Councilmember Jarvis suffers setback

Saying she has nothing to hide but really can’t understand why it’s newsworthy, Chico City Councilmember Coleen Jarvis made public this week the fact that she has been diagnosed with a brain tumor, the second in just less than three years.

In the summer of 2001, Jarvis, who is up for re-election in November, had tumors discovered in her brain and intestine. She was successfully treated and missed only a couple of council meetings.

About a month ago a tumor about the size of a marble was located on the right side of her brain, near the base. Jarvis said that for the last six to eight months she had suffered intense headaches, one of which caused her to pull off the highway in Yuba City for at least a half-hour before she could resume her trip. The episode also forced her to curtail her driving for a couple weeks.

A series of MRIs last year in follow-up to her earlier bout with cancer had not revealed any problems, she said. But the continuing headaches, combined more recently with dizziness similar to what she’d suffered the first time the tumors were found, frustrated Jarvis and her doctors.

“The doctors at Stanford were upset because they didn’t find the tumor in the earlier scans,” she said. The new tumor, she pointed out, is on the opposite side from the first one, which was where the doctors had focused their attention.

She said she has had radiation surgery, which is non-invasive, but did require her to undergo 55 uninterrupted minutes of radiation treatment, an energy-draining experience.

“I’m claustrophobic, so they had to drug me” before putting her in the scanning tube, said an emotionally upbeat Jarvis this week.

She must wait two months for another MRI to see if the treatment is having an effect, she said, because the radiation works very slowly.

She said has not tried to keep the news quiet and that other councilmembers have known about it for some time.

“We were in the middle of the [new] city manager interviews, and I had the MRI that morning, so the whole council knew,” she said. She also told a number a people during an event at the Neighborhood Church a few weeks back.

She said the news has not affected her political plans simply because she has not yet made up her mind on whether she will run for re-election this fall.

“This is my son’s last year of his college wrestling career, and then there are the Olympic trials after that,” she said. “Plus I’m getting married this year, so I have a lot of major life decisions coming up. I’ll make up my mind by March or April. I don’t think I need to make it immediately.”

Jarvis was first elected in 1996 and then re-elected in 2000. She is currently the vice mayor and probably the most liberal member of an ideologically balanced council.