Northbrook woman who beat the odds on breast cancer, then helped others, dead at 77

• Reprints

Georgia Photopulos

Updated: November 16, 2011 1:22AM

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer at 34 in 1968, Georgia Photopulos was given a year to live.

It was bone-chilling news for a mom with two young children in the days before advances in anti-cancer drugs and surgery and chemo­therapy.

Mrs. Photopulos’ reaction?

She refused to accept her doctor’s recommendation to go Florida and enjoy the months she had left.

Instead, she endured 120 radiation treatments and 19 operations — including two mastectomies, brain surgery and multiple heart procedures.

And it was all worth it, she would later tell everyone she could.

The Northbrook woman lived for 43 more years; long enough to be a Yia-Yia (grandmother) to her children’s children and to counsel hundreds of other women living with the disease. She co-authored a book about her struggles and became a nationally recognized speaker who appeared on TV shows including “Good Morning America” and “The Phil Donahue Show.”

Mrs. Photopulos was recognized for her work by Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Jimmy Carter and by a governor who would soon become president: Bill Clinton.

She even wrote some Emmy-winning story lines about breast cancer for the soap opera “The Young and the Restless” in 1976 and 1977, according to her husband, Socrates “Bud” Photopulos, a retired ABC-TV news correspondent and producer.

She died July 26 of complications after heart surgery, her husband said. She was 77.

Even at the end, while on a ventilator, she remained upbeat, encouraging her relatives to share funny family stories to comfort each other.

“She was like this invincible woman,” said her daughter, Kerry Pranger. “Nothing would bring her down.”

Mrs. Photopulos was born Georgia Karabatsos in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the daughter of Greek immigrants. Her family moved to Chicago seeking better opportunities.

Her outgoing nature was apparent when she joined a club at Tuley High School — the Polish Club. It was quite a change for a girl who had entered grade school speaking only Greek. She not only learned some Polish, “She marched in the Kosciuszko Parade down Division Street,” her husband said.

Her high school counselors told her the FBI was hiring, and she wound up working at the bureau from the 1950s into the 1960s. She started out as a clerk, but her bosses took note of her intelligence and versatility, and soon she was doing Greek-English translating, and she helped edit “The Investigator,” the FBI’s employee magazine.

She even assisted on some undercover work, her husband said. The bureau recognized that a man doing surveillance might draw suspicious stares, so they sometimes asked her to accompany male agents so they could pose as a couple, Bud Photopulos said.

A friend introduced him to his future wife, and he was enchanted.

“She made me laugh, she made me smile, and I just knew I had to see her again,” he recalled. “I wasn’t going to let this get away.”

After she was diagnosed with cancer, he said, “She was just not about to give up.”

She told him: “I don’t care what they cut out — as long as I know where I am and I have my mind, I can handle it.”

In those days, there weren’t as many resources for patients as there are now, so she pitched the American Cancer Society about starting a phone-help hotline. “The Cancer Society gave her a small grant to work on the project, and it was a big success,” her husband said.

She landed a column in the Lerner and Pioneer newspapers on cancer and other health matters and soon was invited to speak around the country about the perspective of the cancer patient and the impact of the disease on the entire family.

Her columns contributed to the 1988 book she co-wrote with her husband, Of Tears and Triumphs.

Dr. John Demakis regularly invited Mrs. Photopulos to Loyola University Medical Center to talk with medical students. “She did it in a very positive, almost lighthearted manner,” Demakis said.

“She would wear a wig, but she would pull the wig off. She would do it in a way the kids laughed. They loved her. The lecture halls were packed,” he said.

Soap-opera guru Bill Bell “called her one day and said, ‘I’d like you to write some episodes about breast cancer’ ” for “The Young and the Restless,” her husband recalled, and she came up with story ideas and dialogue.

Nixon wrote to congratulate her on her work, and she was invited to the Carter White House with other prominent Greek Americans for an event honoring the late Dr. Georges Papanicolaou, who invented the Pap test to screen for cervical cancer.

While in Washington, Mrs. Photopulos even met the forbidding bulldog of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover.

“She was told if you are in D.C. and you don’t see him, he will be very upset,” her husband said. “So we were actually ushered in to his office, and we spent a few minutes with him.”

Her phone always seemed to be ringing with calls from frightened people who were newly diagnosed with cancer.

“She’d find doctors for people,” said her daughter, Kerry Pranger. “Even when she didn’t feel well, she would drop what she was doing.”

Phyllis Perivolidis was one of those people. She sought Mrs. Photopulos’ help during her two bouts with cancer. “She showed me the statistics and said, ‘Look how good the statistics are — you’re going to be fine.’ She was like my hero.”

Mrs. Photopulos “brought such enormous consolation to so many people and so much hope,” said Chicago writer Harry Mark Petrakis. “She proved time and time again that the human body is more regenerative than we can imagine.”

Maybe fittingly for someone who did so much to help the ailing, Mrs. Photopulos loved making — and eating — chicken soup from scratch. And she would season her cooking with Greek culinary touches, like putting cinnamon in spaghetti sauce, her daughter said.

Mrs. Photopulos also is survived by her son, James; her sister, Chris Mounce, and five grandchildren. Services have been held.