Survivor Stories: Tim and Tammy Tarrillion practice faith through brain aneurysms, loss of son and cancer

“There is no me without her,” Tim Tarrillion says of his wife, Tammy Tarrillion, and it’s true. Throughout 45 years of marriage, the couple has weathered many hardships together, with their faith pulling them through.

Their medical difficulties started in 2016. After having a headache for a couple of months, Tim went to bed early one night; when Tammy came into the room, he wasn’t breathing or responding. He went to the hospital in Perryville, Mo., where they told him an aneurysm had burst in his brain and transferred him to Cape Girardeau by ambulance, because a storm prevented them from flying to St. Louis.

There, they decided to fly him to St. Louis; there was a 20-minute window within the storm that was safe to get the helicopter in the air. They did, and when he got to St. Louis, the surgeon had just landed at the airport from being out of the country; he came straight to the hospital and performed the surgery.

Tim spent three weeks nonresponsive in the hospital after having the surgery. Tammy says she lived in the waiting room of the hospital praying for a miracle. Three weeks after the aneurysm when Tim was still nonresponsive in intensive care, the doctor told Tammy that Tim would remain in a vegetative state and suggested she take him off of life support. She told the doctor she is Catholic, was praying the rosary and had “a little more praying to do;” she didn’t feel like God had told her what would happen with Tim yet.

She asked that Tim stay in the hospital for a couple more days. That happened on a Thursday; on Saturday when she walked into Tim’s room, his eyes were open.

“You never give up. You never give up with your faith,” Tammy says. “You have to believe. And even we all have doubts.”

Unable to walk, talk or write after three weeks in intensive care at the hospital, Tim spent two weeks relearning these skills and three total weeks in rehab before going home. While he had been in the hospital, the doctor had found a second brain aneurysm, which they operated on in January 2017. Tim didn’t take the doctor’s recommendations for care seriously, though, and in February 2017, he had a seizure that put him back in the hospital for five days.

When he got out of the hospital, he attended the closing ceremony at a Cursillo retreat for one of his daughters in Spring 2017; there, people he had never met before told him they had been praying for him and that he was a miracle. He wanted to be around these people more and become a part of their movement of faith, so he began working on the spiritual team or in the kitchen on every men’s weekend retreat he could.

These experiences in the hospital and being around people who prayed for him awakened Tim’s faith, and he began seeking out opportunities to grow in his relationship with God: Although raised Catholic, he says he didn’t take his faith seriously until this point in his life. Feeling God saved him for a purpose, he talked with the priest at his parish who told him he wouldn’t miss God’s call.

While volunteering on a mission trip with the faith organization Vincentian Marian Youth SEMO, the witness of the young people to God’s joy, he says, changed him.

“There was like 75 kids on that mission trip, and to see them at night, you knew they was all there with God’s love, having a great time. I’m like, ‘[Wow], when I was your age, it was beer, marijuana and music. It wasn’t [being wrapped in God’s glory].’ And it just amazed me. Totally amazed me,” Tim says. “So then I just started joining men’s group. I wanted to grab all the Jesus stuff I could. … I know God wants us to love him, I know we’re made to love him and worship him. … I live to worship him.”

Tim says the health trials that led him to faith had a purpose.

“I think God emptied me at that point,” Tim says of his time in the hospital. “Well, he knows our story. And he knew what I had to face yet: this one [with my wife’s cancer diagnosis], loss of my son, another. And he emptied me and started filling me back up with him, so I can accept and deal with this.”

In 2022, Tim and Tammy’s son Timothy, who struggled with addiction, died in a car accident. Tim says this was “a salvation” for him; he’d been praying for God to heal his son by whatever means necessary, and this was the answer to that prayer.

Tammy says although it was painful, they persevered in their faith.

“When I’d go to church, all I wanted to do was just bust [with emotional sadness],” Tammy says. “I’d think, ‘I’m just not going to go to church. I’m not going to church. I’m not going to let people see me cry, I’m not going to do it.’ But I kept going to church.”

While on pilgrimage for their 43rd wedding anniversary in Rome and the Holy Land a month and a half after Timothy passed away, they got a call from one of their daughters that Tammy’s mother had fallen. When they got back, they received her into their home to care for her for 10 months, until Tammy could no longer care for her because of Tammy’s health. Tammy says she is grateful for this time, because it helped her mother get stronger.

In 2023, a doctor diagnosed Tammy with central nervous system lymphoma. She had been dragging her left foot for a couple of weeks until her foot wasn’t usable, and Tim and their three daughters took her to the hospital in St. Louis. There, the hospital didn’t have an open bed, so she laid in the emergency room for three days before having a biopsy of the tumor on her brain on the fourth day. With her left side paralyzed, they transferred her to a rehab hospital that had an available bed. She stayed there for five days and almost got discharged because Tim says she had become a major liability. The tumor had continued to grow, however, and made her so sick it was mandatory they send her back to the medical hospital.

There, they started an aggressive chemotherapy treatment, transferring Tammy between the medical and rehab hospitals after each round. After three rounds of chemotherapy where she experienced severe symptoms, she underwent eight rounds of radiation localized to the tumor alone. It worked: In July 2024, they didn’t find anything on her MRI.

At the end of her radiation, Tammy had been in the hospital for 94 days. She said she spent her time there praying and gave out holy cards and rosaries to people who cared for her or visited her room.

After receiving therapy two times a week, Tammy now has some of the movement back on her left side; health care professionals say it could take a year and a half for her to regain full movement. Throughout her cancer journey, the Tarrillions’ friends who are religious sisters with the Missionaries of Charity in St. Louis, the religious order founded by Mother Teresa, have been a moral and spiritual support. They have brought Tammy comfort by praying for and with her, visiting her in the hospital, and giving her a crucifix necklace to wear.

Their priest friend, too, has encouraged them: He administered the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick to Tammy, which is given to a seriously ill person to heal them spiritually and hopefully physically. There, the priest introduced Tammy to the idea of redemptive suffering: uniting her own pain and suffering to Jesus’ Passion and death as a prayer of redemption for herself or others. This, Tim says, helped bring Tammy peace.

“I know what my faith says,” Tammy says. “Psalm 116, which was [the reading at Mass] … on our Feast Day of Our Lady of Sorrows: ‘We walk with the living.’ God says he’s taken away all our tears and our stumbling and everything, and we shall walk in the land of the living. He tells us. Just gotta wrap your brain and heart around it.”

Their story, they say, is God’s.

“Don’t underestimate the power of the Lord,” Tim says. “Go to him, use him. That’s what he wants you to do.”

“And accept his outcome,” Tammy adds. “Just accept it. It’s God’s will. As hard as it is. I will have people come up [and say], ‘My gosh, Tammy, you’ve been so good to all these people. Why would this happen to you?’ ‘’Cause it’s God’s will,’ I tell them. Something good will come out of this, too.”

Through it all, they are grateful.

“We’re blessed,” Tammy says. “God has a purpose for us, I know that.”

Hear Tim and Tammy Tarrillion tell their story in their own words Tuesday, Oct. 29, at the Survivor Stories event at Scout Hall, 420 Broadway St. in Cape Girardeau. Doors open at 5 p.m., and the event starts at 5:30 p.m. Reserve your complimentary ticket at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/survivor-stories-tickets-1014912770417.