Bill Jones on Public Service and Cancer Survival

In October 2025, Vaughn resident Bill Jones, 70, noticed he was losing weight.

“I made a joke out of it at first, and the reason I did was that after I retired, I put on some weight,” he said. “I had a lot of new jeans that I couldn’t get into. Then they were too big. I didn’t think much about it.”

Then one morning, he woke up covered with a painful rash.

“It was like a sunburn, dark red everywhere but my hands and my head,” Jones said. “It itched so bad I couldn’t sleep. They finally got me some salve, like four times the amount you’re supposed to use, but that controlled the itching.”

A dermatologist thought the rash might be a side effect of medication for arthritis, but he’d been receiving that under a doctor’s care for a decade.

“I went to my doctor; he said he wanted to get a blood test done. Then he called the day before Thanksgiving and said, ‘You need to go to the hospital. Your kidneys and liver have stopped working.’ ”

Jones checked into St. Anthony Hospital in Gig Harbor for a few days of treatment, tests, and monitoring. “As far as I knew, I was doing fine. But I wasn’t fine.”

Two days later, he was transferred by ambulance to St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma. He was unconscious by the time he arrived and was intubated and put on a ventilator.

Jones had double pneumonia and organ failure and started dialysis. He was in a coma for 10 days.

“I still don’t remember probably the first three weeks,” he said. “Everybody was telling me what was going on, but it just wasn’t registering. Claudia came in one afternoon and said, ‘You have cancer.’ And I said, ‘OK, so now what do they do?’ She goes, ‘Well, I’m not sure yet, but they have to do something because this isn’t good.’ ”

Coming to the Key

Bill and Claudia Jones met as students at Sylvester Middle School in Burien. “His brother was in all my classes, seventh through 12th grade,” Claudia said. “I knew Bill, but we weren’t ever boyfriend and girlfriend.”

The two were friends for years before they got together in their mid-20s. They married two years later in September 1986. Another decade on, they moved to Herron Island with two of their four children.

“We had a cabin out here,” Bill said. “We used to spend our weekends and holidays and all that out on the island.”

The kids rode the ferry to school, attending Evergreen Elementary and Key Peninsula Middle School. Bill drove trucks and later was a night supervisor commuting to Kent. “It worked out well because Claudia bought a second cabin and made a little grocery and hardware store,” Bill said. “I could stop and buy things that people wanted. We were there for 10 years.”

They both started volunteering for the KP fire department because there was an engine and an aid unit stored in the island community building, and no one to use them.

“We just wanted the training so we could do medical response,” Bill said. “A lot of retired people live over there, and whenever anybody had a problem, they came to Claudia’s store instead of calling 911.”

Longtime KPFD volunteer DeeDee Kirkus trained them as EMTs by staying overnight with them on the island every week.

“When she was done with us, we took the tests at Tacoma Community College with all the other classes,” Bill said. “I did my firefighting training at Gig Harbor — we (KPFD) did it all together then — and I was a firefighter by the end of 2006. It was a lot of fun living out there. Then we woke up one day at the same time and said, ‘We’ve got to get off this island.’ ”

Bill and Claudia moved to Vaughn.

He remained a firefighter until 2014, when he had a hip replaced. “I didn’t want to get into a situation where I couldn’t help somebody.” He also retired in 2015 after 43 years with two different trucking companies, joined the KP Lions Club, and is now its president.

Claudia, meanwhile, became a KP fire commissioner and later a department chaplain.

“I did maintenance, besides the calls and stuff,” Bill said. “I help with the training, teach CPR, do a lot of public events, the parade, the Santa sleigh, teach the new guys how to drive, road tests, that kind of stuff. So, we’re still hooked up. And it’s been great. I still do enjoy being around all those guys.”

They have been KPFD volunteers for 25 years.

Cancer

Bill was diagnosed with Stage IIE Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which had spread from his central core lymph nodes to adjacent organs. This caused the systemic chaos he experienced. The lymphatic system is critical to the body’s immune response. Bill’s rash was symptomatic of a compromised immune system overreacting to an assault it couldn’t identify, because the enemy was part of the immune system itself.

As a result, Bill’s blood was overloaded with toxins that overwhelmed his filtration organs — the kidneys and liver — and made him vulnerable to infection. In his case, pneumonia. He was put on chemotherapy while still in a coma.

“I understood kind of, but not,” he said. “It didn’t matter because I wasn’t going anywhere, right?”

Bill was treated with a regimen called CHOP, a combination of four cancer-killing drugs, plus a chemotherapy biologic, an immunotherapy drug supplied by the University of Washington Medical Center. It can include substances produced by living organisms, or synthetic versions, similar to a vaccine, to help the body’s immune system target cancer cells, instead of killing every cell in its path, like traditional chemotherapy.

“It was kind of funny, when I was in ER at St. Joe’s, the people who were working there were questioning why they were doing anything to me because of my age, and Claudia happened to overhear one of them,” Bill said. “ ‘He’s 70 years old, what do you want us to do?’ someone said. And she said, ‘You will do whatever you need to do because he’s going home with me,’ and it was never brought up again. One of the nurses told me what happened later. It wasn’t funny for Claudia.”

In the ER, Claudia said, “I was an absolute robot.” She told the staff, “He’s 70 going on 50. I want you to throw everything at him. And they did.”

Community

After nearly a month at St. Joe’s, Bill was given a walker to practice getting around on his own.

“I had no idea I was on the oncology floor,” he said. “I was there for like four weeks before I understood what was happening. One of the gals there said ‘You know, we’re going to miss you when you go home. Because you’re so upbeat and you do what you’re supposed to do. Most of the people on this floor, they don’t go home.’ ”

Bill said he and Clauda are grateful to the community.

“It’s just, it was just such a ride,” Claudia said. “I had no trouble feeling, as many people say, born again. I could feel the positive energy from the peninsula. I could feel it from our family. There was, there was no turning back. There was just no, no turning back.”

“Everybody’s been fantastic,” Bill said. “I need to figure out a way I can thank these people because they really helped Claudia out while I was in there. The fire department took up a big collection, another group from the church did the same thing. A couple of firefighters came and put railings along the porch, railings in the downstairs bathroom. For a while, our fridge was so full of stuff we couldn’t fit any more into it,” he said. “We love it here.”

Bill’s last PET scan found no cancer cells in his system. His final infusion of chemo was May 19.

“The day after my 71st birthday,” he said. “Now we’ll see how long it lasts. I don’t think anybody can give you a time; you’re going to be fine for this long or whatever. I’m hoping I’m gonna be good.”