It’s been more than six years since Eileen Walker was diagnosed with a form of advanced appendix cancer that had spread inside her abdomen. In those years, she’s been living life to the fullest – engaging in community causes, staying active in her church, gardening, and traveling.
Last year, the 77-year-old Loveland resident married her longtime boyfriend – a man who stood by her through her treatment and recovery.
Her six years as a cancer survivor haven’t always been easy. There was a near-death experience during recovery, heartache over the sudden death of her son, and anxiety over a breast cancer diagnosis. Through it all, Walker has been certain about one thing: She’s grateful to Steven Ahrendt, MD, the University of Colorado Anschutz Cancer Center surgeon who removed her appendix cancer in a 13⅟₂-hour operation, and who still sees her during regular visits.
"I can't say enough wonderful things about him,” Walker says. “I am absolutely convinced I would not be here if it weren't for him."
“She’s a trooper,” Ahrendt says of Walker. “She’s had ups and downs. But she’s managed to work through all of that and stay very positive.”
The appendix is the small, finger-shaped pouch attached to the large intestine. It was once considered a useless leftover of an earlier stage in evolution, but medicine has since established that the appendix helps support the immune system, particularly in children, and also serves as a storage space for beneficial gut bacteria that return to the intestines after an illness to help manage digestion.
Decades ago, removal of healthy appendixes – known as an appendectomy – was routine to prevent future appendicitis, a painful swelling of the appendix. Today, fewer than 10% of appendixes are removed. Adults do fine without an appendix.
According to the National Cancer Institute, appendix cancer – also called appendiceal cancer – is estimated to impact about one to two people per 1 million people each year in the United States. However, recent studies indicate a rising incidence of appendix cancer. It’s more frequently diagnosed among people between the ages of 50 and 55, though it can occur at any age.
If appendix cancer is caught early, the five-year survival rate ranges from 67% to 97%. If the cancer is limited to the appendix, an appendectomy is a typical treatment.
The outlook is not so promising in an aggressive, stage 4 case like Walker’s – known as signet ring cell cancer of the appendix. “Roughly one in three patients will be alive at five years if all of the visible cancer can be removed at surgery,” Ahrendt says. But for Walker, at 6⅟₂ years, continued survival “now is more likely for her than not,” he adds.
→ Actor’s Death Sheds Light on Appendix Cancer
Walker says she grew up as an “Army brat,” frequently moving around the country. As an adult, she lived in New Jersey and British Columbia before settling in Colorado, near her son in Longmont, a decade ago. She had two children with her first husband, who died of a heart attack in 1992.
In April 2019, she says, “I went to my nurse practitioner and said, ‘Something just doesn't feel right. It's not any pain. It's just a weird feeling, and I'm having trouble getting my jeans zipped up. I’m getting bloated.’”
The nurse practitioner sent Walker to UCHealth Medical Center of the Rockies to be scanned. “She called me back two hours later and said, ‘I need you to come into the office right away.’ She said they found a growth, and it looked like cancer.”
A local oncologist sent Walker to the CU Anschutz Cancer Center. After further tests, she was diagnosed with stage 4 appendix cancer. “The prognosis was not good,” she says.
Walker was worried she would have to go to another city for specialized treatment. “That was before I got involved with Dr. Ahrendt, who had just recently moved here, and this was his specialty.”
Photo at top: Eileen Walker and Arjan de Bes at their wedding reception in October 2025. All photos provided by Eileen Walker.
Eileen Walker and Arjan de Bes on their travels to (from left) Ketchikan, Alaska; Barcelona, Spain; and Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Ahrendt is a professor in the CU Anschutz Department of Surgery’s Division of Surgical Oncology who specializes in treating patients with abdominal cancers, including appendix cancer, with a two-step surgical treatment strategy known as cytoreductive surgery, or CRS (removing all of the visible cancer from the abdominal cavity if possible) and HIPEC.
In HIPEC (for hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy), heated chemotherapy drugs are directly delivered into the abdomen while the patient is still under anesthesia, targeting any remaining invisible or microscopic cancer cells. Heating enhances the ability of the drugs to penetrate tissue and helps make cancer cells more sensitive to the drugs.
Ahrendt first evaluated Walker in May 2019. A biopsy showed she had signet ring cell cancer, “the most aggressive form of appendix cancer,” he says.
The cancer typically spreads on the surface of the peritoneum, the sheet of tissue that lines the inside of the abdominal cavity and the organs within.
→ HIPEC Procedure Pumps Chemotherapy Into the Abdomen to Kill Cancer Cells
Ahrendt and several other specialists reviewed Walker’s case in a multidisciplinary clinic – a hallmark of the CU Cancer Center. “Our plan initially was to give her systemic chemotherapy, and then make a decision about whether we could potentially remove all the cancer” through HIPEC treatment, he says.
The chemo experience was not easy, Walker says. “I used visualization a lot when I came back from chemo. I would lie in bed, and think about my little chemo Pac-Man that would gobble up all of my little cancer cells, throw them in a big trash truck, and cart them all away. It helped me feel good.”
In July, Ahrendt’s team used a laparoscope – a thin, illuminated tube with a camera, inserted through a tiny cut in the belly – to determine whether all of the cancer could be removed and still leave Walker with a reasonable quality of life. A cure is very unlikely in patients with signet ring cell cancer if residual cancer is present after surgery.
