Leukemia Deaths Spark Reactions
It’s hard to explain the sinking feeling I get when I hear of someone who has died of “my” disease. Maybe that’s because it’s a combination of reactions: sadness, a reminder that I could have died, and thinking “there but for the grace of God go I.” A question arises: Why am I still here? In the cases where it was someone I knew, also survivors’ guilt. I know I am not alone in having this happen. I’ve talked to friends who have experienced it.
Learning of leukemia deaths can cut close
My social worker knew this kind of news was dangerous for patients in active treatment. When I was in the hospital in 2006 getting chemotherapy after I relapsed, she wanted patients to turn off the TVs when news came on about the death of Susan Butcher, the four-time Iditarod champion, of a recurrence of leukemia after a recent stem-cell transplant. She was 51. This one cut close, because I was the same age.1
Last month, I ran into “it” again. Only this time, not only was the person the same age, but he was also a newspaper person like me and a member of the family that owned the chain for which I worked. The headline caught my eye immediately: David Newhouse, 65, Dies; His Paper Broke the Sandusky Story. And the subhead: “A member of a powerful publishing family, he drove his Pennsylvania newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the child sex abuse scandal at Penn State.”
The paper where I was a reporter, The Sunday Republican in Springfield, Massachusetts, was actually the result of a merger of two Newhouse newspapers. I had joined the morning paper, The Morning Union; the afternoon paper was The Daily News. We shared the same office, one group of reporters and editors on each side. At some point, when afternoon papers went out of fashion, we merged to become The Union-News. The Sunday paper was always The Republican. In another name change, they dropped the Union-News and called both the morning paper and Sunday paper The Republican.
Different family members spent time working at different papers. For a while we had Steven, and then, Robyn, David’s sister. The cause of death: “complications of leukemia.” We have a private Facebook group called “Old Repubs,” and I shared the obituary in it with a comment that I was sorry for Robyn’s loss.2
Was it my leukemia?
But wait, I wondered, did he die of MY leukemia (acute myeloid leukemia)? Didn’t the obituary writer know that just saying “leukemia” left out a lot of information and that there are many types of leukemia? I found another obit that said he died “after a 14-year battle with leukemia.” I surmised, then, that it was some form of chronic leukemia. Did that make it less sad and less threatening? I don’t know. It was one step removed on the leukemia side but there still wasn’t much distance on the newspaper side.3
In my reading, I came upon something odd. His father, Norman, had also had leukemia. Again, the stories didn’t say which kind. But it must have also been chronic because he was diagnosed in 1971 and told he had five years to live. In fact, he lived until 82, when he died of a heart attack.4
I read in one story that Robyn gave him a lot of vitamins and he asked his doctor if those were the key to his longevity. Not surprisingly, his doctor said no. I went down the rabbit hole and looked up, “is chronic leukemia hereditary?” I found this out: “Inherited susceptibility to chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) has been recognized for decades.” I don’t know if they had CLL or not. Sounds like maybe they did. As a curious reader, blood cancer survivor, and freelance editor and writer, I know one thing for sure: They should have told us!5
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