running helped because it cleared her mind. She forgot about the 33-percent chance and the cancer; she could plug in her headphones, let the music take her away, and just run.

“Emotionally, it helped me to fight the cancer by running,” Russell said. “I felt good about myself when I ran. I felt stronger, little by little, and I gained confidence. I think that showed (my family) that I was going to be OK.”

She quickly graduated from walking in the days after chemotherapy to jogging to running miles. Her training partner through all of this has been her husband, David.

They started dating shortly before the second diagnosis and Meg worried that it would scare him away. Instead, David asked her to marry him.

She was no longer by herself.

“When he first asked me I was like, ‘Why? I have cancer,’ ” Russell said. “But I knew then that I wasn’t by myself anymore. I had my husband to fight through it with me. Without him, I don’t think I would have survived.”

Russell is a believer in fate and she thinks it’s no coincidence she was faced with cancer. She didn’t know it at the time, but the ordeal would reveal strength and resolve she didn’t know she had.

She beat the odds and is stronger because of it. Now she wants to help other do the same.

“I could have stayed at home and worried, ‘I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I’m going to die,’ ” Russell said. “But I refused to do that. I wanted to fight back. Now I want to give others, in situations like mine, a little bit of hope. That’s my hope. That’s my purpose.”

This story was originally published April 30, 2016 at 8:09 PM with the headline "Andover woman still running for her life at half marathon."