She was preceded in death by her husband, Apolinar Tongco Dizon (2000), and her parents Dominador Valdecañas (1978) and Natividad Quintos Valdecañas (1999). An unlikely matriarch as she had wanted to be a nun, she is survived by her children Paul (Grace), Victor (Deborah), and Maria Luz (Robert), and 8 grandchildren (Sabrina, Brianna, Evan, Victoria, Claire, Emme, Beauregard and Thaddeus), plus two siblings Antonio and Maria Lourdes. She was the eldest of nine (Dominador, Rudolfo, Nicanor, Leonila, Antonio, Virgilio, Adolfo, and Maria Lourdes).
Born in Balanga, Bataan, Philippines, she graduated with a doctorate in Medicine from the University of Santo Tomas. She moved to the United States to complete her internship in Dayton, Ohio and her residency in Pediatrics at Detroit Children’s Hospital (where she was famous for her white Buick). She completed her fellowship in Developmental Pediatrics at the University of California - Los Angeles, where she was appointed a clinical fellow at the United Cerebral Palsy Research and Educational Foundation followed by employment at the Phelps’ Rehabilitation Center in Reisterstown (Baltimore), which later became the Phelps’ Center for Cerebral Palsy at the Kennedy Krieger Institute.
She met her husband in Detroit at Belle Isle but returned to the Philippines to establish the first Cerebral Palsy clinic in the country at the Mandaluyong Medical Center. They married in 1960 before returning to the United States to continue their respective occupations -- first Manhattan, then Charlotte, North Carolina, then Brooklyn. Later, with three young children now in tow, they crossed the country to Montesano, Washington, where her husband served as the town doctor and surgeon and she ran the medical practice. Several years later, while attending a medical conference, they ran into old medical school friends and decided to move to Houston, Texas, a.k.a. Mission Control. That is how her children became Texans. As her children grew older, she started to work in real estate, later also practiced medicine with the U.S. Public Health Service and, in her final working years, worked at the pharmacy of one of the local hospitals.
She relocated to Columbia to spend more time with her granddaughters but also enjoyed extended visits with her grandchildren in Columbus, Ohio and Chicago, Illinois. Her daughter-in-law and daughter could not have survived their respective twins’ first year without her, ever ready to hold and feed a baby in the middle of the night. She also would visit her siblings in Atlanta, Georgia. She said the thing she was proudest of in life was her children, but they know she was equally proud to have been a diplomate of the American Board of Pediatrics.
She famously had no hobbies other than making rosaries and watching her favorite TV show, “Young Sheldon”. Her family wishes her Godspeed as she slips “the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God”.
In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Cerebral Palsy Foundation in her name.
https://www.cerebralpalsyfoundation.org/
