Rachel Woosley didn’t want to believe that her children could get cancer. “It’s a whole denial thing,” the Billings woman said. “It had skipped every other generation, and we thought maybe it will skip the girls.” Rachel Woosley’s husband, Kirk, was diagnosed with retinoblastoma, or cancer of the retina, as a toddler. Kirk Woosley suspects that his grandmother’s twin sister, who died at age 3 from an undefined eye injury, also had the disease. “We didn’t know for sure it was genetic,” Kirk Woosley said.

Just in case, the couple made sure their pediatrician knew about the family history. Despite regular checkups for Kayla, now 11, and Shelby, 10, the doctor never found anything. It was Rachel who noticed an odd reflection in Kayla’s left eye when the girl was about 2. “Her left eye was completely full of tumors,” Rachel said. “We had just days to decide. Once the eye fills up, it finds a way out, so it would have gone into her brain and killed her.”

The Woosleys had to decide almost on the spot whether to pursue chemotherapy at Casey Eye Institute in Portland, Ore., where the family lived, or to have Kayla’s eye removed.”It was a Monday or Tuesday, and they were like, ‘Friday is open for surgery,’ ” Kirk said. Fearing the toddler wouldn’t survive chemotherapy, the couple opted to have her eye taken out. “It wasn’t long after Kayla had her surgery that we took Shelby in, and she, of course, had it, too,” Rachel said. Shelby was less than a year old and had a single tumor. Radiation therapy eliminated the malignant growth, and today Shelby has perfect vision.

For the next year, the girls returned to the hospital every six weeks. Each time, they were put under general anesthesia while doctors examined their eyes. “Every checkup they had was a prep for surgery,” Kirk said. To date, both girls have remained cancer-free.

So has Kirk. The Billings native was 2 years old when doctors discovered a tumor on the optic nerve of his left eye. He traveled to New York City for treatment and returned for checkups every year until he was in high school. He doesn’t remember much of it. “I do remember going in when I was junior high age, and they had doctors from other countries lined up. They looked at my eye,” Kirk said. “I felt like a guinea pig.” Kirk did not lose his eye, but he cannot see out of it. “I’ve never known anything different,” he said. “I teach wood shop at Skyview. That’s a profession where you have to be careful, and it’s never crossed my mind that I needed both eyes to do that.”

Kayla uses a prosthetic eye. At the time of her surgery, doctors used donated sclera, which is the white part of the eyeball, to attach a piece of coral to the muscle at the back of Kayla’s eye socket. Because of that, she has some muscle control over the prosthesis. She was recently fitted for a new prosthetic eye and got to watch as it was formed. “It was weird,” Kayla said. “When he put the molding in (the socket), it felt scratchy, like there was salt in there. The new eye was bigger, so it felt weird.”

The Woosleys think Kayla and Shelby were born with retinoblastoma. About 40 percent of retinoblastoma cases are genetic, according to the American Cancer Society. In 75 percent of cases, the disease produces tumors in one eye. About 250 American children are diagnosed with retinoblastoma every year. By contrast, 211,000 women in the United States are diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in a year. The Woosleys said they feel lucky that their daughters’ tumors were found early enough for effective treatment and that both girls had the cancer in only one eye. “It’s probably been hardest on Rachel,” Kirk Woosley said. “For me, it wasn’t any fun, obviously, but I knew the drill and knew what was going to happen. She’s never been through this before.”

“We had always talked about having four kids,” Rachel said. “But once these two came along …” Rachel said she and Kirk realized they weren’t willing to risk having more children with retinoblastoma.

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