Starts with K

It was a meeting unlike any I’d ever covered.

There were tears. There were beers. There were (only a couple) swears – and yes, I know it doesn’t rhyme, but it’s true.

I wasn’t really paying much attention when my boss, Rick Bussler, asked me to cover a meeting of the Blooming Prairie Cancer Group. In fact, when I talked to him three days later, I had to ask him to remind me of the date and time.

It’s not like me to tune out assignments, but when he called me that Friday, I was sitting in an oncologist’s office at Mayo Clinic.

The irony was not lost on me, of course.

My husband, Russ, started feeling a bit punk around the first of the year. A stomach bug was making the rounds, and we both wrote it off.

By February, I noticed a significant change in his appetite; he complained of pain in his abdomen.

By late February, I suggested he lay off spicy, fatty foods, because I suspected it might be gall bladder issues. It helped somewhat, but he still didn’t feel great.

He’d already made a doctor appointment by the time I noticed his eyes. The whites were … not. They were yellow. I was immediately alarmed that there was liver trouble.

After a series of wildly unlikely events, including his primary physician telling him to lie about how he was feeling, Russ was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in late March.

There was a blockage in something called the ampulla of Vater, which we all have. Surgeons put a stent in, collecting a biopsy while they were at it.

Folks, when I tell you he felt immediately better, I am not kidding. He was a new man, and a new color. The yellowness, which by then had spread throughout his body, was gone. He was released from the hospital the next day, and we ate pizza and Buffalo wings that night.

After a brief detour for open heart surgery in April – because why not – he is recovering nicely and rebuilding his strength.

As we wait for his heart to heal, we’re in a holding pattern for the cancer. His oncology team seems hopeful, as all the “markers” remain steady.

So that was the good news I was listening to when my boss called about the BP Cancer Group meeting.

And it was the good news I was thinking about as I listened to all the amazing things this group does for the community and beyond.

This group – which in the past year has donated more than $53,000 to people navigating cancer – worried out loud if they were doing enough, and I almost laughed.

They provide gas cards, parking passes, VISA cards for incidental expenses. They step in when a family’s utility bill is due, but medical appointments have replaced jobs.

I would hazard a guess that most, if not all of them, work full time. They have families. They have other obligations. Yet there they were, on a Wednesday night in August, trying to figure out how to do more.

If you’ve never been to a Blooming Prairie Cancer Auction, I suggest you find your way to town on Sept. 5 or 6. Or both.

Pay $300 for a pan of scotcheroos or $600 for a quilt, because this auction means business.

They’re figuring out how to do more. You can, too.