Councillor is recovering from cancer - Yvonne McCormack gets baptised

On a Thursday night in November 2015, councillor for the Greater Portmore East division, Yvonne McCormack, was helped to bed with her body in pain.

The rigidity of the breast cancer and multiple myeloma she had been battling rendered her bedridden for eight months.

The next morning with a leap of faith, she tried to do the one thing that she had been hoping to do for all those months. She miraculously got up and walked to the bathroom by herself.

McCormack told the tale in a testimony before she reaffirmed her faith in Christ with a baptism at the Portmore Holiness Christian Church on Hellshire main road yesterday.

"I have had breast cancer since 2011, and then in late 2014, I developed multiple myeloma. So, for about a whole year I was out, couldn't do anything for myself," McCormack told THE STAR.

"I believe I got some 'Jesus Pills' because when we went to the doctor, he said 'Yvonne, pills don't work like this. This is not the result of medicine, so this must be a 'Jesus pill'."

She said that since that Friday morning, she has been recovering well and was able to assist her party, the People's National Party (PNP), in securing a seat in the General Elections in February and Local Government elections in November of last year.

"I ran two elections - one for my MP, [Fitz Jackson, South St Catherine], and one for myself, and we won both," McCormack said.

Responded well

And, the hierarchy of the PNP was there to celebrate the spiritual occasion with her.

"When the master calls one will have to respond, and she responded well today and I am sure that she will recover [completely] soon," party leader Portia Simpson Miller said.

Peter Phillips said: "What I am here today doing is showing my solidarity with my friend and my comrade Yvonne, who has battled illness, and is now triumphing, and it has to be celebrated."

But McCormack's road to recovery wasn't smooth sailing. She hit a major bump when she went to Cuba in June of last year to do a bone-marrow transplant to correct the multiple myeloma cancer.

"When I went to Cuba, I was advised by the doctors that the chemo [chemotherapy] that I had been taking had damaged the left valve of my heart, and it was so bad that I couldn't do the bone marrow transplant," she recalled. "So, they sent me home to do treatment and the cardiologist said that it is not reversible."

But after two months of treatment, McCormack learnt that the valve had almost recovered completely.

"When I did the echocardiogram over and it said significant improvement, up to a 100 per cent, so that can only be God," McCormack said.

While not completely cured of her ailments, McCormack, who got baptised yesterday for the second time, said she has found a new calling.

"I sat down one day and I came to the realisation that God doesn't only want me to be a councillor, but a Christian councillor," McCormack said.