|
When Dale Kueter was diagnosed with cancer for the second time, he admits to becoming depressed and angry.
“I thought I had beaten it,” he says.
A referral to University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics—where he encountered the unexpectedly bright attitudes of children with cancer and many “tremendous” staff members—appears to have given him the edge to conquer the disease once again.
Kueter, 70, graduated from the University of Iowa journalism program in 1958 and wrote for Iowa newspapers for 41 years, including a 1990 trip to Czechoslovakia for a series on the changing political structure of the former Soviet satellite. He and his wife, Helen, raised five daughters.
He retired from the Cedar Rapids Gazette in 1999 and has just written his first full-length book, Vietnam Sons, which tells the story of two friends from Iowa who served together in Vietnam and the lifelong guilt one of them feels when the other dies from friendly fire.
“I’ve lived a full life,” Kueter said. “And here were these kids with cancer who were still smiling, laughing. It woke me up.”
With help from physicians at Gastroenterologists, P.C., and Mercy Hospital in Cedar Rapids, Kueter overcame colon cancer in 2002. Two years later, as part of a physical, his physician, UI Carver College of Medicine graduate Jill Flory, MD, sent his blood to a lab for testing. Low platelet levels foretold Kueter’s second experience with the disease.
After further testing at UI Hospitals and Clinics, a diagnosis was made: mantle cell lymphoma, a cancer of the cells of the immune system that make antibodies to invading pathogens, such as viruses.
A treatment plan was carried out by Roger Gingrich, MD, PhD, director of the UI’s Adult Blood and Bone Marrow Transplantation Program; and specialists at Iowa Blood and Cancer Care in Cedar Rapids. The key component was an autologous stem cell transplant at the UI’s Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The transplant involved removing Kueter’s stem cells, treating him with cancer-destroying levels of chemotherapy, and then returning the stem cells—cleansed to remove possibly contaminating cancer cells—to his body.
“Mr. Kueter was a positive, always upbeat fighter—and that’s what it takes to beat this disease,” Gingrich says.
“I was uncomfortable going to UI Hospitals and Clinics because I imagined it would be sterile, non-caring. It sounds cliché, but I thought I would be just another number,” Kueter says. “I could not have been more wrong. I met so many wonderful people. Having such a warm, loving environment was so important to the healing process.”
—Clancy Champanois
|
