Don’t tell 77-year-old Judy Wolcott that you’re depressed about getting older.

The 39-year Woodridge resident overheard someone say that recently and, “I was just as fierce as I could be,” she said, lowering her eyebrows and crinkling her nose to make a ferocious face, as she recalled the conversation. “I said, ‘Don’t you ever say that again! Just think about the alternative!’ “

Wolcott has thought about the alternative – death – during three bouts with cancer which, she says, have given her, “friendships and a zest for staying alive.”

She got her first cancer diagnosis in July of 1993, when she was in her 60s. Before the colonoscopy, the doctor said, “You’re too young to get colon cancer,” Wolcott remembers. “Then, afterward, he came back in and said, ‘Guess what. You’re not too young.’ “

Wolcott was determined to survive, she said, because she really wanted to see her grandchildren. “Little did I know, I wasn’t going to get any grandchildren,” she added with a laugh.

Survival meant cancer treatment and a surgery to remove, “gooey black stuff,” from her colon.

A scene from Wolcott’s childhood kept running through her mind before that first surgery. She had fallen in her neighbor’s driveway and badly scraped her knee. There was blood everywhere, and a pebble had gotten stuck in her knee. Someone took it out for her. Wolcott connected the cancer with the pebble – it was inside her, and it needed to come out, somehow.

Following the surgery and a double dose of treatment for six months, it did – she was cancer free.

But it didn’t last. In May of 2006, she got breast cancer from taking hormones associated with her first cancer treatment. That seemed like “a non-event,” compared with the colon cancer, though – which came back in Dec. 2008.

Wolcott is now cancer free again, and she says she plans to live to be 120-years-old – because, she insists, she likes “collecting birthdays,” not because she’s afraid of death. She sees life as an adventure, she says, and wants hers to last as long as possible.

“(Death) is all part of the adventure, because no one really knows for sure what’s on the other side – whether it’s nothing or something better,” she says.

She thinks, though, that the adventure ends at death, and she wants to postpone that for as long as possible.

To help her do that, Wolcott has a weekly fitness ritual that includes a wide variety of activities from bowling to dragon boat paddling.

She does most of that fitness routine with other cancer survivors through Team Survivor Northwest, a Seattle-based fitness group for women who have survived cancer. “There’s no good reason to get cancer,” Wolcott says, “but there was a wonderful result – the friendships I’ve made from being in this organization. They’re just amazing.” She once told a friend, “I’d never wish cancer on anyone, but I wish you could go on these Nordic walks with us.”

The friends she’s made through her cancer have been a bit like a sorority, she said, and there are things that they can share with each other that others wouldn’t understand.

She remembers slowly shuffling to the shower with so little energy that she could barely put one foot in front of the other. The phone rang. She answered it, and a voice on the other line very seriously said, “Have you planned your funeral?”

“That’s funny,” Wolcott replied.

“No, it’s not,” the lady said.

Wolcott still thinks it is, but it’s the sort of thing that people with cancer might understand and feel more free to laugh about.

“There’s a whole different outlook once you’ve had cancer and survived,” she said.