Veteran walks to L.A. for girl fighting cancer

Jim Hickey was a Marine based at Camp Pendleton in the 1980s and he came back 33 years later for a different kind of mission — a different kind of battle.

Hickey is walking from San Diego to Los Angeles to help a little girl fighting cancer. The 59-year-old Marine Corps veteran is walking roughly 150 miles to Duarte to the City of Hope Cancer Hospital to ask if they will help her.

The walk is one of seven cancer awareness walks Hickey has done around the country covering more than 8,300 miles through deserts and up mountains in thunderstorms, 100-degree heat and snow.

He started the walks after his father died of prostate cancer in 1995. A year later his brother was diagnosed with prostate cancer at age 41 and won the battle.

"Those two events, happening so close together, got me started walking," said Hickey, who lived in Escondido in the 1990s but now lives in New Jersey and works as a bartender. "I wanted to bring awareness about cancer. "

He has made five attempts to walk across the entire country and dedicated portions of the walk to an adult or child he heard was battling cancer in that area. He has helped 10 adults and 23 kids on those walks.

This time he is walking for 10-year-old Elsa Wiemerslage, who lives in Waterloo, Ill. Elsa was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) when she was 5 years old. After a stem cell transplant from her brother's cord blood in 2016, she had been recovering well. But a year after the transplant, the disease started coming back. She has been in the hospital for several months and is awaiting another stem cell transplant. The family has a Facebook page called Prayers for Elsa, which has 4,800 members and thousands of prayers and messages.

Hickey met Elsa's parents in 2017 by chance at restaurant before starting a cancer awareness walk for another child that went from Wrigley Field in Chicago to Busch Stadium in St. Louis.

"I've been friends with Elsa's parents since then. When I saw on Facebook that she was readmitted to the hospital in July, I decided I needed to do this walk for her. This has been her longest consecutive (number of) days in the hospital," Hickey said.

Despite the COVID-19 risk, he made plans. He got a night job sanitizing an office building in Columbia, Mo., to fund the trip. The timing is right, September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.

"It's incredible that Jim's walking so far to raise awareness about childhood cancer and to share Elsa's story," said her dad, Kevin Wiemerslage, a firefighter/EMT in the St. Louis area.

Hickey started the walk at the Hampton Inn San Diego-Downtown on Sept. 8, close to the anniversary of his father's death 25 years ago, and headed out on Pacific Avenue with his backpack that has a "Prayers for Elsa" T-shirt attached to the back.

"My daily routine constantly changes. There is no set miles to walk day to day. If the next town I want to get to is 18 miles that day, that's how many miles I'll walk."

He is heading through Del Mar, Encinitas and Oceanside in North County. He is planning to pass through Camp Pendleton and then plans to head along the coast as much as possible on his way to L.A.

Walking on highway shoulders, especially when cars are speeding by at 70 miles an hour is unnerving, but Hickey said that is not the hardest thing.

"The hardest part is the loneliness. I'm out there by myself, always a stranger into every town," Hickey said. "But I've stayed in the homes of complete strangers I just met on the road over 150 times."

On his first attempt to walk across the country in 1998, Hickey walked from New York and made it 2,154 miles to Clovis, N.M. His second attempt five weeks later was from Washington, D.C., and he made it 2,282 miles to Denver. He credits his training in the Marine Corps for helping prepare him for the mission.

"I was a grunt while serving, and there's no way in hell I would be able to do this without that kind of training," Hickey said.

Subsequent attempts brought him down the East Coast to Florida and as far west as Iowa. He keeps trying again. "It's something I feel I have to do to try to help others," Hickey said.

Along the way he's battled everything from pneumonia, fevers, gastroenteritis and the flu to shin splints, back pain, nerve damage, blood poisoning and lots of blisters. He got hit by a car in 2011 and ended up in the hospital with a broken leg. But he said he won't quit.

"If it wasn't for my faith in God, I would have quit a long time ago," Hickey said.

"He's a good man doing a good thing," said Greg Watkins, a Marine buddy from Camp Pendleton.

"He doesn't quit — he has a drive to bring awareness about cancer," said Watkins, who was Hickey's squad leader. "God has given him a mission and he's going to run with it until he can't anymore."

The last couple of walks, including this one are "tune-up" walks," Hickey said. "Next year I will try for a sixth time to walk across the entire country,"

On the walks he asks folks to donate directly to The City Of Hope or other organizations fighting cancer. He said he does not take donations. He sometimes sells T-shirts to cover some expenses. He said he has been asked to speak at over 40 schools and several sports teams have invited him to games to help promote cancer awareness.

"I just want to get to the City of Hope and see if they can do something for Elsa that hasn't been tried before," Hickey said.

You can follow Hickey's journey on his Facebook page, facebook.com/nevereverquit. Donations to the family can be made through the Prayers for Elsa Facebook page at facebook.com/groups/434041356785639.

___

(c)2020 The San Diego Union-Tribune

Visit The San Diego Union-Tribune at www.sandiegouniontribune.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.