“She had pretty extensive disease,” Ahrendt says. “We have a scale of zero to 39 based on the volume and distribution of tumors in the abdomen, and her score was 32 out of 39. But we did feel we would be able to remove all the visible cancer,” making Walker a good candidate for CRS/HIPEC.
At Thanksgiving 2019, a few weeks ahead of Walker’s surgery, her family – her daughter and son-in-law from Wisconsin and her son – gathered at her home for dinner and met Arjan de Bes, Jacob to his friends, a software engineer in Fort Collins who was from the Netherlands. “I was in a relationship with him,” Walker says with a smile. “We were just friends; not any big deal.”
On Dec. 16, 2019, Walker went in for surgery. In addition to removing her appendix, Ahrendt and his team removed sections of Walker’s small and large intestines, the upper rectum, the uterus and both ovaries, and part of the right diaphragm. After the heated chemotherapy treatment, the team reconnected sections of Walker’s intestines. She was in the operating room from 8:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Walker says that in January, while she was still recovering in the hospital, “I aspirated vomit. I almost died. I was on a ventilator, and they called my daughter in Wisconsin and said, ‘You better get down here right away. We don’t think she’s going to make it.’”
“We had worked on her right diaphragm, which makes breathing difficult, so breathing was tough to begin with,” Ahrendt says. “And also she had a lot of work done on her intestines, and they didn’t work very well yet, so she ended up aspirating and went back on the respirator for a number of days and struggled with breathing. The Surgical Intensive Care Unit team and intensivists had to do some special maneuvers in the ICU to keep her blood oxygenated. She had a rough go of it.”
Walker’s daughter in Wisconsin contacted de Bes. “He came down to CU Anschutz right away, and basically never left. He would get up in the morning and go to work, and then come back at the end of the day, and sit with me until I fell asleep. I was terrified to fall asleep because I was afraid I wasn't going to wake up, so he would hold my hand, sleep on the little bed in my ICU room, then he would go to Fort Collins and then come back.”
Through it all, Walker says, “I had all this incredible attention” from the medical staff, “and I can’t say enough wonderful things about Dr. Ahrendt. He would come in every morning and check on me. He has always treated me as a person – not as a case number, but as Eileen Walker – and that made a really big difference.”
Left: Eileen Walker working on her mountain property. Right: Walker and volunteers at the mobile laundry truck she helped organize.
Walker was finally discharged from the hospital on January 24, 2020. Several weeks later, she and de Bes went to visit her son in Longmont, and she discovered her son had died suddenly. “He was my strength,” she says softly. “He was my everything. We were really close.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit that spring, “Arjan basically moved in. She set up his five monitors in the dining room, put his socks in the drawer, and never left. He took care of me forever.”
Six months after her surgery, Walker was back in action, working with de Bes on moving logs and clearing brush on his piece of land in the mountains. She settled into a routine of regular CT scans and bloodwork.
In August 2024, Walker got another scare: A scan revealed a lump in her breast. “They did a biopsy, and they found cancer,” she says. “In my mind, the cancer was spreading through my body.”
But the breast cancer was localized and successfully treated, and there has been no further sign of the appendix cancer. At five years out from surgery, Walker went from follow-up visits every six months to annual visits.
“She has some side effects from having a shorter intestine than normal,” Ahrendt says. “But she has made the most of things. She’s been able to eat and maintain her weight. She’s 6⅟₂ years out, with no sign of recurrence. I would think at this point that recurrence would be a pretty low probability.”
Today, “I’m alive and well,” Walker says. She has to watch her diet, “but other than that, there isn’t anything that slows me down.”
Walker has stayed busy with volunteer work, focused on her church and causes such as homelessness and Habitat for Humanity in her community. Before her cancer diagnosis, she helped organize a mobile laundry truck where people experiencing homelessness can wash their clothes. “For a while I stepped back, and then I stepped back in,” she says.
At First Congregational Church Loveland, she serves as financial secretary, manages the website, and in 2023, she helped launch Thrifts and Gifts, a twice-a-week thrift shop at the church featuring donated clothing, household items, and handmade products from people in the congregation, friends, and relatives. “For me, it’s all about community,” Walker says.
On October 18, 2025, Walker and de Bes got married at First Congregational Church. She and her new husband are talking about building a home on their mountain land.
“She’s been a joy,” Ahrendt says. “She was very near having a fatal complication in the hospital with the aspiration, but she made it through that and has been moving forward ever since. She’s always been very positive and always great to deal with.”
Ahrendt says that Walker’s journey demonstrates that the CU Anschutz Cancer Center “can give patients a chance that they may not get at most places in the country. She’s a good example of somebody who, if you apply the right treatment to the right patient with the right cancer biology, you can have a great outcome like this.”
Walker is philosophical about her cancer journey. “After my ventilator experience, I thought, I could have died – with cancer, on the operating table, or aspirating vomit. So why am I here? What is my purpose? What should I be doing if I'm given another chance? I decided, ‘My time on Earth is not up yet.’”
Eileen Walker and Arjan de Bes at their wedding in October 2025.