• 6/5/2005
  • El Dorado, KS
  • Steve Smith
  • El Dorado Times (www.eldoradotimes.com)

When Mike Wheeler talks to the audience at Galen Blackmore Stadium Friday evening “cancer clinical trials” will be the three words he will want his audience to particularly remember. Those three words, he says, are the reason he will be able to stand in front of those people.

Wheeler, of El Dorado, is chairman of the Butler County Commission. He is also honorary chair of this year’s El Dorado Relay for Life event benefitting research and activities of the American Cancer Society.

Relay for Life will begin at 7 p.m. Friday and continue until 9 a.m. the following morning.

It has now been two years since the Memorial Day time period of 2003 when Wheeler was diagnosed with squamous cell cancer, which for him created a tumor the size of a golfball at the base of his tongue.

He’d had trouble breathing, eating and swallowing for about six months prior to his diagnosis, and there had also been a bout with pneumonia in both lungs during that time. Even with the severety of his symptoms, he said, “I thought I’d get over it. I thought maybe it was a sinus infection or a sore throat.

“I blew it off; I’m not real big on going to doctors, and I just thought ‘well, I’ll just ride it out.’

“I just never got any better,” he said, “so my physician and I finally decided I should go see an ear, nose and throat doctor so he could look down my throat and see what was going on.” When that happened, he said, “I could tell by looking at him it wasn’t good.”

Wheeler had a biopsy the following day and began chemotherapy the following week, which was the first week of June in 2003. By the last week of that month, he said, the tumor had disappeared.

“They couldn’t see it anymore; it wasn’t on any of the scans anymore,” he said.

There were still three more rounds of chemotherapy ahead of him, Wheeler said, as well as six weeks of radiation treatment.

It was in the middle of September of 2003 that all his treatments were finished. Since that time, he said, he has gone back every three or four months to get a check-up — and the word continues to be that “I’m in remission, I’m cancer-free and looking good.”

What that all brings him to, Wheeler said, is the cancer clinical trial he was on for his treatment.

He met the criteria, he said, and then had the option of going the route of a regular treatment for his kind of cancer; having surgery to cut the tumor out; or trying the clinical trial, which encompassed the four rounds of chemotherapy, six weeks of radiation plus an extra drug which went along with his chemotherapy.

“It sounds kind of experimental, but it’s not,” Wheeler said of cancer clinical trials. “It’s state-of-the-art.

“It’s not the status quo,” he said. “It’s what’s going on; it’s the most current, most relevant kind of treatment that exists for whatever particular cancer” a person has.

While there are lots of young people involved in clinical trials, Wheeler said, for some reason there are not as many adults as children participating in them.

“I don’t know what the reason is for that,” he said, adding for a person who has just been diagnosed with cancer he now believes the question about whether they are eligible for a cancer clinical trial should be the first ones out of their mouths when they go in for a consultation.

“They work miracles,” he remarked, and “I’m a miracle guy, I think, just being here.”

There is “quite a network out there” involving doctors who are involved in clinical trials, Wheeler said; it’s not a case of one group people working in isolation and not sharing their information.

“That information is disseminated through the cancer community,” he said. “The researchers and the doctors are all tied in; it’s quite a network of people.

“It’s pretty amazing.”

Wheeler said he is promoting clinical trials because as more people become involved in them that will lead to “more hope, more medicine and more cures.

“Who knows whether a cure for cancer in general” could be somewhere in a lab waiting to be used in a clinical trial, he remarked.

Whatever route one decides to take in battling cancer, Wheeler said, they should never give up on hope or “sell the human spirit short.”

Also, he said, “I couldn’t have done it” without the support of his wife Debbie, a counselor at El Dorado High School, and the support he received from his and her families.

“I just can’t stress enough how important the family is,” Wheeler said, also recalling the advice he got from his younger sister after he started telling his family about his situation.

He’d been in a down mood when he told her, he recalled, “and the next day she called me and said ‘I’ve been thinking about that conversation we had yesterday.’

“She reamed me out about my attitude and said ‘you’re never going to beat this thing if you don’t get your head screwed on right; you’ve got to have the right attitude.’

“She was very sweet about it, but she chewed me out.

“I kid her about it today,” Wheeler recalled of that conversation, but as he got to thinking about what she had told him he realized “she was right; there’s nothing to be gained by being down on this thing.

“I just can’t imagine” going through his cancer treatment by himself, Wheeler remarked.

“That support group is huge,” he said, adding “when you live in a town like this everyone is so supportive.

“It was a great experience just to find out how much love and support there really is out there.”

At one time or another, he said, there were also probably a dozen doctors involved in his treatment process.

“It’s teamwork,” he said. “I just don’t think you can do it by yourself — I couldn’t have done it by myself.”

Looking back, Wheeler admitted, “it really worked to my disadvantage” not to have looked into his cancer symptoms sooner.

“I should have gotten it checked out immediately,” he said, adding it turned out the kind of cancer he had is generally associated with smoking, drinking or chewing tobacco — none of which he does.

“That was what was kind of discouraging,” he remarked. “There really wasn’t anything which precipitated it.”

While he did all his radiation treatment through Via Christi in Wichita, his chemotherapy was done through Susan B. Allen Memorial Hospital in El Dorado.

Two weeks after he finished with radiation that portion of his cancer treatment became available through the opening of SBA’s new Cancer Treatment Center.

Even as a hospital board member, Wheeler said, “I never dreamed” he would one day be in the position of needing to use SBA’s cancer treatment services; now, he said, he would be able to have his entire treatment conducted through the hospital.

“We have the best radiation doctor in Wichita coming over here once a week,” he said, “and that’s who everyone wanted me to go to.”

Now, he said, even doctors in Wichita have nothing but the highest praise for the radiation equipment at SBA’s Cancer Treatment Center.

People in El Dorado may not understand “how lucky they are” to have SBA’s treatment center, he remarked.