Beating Cancer and Creating Joy

Gates resident regrowing her business after completing cancer treatments

By Mike Costanza

 

It all started with a suitcase.

On a steamy June day in 1989, Thelma Hamilton and her late husband, Robert, were unloading furniture at a craft sale near Saratoga Springs. Back then, Thelma painted sunflowers, Christmas scenes and other colorful images on tables, buffets, chairs and other types of furniture and sold them.

“I’d take a dresser and I’d paint, like, a rooster on the front of it,” the 69-year-old Gates resident said.

Robert pulled out a suitcase full of ornaments that his wife had decorated by hand the previous Christmas for a sale they’d held in their Watertown home. She objected to displaying them with the furniture they normally sold, but Robert decided to put the case out in order to fill a gap in their display space.

“We had 40 ornaments, and we sold them all in two hours,” Thelma said.

They decided that creating and selling ornaments was easier than lugging decorated furniture to sales venues, and Thelma began hand-painting more ornaments in her home workshop.

In addition to Christmas themes, she decorated them with images and messages that had personal meanings, such as the name of a customer’s child or the announcement an upcoming wedding. Thelma sold them out of a store in town, sometimes with the help of her young granddaughter Sydney Havens.

“We would have a line of people waiting to get their ornaments personalized,” Havens said.

No matter how long the line, Thelma always took the time to talk to her customers.

“She made friends with just about anybody,” Havens said.

Thelma eventually closed the store, and she and Robert began selling her creations at craft sales and online.  Havens often accompanied her.

“When I was little, I would crawl under the table and take a nap while she was talking to people,” she said.

Though Havens now lives and works in Albany, she still helps her grandmother at some craft shows.

Demand grew, and by 2019 Thelma L. Hamilton Designs was wholesaling ornaments to shops all over the country and in parts of Europe. That year alone, the company did close to $100,000 in sales.

Then COVID-19 hit and sales fell. Thelma worked to keep her business going, and in October of 2021 moved with Robert to a new home in Gates. A month later, she was diagnosed with Stage 4 terminal ovarian cancer. The cancer had metastasized, invading other parts of her body.

“I had several doctors who walked away and said ‘You’ve got 24 hours. It’s too far gone, there’s nothing we can do,’” Thelma said.

Roxana C. Vlad-Vonica, a medical oncologist hematologist for Rochester Regional Health, decided to take her case.

“[She] said ‘If you’ll work with me, we’ll do this one day at a time,’” Thelma said.

On Dec. 9, Thelma began undergoing chemotherapy. Unlike other patients who have received the medications, she initially did not experience the fatigue, nausea and other side effects they can cause.

“Every time I sat through chemotherapy and got my infusion of chemo, I got stronger,” she said. “That was very unusual.”

That’s not to say that the treatments didn’t leave their mark. They eventually left her in constant pain, confined to a wheelchair because she’d lost the use of her legs, and without any skin on her tongue.

“I couldn’t eat, but I got through it because of my faith in God,” she said.

Following chemotherapy, Thelma underwent surgery to remove the rest of her cancer, physical therapy to regain the full use of her legs, then a second course of chemotherapy.

“That infusion, for most people, heals them of the cancer for the rest of their life,” she said.

Unfortunately, Thelma was allergic to the medications. The incisions from her surgery began to open up, and her doctor curtailed the regimen. Despite that, she was declared cancer-free in December of 2023.

Then tragedy struck.

Robert had recently suffered a number of strokes that had forced him to spend time in an intensive care unit. Though he was able to return home, just after Thelma received her good news, he suffered a massive heart attack and died. They’d been married for 37 years.

“That was one of the darkest times in my whole life,” Thelma Hamilton said.

To cope with the terrible loss, she focused on continuing to heal from cancer and re growing her business. Donna Wabshall, who owns Craft Company No. 6, came to know Hamilton through selling her ornaments and the experiences they both had shared.

“My mother had died of cancer, and I had watched what my mother went through,” Wabshall said. “I had lost my first husband years ago, so again, it was just something else that we bonded over.”

The two became good friends.

“She is a pretty upbeat person considering everything that she’s went through, very happy, helpful and just generally a good person,” Wabshall said.

Craft Company No. 6, which sells handcrafted American and Canadian artisan gifts, jewelry and accessories, is the only local store that offers Hamilton’s decorations. They sell well, particularly the ones offered at the holidays that bear depictions of Rochester’s historical buildings.

“Every year there’s a new ornament, and we’ve got people that come back to just look for the new ornament that’s coming out,” Wabshall said.

Thelma L. Hamilton Designs is still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and its founder’s fight against cancer—in 2024, the company made only a fraction of its normal pre-pandemic sales. Though Hamilton can’t say her cancer is in remission until she’s free of the disease for five years, she believes she’ll make it that far, and is even working on a book about her experiences.

“I was never worried that I was going to die because my faith in God carried me through,” she said.

For more information on Hamilton, her creations and her business, go to: www.facebook.com/ThelmaLHamiltonDesign.

To meet her in person or view her hand-decorated ornaments, head to the Dome arena in Henrietta in November for Christmas in the Country, a three-day shopping event.