Clay Wiggins, like most folks, has good days and bad days. It’s just that good and bad are defined differently for the man who has been told he may have terminal cancer.
Wiggins, who turned 46 this Wednesday, Feb. 26, grew up in Warrenton and moved with his family to Jones County in 2002.
“Dad got a job over here in Jones County with the water system,” Wiggins recalled. “We all moved over here, and I got a job with Butch (Reece) at the sheriff’s office doing dispatching. I stayed there till 2018, when I left in August. My son was born in October.”
Wiggins, who now specializes in I.T. and communications work, started later that same year part-time with the District Attorney’s office, then went full-time in 2022.
Wiggins met his wife, Heather, when he was working security at a consignment sale in 2015. They married in January of 2017 and have three biological children: Warren, 6, and daughters, Everly and Hannah, 2 and 11 months. Heather, a teacher at Gray Station Middle School, had adopted two daughters, Micah and Emma, before they met.
“She already had adopted the two girls to start with,” Wiggins said. “She adopted them through DFACS when they were 14 and 6. So, she was a single mother, raising two kids.”
Wiggins first noticed he had health issues in January of 2024. He had a history of acid reflux, and his primary care physician in Gray referred him to a gastroenterologist in Macon. It was believed to be a minor issue.
“They said it’s probably what they call a stricture,” Wiggins related. “It’s like a piece of skin that grows across the bottom of your esophagus sometimes.”
They told him an endoscopy would probably take about 15-30 minutes, and the minor surgery started at 3:30.
“When I got into recovery and woke up, I had some blood stains on my gown,” he recalled. “What happened? What happened here? I looked at the clock. It was 4:30. I said, ‘Wait a minute’, thinking, something’s not right.
“Sure enough,” he declared, “the doctor came in with a sheet of paper with some pictures on it and said, ‘You’ve got a tumor in your stomach and cancer.’ And I was dumbfounded.”
Wiggins was sent to a surgeon in Atlanta, who explained to him the process of removing a large portion of both the esophagus and stomach then reattaching the two body parts. “And that it was a 50% survival rate for the surgery,” he added. “And I’m like, well, that’s not that good of odds.”
Wiggins next went to Piedmont Hospital in Newton County for a PET scan. He then had a follow-up with the doctor in Atlanta.
“They said ‘it’s in your lungs and in your liver. We can’t do surgery. You’re not a surgical candidate.’” He was then referred to the Central Georgia Cancer Care in Macon, where he was told chemotherapy was the only treatment he could be offered. Wiggins, though, refused to give up without another opinion and went to the City of Hope, a nationwide cancer hospital in Newnan.
The doctors there informed Wiggins the diagnosis was gastroesophageal adenocarcinoma, and that “it is very rare for people my age to get this type cancer.” They could not offer any other help, either.
The new patient went to meet the doctor in Macon to discuss the chemo, and, he remembered, “They said this is palliative care. It’s not curable.”
The diagnosis and treatment clearly had emotional effects.
“I’ll never forget the first day that I went to chemo,” Wiggins recalled. “I found out I had cancer on Feb. 6, 2024, and my wife was about nine months pregnant at the time with our youngest. And so, it was just a lot of emotions, running wild, you know.
“The first day I had chemo was March 18, 2024. I went to chemo that morning, did everything that I was supposed to, got home.” Then, he shared, “My wife says, ‘we’ve got to go to the hospital.’ My baby was born that night, on my first day of chemo. I’ll never forget that.”
Wiggins explained that he goes through chemotherapy every other week, and it is basically a three-day process. On Tuesday, he is injected with a steroid bag, a nausea bag, an immunotherapy bag, and two bags of chemo. He wears a shoulder pump from Tuesday afternoon until lunchtime Thursday and receives a slow infusion through that pump.
Now, nearly a year later, there are some signs of improvement. But, Wiggins was still hit with harsh reality.
“So, the scans have shown that the tumor has shrunk. It’s not gone away. The spots on my lungs are gone, but it’s still cancer in my liver.”
Wiggins sees a nurse practitioner when he goes in for chemo and undergoes a PET scan every three months. He asked his oncologist once if he would ever be able to stop the chemo treatments.
“She said, ‘No. You’ll be on chemo till you die.’
“She says, ‘the statistics show that out of 100 people with your type of cancer, not 100 people, but out of all the people that have been studied that had your kind of cancer, 80% of those have died within five years. You’ve got a 20% chance to live five years or longer.’ So, I really took that hard. I’ve got like, five years to live, you know; that’s not something you want to hear.”
Wiggins emphasized that, despite the disease and potential outlook, he feels relatively healthy now the weeks he’s not doing chemo.
“Like right now, I feel good. I can’t go out and run a marathon, but I feel good enough to come to come to work and do what I need to do here.
“I feel good enough to take care of my kids,” he continued, “and, you know, play with them and go to their activities and stuff some days. I may get home more tired than the other ones. But the weeks that I have off of chemo, like this week, I feel almost normal.”
The two oldest children know the seriousness of the situation, but not the younger ones.
“They know daddy’s sick,” Wiggins related. “Daddy’s got a bug in his tummy is what we’re saying. So they know daddy’s sick, but they’re too young to understand the whole picture.”
Wiggins, who said he has always tried to help others whenever possible, knows he doesn’t have to continue working.
“The doctors told me last year, ‘You know, you can go out, we can get you disability. You can go out on disability and sit at home, not have to work, with the type of cancer you have,’ and I’m like, ‘No, that’s not gonna help me any. I need to have a purpose.’
“I sat there this morning (at the doctor’s office) and I was looking at folks,” he went on. “I knew you were coming to talk to me, and I was just looking at people. And I’m like, I’m blessed. I’m blessed just to be able to walk in here, that I’m able to leave here and go to work, that I’m not confined to a bed 24 hours, that I still have, I mean, as crazy it sounds, that I still have my hair.”
Wiggins has not given in to the mindset to say there is no chance he will beat the disease. He has an appointment March 5 at Emory Hospital in Atlanta.
“I’m going to go see them, just to make 100% sure I’m doing the right thing,” he noted, “and that there’s nothing else out there available that I don’t know about, clinical trial or, you know, some advanced procedure. But,” he added, “the scans have consistently showed shrinking of the tumor, which is what we wanted.”
Wiggins volunteered that he felt sorry for himself when he heard the news and realized the gravity of his situation.
“I went through the time, this period when I first started, when I first found out I had cancer. Why me? Why did God choose me? And, you know, I had to move past all that. I had to accept what was going on in my mind for my mental health. I had to wrap my head around what was going on.
“And then, nothing I did was going to change anything,” he recalls realizing. “I’m still going to have this, no matter what.
And I just turned it over to God. And whatever is going to happen is going to happen. I’m thankful for every day. And I wake up in the morning, do my normal morning routine, get up, go to work; if I have to go do chemo, you know, get up and go to chemo.”
Wiggins went to college only briefly after high school graduation. In 2023, however, he rectified that with online classes.
“I graduated from Kennesaw State College with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology. I wanted to show my children,” he stressed, “it’s never too late finish what you start. Even though you’re in your 40s, and you have been out of school for 22 years, you can dust the cobwebs off and go back. So, I went back, picked my degree, walked across the stage, the whole nine yards.”
Looking toward the future, Wiggins definitely has both faith and goals.
“I trust in God that He’ll find a way that He won’t take me before I get to see my children grow up. I want to be able to walk all four of my girls down the aisle. I want to be the best man at my son’s wedding. That’s my goal. And,” he said with conviction, “I’m going to do everything I can to get there.”
