Pamlico author thankful to be alive

Vicki Prescott was anxious and excited as she stood in the labor room the day before Thanksgiving 2008, awaiting the birth of her daughter’s baby.

Prescott was startled when her cell phone rang and she hurried to a hallway to answer. It was her doctor and the news was not good. She called her husband, Bobby, and swore him to secrecy.

She returned to her daughter Brandi Robertson’s side for the successful birth of her grandson.

The next day, Prescott prepared the holiday meal and celebrated with family at her home in Grantsboro.

That weekend, she finally shared the doctor’s news with her family.

Prescott had a brain tumor. By the following Tuesday, she was preparing for surgery at Duke Hospital.

She credits a series of unlikely events with leading to discovery of the tumor and saving her life.

She worked for the Eastern Carolina Council in New Bern and typed a lot. In 2008, she experienced numbness in her hand. She chalked it up to carpal tunnel.

By chance she met an acupuncturist at a benefit dinner in New Bern last November. The woman examined her hand and told her it was more likely a nerve problem in her neck.

The following week, the numbness persisted, and she went to her doctor, Joseph Overby.

He concurred that it was not carpal tunnel and ordered an MRI. Her insurance company wanted her to have physical therapy, but she credits Overby’s persistence with arranging the test which discovered the tumor.

At Duke, the surgeon revealed the severity and immediacy of the situation.

“He said ‘you better thank your doctor, because within three months you would not be here,” she recalled. “I credit Joe Overby with saving my life.”

Radiation treatment followed the surgery, and she still has numbness and pain and undergoes an MRI every six months.

But, she remains thankful.

“I’m here,” she said. “I could be dead.”

Before the medical crisis, she wrote a folksy cook book in 2007, “Ice Tea, Please.”

Her grandmother was 90 and Prescott decided to write down some of the recipes for her daughters, Brandi and Kristen. The list became a book.

“As I started writing the recipes, I would think of a story that reminded me of the past,” she said. “So I wrote these stories down for them. The stories kept coming. I would stay up until 2 o’clock in the morning and just write. Finally, I said I’ve got to stop. I’ve got 400 pages.”

Over the years, she had often thought of writing a book of fiction.

“But, I couldn’t find anything that I really wanted to write about. But, this, it was just like flowing,” she said. “I had to take about a hundred pages out.”

Her oldest daughter Brandi looked over the manuscript and urged her to publish it. Ironically, the publishing date is the same month she found out about the tumor.

Prescott’s maiden name was Banks. She is a Grantsboro native, and her parents were both rural mail carriers.

She started school in the late 1950s at the old Alliance School, where a hurricane tore the room off the two-story brick building. She and the other students were bused first to Oriental and later to Arapahoe.

She graduated from Pamlico County High in 1975 and attended community college.

She was 19 when she met Bobby Prescott from New Bern at a friend’s house, romance blossomed for a year and a half, and they married.

Prescott had a commercial fishing boat and sold seafood along the coast.

He changed his career direction and they opened the Trawl Door restaurant in Oriental in the late 1970s.

But, after their first child was born, they realized the long hours required to run a restaurant did not blend well with raising a family.

“If you owned it, you had to be there,” she said. They eventually sold the business, and Bobby Prescott started a marine construction business and she became a stay-at-home mom.

She later worked in real estate, and in the 1990s she went to work for the Eastern Carolina Council.

The tumor has changed her life. She had to give up her job. But, she remains busy with painting, making jewelry and typing late into the night.

The sequel to “Ice Tea, Please” is in the works.

Charlie Hall can be reached at 252-635-5667 or chall@freedom.com.