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Feature Stories

Dorothy Peppe

by Michael Corey

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Most people fall in love with Ohio Stadium because of the Buckeye football team that fans hold so dear.

Others go there just to fall in love.

While Lou Peppe was earning his lone varsity letter with the Ohio State football team, Dorothy never missed a game. They'd met just
a few months earlier in summer school.

"Part of our courtship was going to football games," she recalls from her home in Upper Arlington, her piercing blue eyes and rapier-like intellect still thriving 74 years later at the age of 89. In all that time, she has rarely missed a game--such is the depth of her passion for life, for love, for her dear Buckeyes and for her late husband.

But in 1952, their relationship moved to an entirely different playing field.

"I was taking a shower and I came downstairs and I showed this lump to my husband and my sister," Peppe says. She immediately sought out a
young doctor named Arthur James.

"He was going on vacation for two weeks, so I had to worry about it for two whole weeks, so it was the longest time in my life," Peppe says.

In May of that year, Dorothy Peppe went to White Cross Hospital--later renamed Riverside Hospital--for a full mastectomy. It was just two weeks after
her 35th birthday.

"I don't know if I hadn't had a good family or a good relationship with my husband how I would have done it," Peppe says. "To me that's one of the most important things. And he said to me, 'You're the same person I married.' That buoyed my hopes. And I hoped that I would live--my son was nine years old, and I wanted to see him get through junior high school. Because in those days it was a death sentence, as far as I knew. I was just plain lucky. Plain lucky."

Unfortunately, Peppe suffered from difficulties in coagulating her blood. On one evening, she hemorrhaged in the middle of the night and awoke to nurses drastically trying to stop her bleeding. She spent nearly two weeks in the hospital, with her husband and the rest of her family streaming in and out of her room.

"It was not an easy time for me," Peppe says.

"And there was nobody that I really knew that had had it," she continued.

And as a result, Dorothy Peppe has spent a lifetime reaching out to others diagnosed with breast cancer. In the 53 years that she has been a survivor of breast cancer, she has been giving to others by simply living her life and sharing her story.

"You try to do what you can do to help other people, and whatever I've done as far as volunteering I've gotten much more out of that than what I've given."