RALEIGH -- The last thing Julie Walker ever wanted was to be in the news. She would just prefer her husband Scott make the headlines on the ice.
She had no choice last spring, when she was diagnosed with cancer just as Scott and the Carolina Hurricanes were making a deep run in the playoffs.
Now, after successful surgery, Julie Walker is ready to return to her private life as a mother of two. Before she does, though, she would like to take advantage of her time in the spotlight to underline the importance of annual exams for women.
She went two years without a Pap test, and she just happened to visit her doctor on a whim in April, wanting a check-up before returning to Ontario for the summer. If she had waited another six months, her doctor told her, her cervical cancer might have spread beyond where it was easily contained.
"I've had so many people come up to me since then and say, 'My mother hasn't been to the doctor for six years' or, 'I hate going, and I always put it off,' " Julie Walker said. "It's such an important message for all women to go every year, whether they like it or not.
Like anything, if it's caught early enough, it was very traumatic for us, but it was curable. So we were very lucky."
She still faces annual follow-up testing, but now that it's over, the Walkers can look back on last spring and ... well, it's all still a blur. For the first time in his 14-season NHL career, Scott was on a team making a run in the playoffs, which should have been a joyous time for the family. Julie's diagnosis changed all that, particularly when the team and the Walkers decided it would be best to acknowledge Julie's cancer diagnosis before the conference finals.
She understood the logic of clearing the air rather than letting rumors run rampant and becoming a distraction to the team. She acknowledges that it was the right decision in retrospect, but it was agonizing at the time.
Overnight, her very personal struggle became a very public one.
"It gave us a lot more support, but it made it harder in some ways," Julie Walker said. "Especially being from Canada, when it hit the news there, it was a big deal. We tried to call around to everyone we knew to tell them. It wouldn't have been my choice to go public with it, that's for sure.
"We had a lot of people calling me. I think just having to talk about it that much more made me think about it. I was trying to forget about it and hope that it would be over in a few weeks. You just couldn't do that."
At times, the outpouring of support was overwhelming -- the calls from friends across the continent, the cards and letters. The house was full of food and flowers.
She has so many people to thank: friends, family, Hurricanes fans, the team and the staff at Rex Hospital. When she had her surgery in June, her mother and brother and sister came to stay with the Walkers, and the Hurricanes' wives delivered meals to the house for weeks.
Yet when Scott scored the biggest goal of his career, she was alone, having determined at that point it was bad luck for the team if she left the house to watch road games. By the time overtime rolled around and Scott scored the series-clinching goal, the kids were asleep, although she woke them as she yelled and screamed to no one in particular.
After Scott's emotional television interview, she got the kids dressed and took them to the airport to await the team's arrival from Boston, awash in a sea of fans.
A day later, Scott would announce to the world that she had cancer and everything would change, but for that moment, they were just a family celebrating a proud moment at a difficult time.
Now, with Julie healthy and Scott beginning another hockey season, the Walkers are hoping for more important moments ahead -- celebrated in private, on their own terms, together.
