Terry Bolt started playing World of Warcraft with her sister at 60, shortly before she was due to retire. Two weeks after she left her job as a middle school teacher, doctors diagnosed her with an aggressive form of hormonal cancer and gave her six months — at most — to live.
That was four years ago. Today, she counts the massively multiplayer online game as a distraction from the tough times, a place to sound off without worrying family, and a hang out friends.
Her daughter filmed a documentary based on the experiences this MMO grandma and others have had in one of the world’s most notable online games, one that 7.4 million people play. WoW MoM just launched a Kickstarter to pay for the movie’s editing.
“I never ever thought any video game would be worth playing until i started playing WOW,” Terry said. “It’s a whole community.”
Above: Terry Bolt turned to online friends in Warcraft when she didn’t want to burden her family.
Her daughter, comedian Andie Bolt, recorded an episode on the hugely popular tech and comedy Nerdist podcast with host Chris Hardwick a couple of years ago. He asked her what was in her standup at the time, and she told him, “Well, it’s kind of like a lot of cancer and World of Warcraft.”
When pressed, she told him her mother’s story, and Hardwick suggested they should all go to BlizzCon, the annual convention for Blizzard Entertainment fans. Terry gushed about the idea, Andie said.
The road to BlizzCon, or how to cosplay as a goblin at 63
Terry listed off two things she wanted to do before she died. She wanted to publish a young adult book — the science-fiction adventure Bubble Riders, which ended up as one of the premium awards for the documentary’s Kickstarter. And she wanted to cosplay as a Warcraft character at BlizzCon.
Above: Tedi, Andie, and Terry Bolt in their BlizzCon cosplay costumes.
All right, the family decided. We all will dress up. But then Blizzard canceled the 2012 convention.
“When your mom has 27 tumors in her liver, it’s like, ‘Ah, dammit,'” Andie Bolt said. “You don’t have that kind of time.”
But Terry had found a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where Andie lives. (Terry lives on a ranch in the Kern River Valley, off the grid, about four hours north in California’s Central Valley.) And that surgeon diagnosed her three large tumors as the symptom of a much more systemic disease: Neuroendocrine Tumors/Carcinoids, or NET for short.
NET is essentially a hormonal cancer: Anywhere hormones can go, so can the cancer cells. It’s the type of cancer that claimed Steve Jobs, whose eventual tumor site was in his pancreas. Unlike most cancers, it doesn’t respond to chemotherapy. Surgery is one option to extend life.
15 hours of surgery, 15 pounds of tumors
The new oncologist felt that they could operate. Six hours in, the doctors came out to visit with Andie Bolt and the rest of Terry’s family. It was so much worse than they expected.
“They came out after six hours and said, it’s the worst case we’ve ever seen,” Andie said. The six-hour surgery would stretch on to 15 hours, and in all, the doctors removed 15 pounds of tumors from the small woman’s body. There were still tiny tumors everywhere. But by 2012, Terry finally started to recover from the operation.
The video is still shown at the center for instructional purposes.