Focus
University Daily Kansan, June 19, 1985
Page 6
Patient predicts win over cancer after pain of disease, treatment
By Tim Hrenchir
Staff Reporter
Rose Eiesland remembers the pai of the needle.
"The drugs are so strong you can feel them burning in your arm," she says. "Sometimes I wondered if fighting cancer was really worth it."
John Lechliter/KANSAN
Rose Eiesland, Topea senior, is fighting Hodgkin's disease with the support of her boyfriend, Paul Stefansson, San Marino, Calif., junior
And it got worse. The afterschool after each chemotherapy shot brought about four to five hours of violent nausea and vomiting.
"Every time the nurse would tell me, 'You're going to be sick, I would expect that to happen.' Eileesland, Topeka senior, recalls. "But one day I told the nurse, 'I don't want to hear that anymore.' It was all mental. When I finally decided I wasn't going to be sick anymore. I wasn't."
The story of her battle against cancer tells of her courage, her will to live, her triumph over Hodgkin's disease and her effect on friends and family. This 21-year-old woman's attitude, her friends say, meant she'd be one to survive cancer and return to her studies.
But first she was reduced to tears upon learning of her cancer and she saw a friend die from cancer. During treatment, much of her hair fell out.
"One morning I woke up and saw all my hair from the back of my head had fallen out on the pillow," she says.
The radiation treatments also turned her skin a sickly brown.
"really hated that because I looked like I had cancer," she says.
ed like I had cancer," she says.
While she was undergoing chemotherapy, Eiesland and a friend who also had cancer attended a few meetings of a cancer support group.
"I felt so uncomfortable there," she says. "Most of the others were older people, and a lot of them had terminal cancer."
"I was confident I would live."
Eiesland left the cancer support group. She decided to lift herself, to 'ely on her own inner strength.
"I decided to be my own shrink," she says. "I decided I wasn't going to let cancer ruin my life. I knew the doctor had a way. I don't have to worry about it anymore."
Linda Brewer, a nurse in the oncology unit at the University of Kansas Medical Center, says a good attitude is important for cancer
"From personal experience I can say the people with the best mental attitudes almost always do better," she says.
A physician told Eiesland she had cancer in September 1983.
"I just stood in the hallway and cried." she says.
Eiesland was afflicted with Hodgkin's disease, a cancer that most often strikes people 20 to 40 years old. She had two tumors in her neck and one that covered about half her chest.
Eitesland's odds of surviving Hodgkin's disease were 70 to 90 percent, according to the American Cancer Society. Dramatic improvements have been made in treat-ment of patients who achieve 35 percent of its victims survived. The disease occurs about twice as often in adult males as females.
treatments. Eiesland needed all three.
Hodgkin's disease patients can be treated through surgery, chemotherapy, radiation treatment or any combination of those
She began chemotherapy after undergoing exploratory abdominal surgery in November 1983. She completed chemotherapy in May 1984 and began radiation treatments to treat cancer. She received five treatments in late June, and X-rays taken in August revealed that her tumors were gone.
During the ordeal, Elesiand was able to share her feelings with two other college-age Teopkans who also bad cancer.
"We kept each other strong," Steu says. "We figured we were going to live. When it was all over we were going to rent a limo and go to Kansas City and drive around and celebrate."
A year ago one of those friends died of leukemia.
"That devastated me," she says,
"I could not handle it. The low point
came when I went to a restaurant like he
was, but then it like he was
90 years old — then it really hit me."
Eiesland's mother, Helen Eiesland, says her daughter remained strong throughout her battle with cancer, only saw her cry but she says, she says
She says her daughter "has always hated to give in to anything."
"She would be climbing the stairs and she would have to stop and rest halfway up," she says. "Before she always took them two at a time — it was so frustrating for her to have to give in to something."
But now Eiesland has regained her strength, and her hair has grown back. "She looks healthier than she has in years," her mother says. And
now visits to her physician come only once every three months.
"I don't know how she does it," says her boyfriend, PaStefanSSon, San Marino, Calif., junior. "She's been through so much, but now she continues her life as if nothing ever happened."
She takes a full class load, studying for a degree in journalism, and works four days a week at the deli in the Kansas Union.
"She would make a great advertisement for the American Cancer Society," Helen Eisland said. "Everyone seems to think an automatic death sentence, but
they would think differently if they saw people like Rosaleil trugging up the hills at KU with her 50-pound backpack."
Eiesland tends to downplay her cancer, however
"I don't talk about it around the people I've met this year," she says. "Cancer doesn't have to be a part of me forever."
Eiesland says her cancer is technically in remission.
"But I'm confident I'm going to make it."
She says, "You can't really say I've been curled until I've been free of tension."
Triathletes pedal, swim, run Tinman course
TOPEKA — Six months ago Stanley Lombardo was sitting in a wheelchair, his right leg swathed in bandages, recovering from a serious leg injury.
But on Saturday, Lombardo, 41, competed in the Topeka Timan Triathlon, a grueling event that combines a 1.000-yard swim, a 19.8-mile bicycle ride, and a seven-mile run. "I had my doubts about finishing," Lombardo, associate professor of lassics, said after the race. "It
John Downs, Belton, Mo., graduate assistant in recreation services, also competed in the Tinman.
By Lisa Gaumnitz
wasn't just that my leg hurt — I'd bad it, I felt really drained."
Staff Reporter
At one point in the competition, Downs hauled himself out of Lake Shawne and sprinted to his bike. He feversily pulled on socks, cleated shoes and a helmet, hopped on his bike and raced up the hill to the roadway. Barely 30 seconds had passed in the transition from water to land.
"It's easier to pick up a minute or two there on the transition than
anywhere else in the race," Downs, 31, said. "I figured out a routine, and through my experience and all the rules I had to obey, I knew exactly what I wanted to do."
Downs and Lombard were just two of 750 entrants in the fifth running of the Tinnan. For Downs and Lombardo, as for many of the other entrants, the Tinnan was more than just another race.
By competing Saturday, Lombardo said he was one step closer to fully recovering from his leg injury. The Tinman was the first competition he
had entered since he stepped through a glass door in November and badly cut his lower leg from the bottom to the middle of his calf.
The injury cut through much muscle and many nerves, Lombardo said, and kept him either on crutches or in a wheelchair until February.
He said, "Everything was fine up until the run and then the leg went." The run is the final event in the triathlon.
"I decided to enter the Topeka Tinman to spur me on in my recuperation," he said "I set finishing the triathlon as my goal, but I told myself. I'm just going to see how the leg feels after the swimming and biking."
Although Lombardo had started swimming in February and had begun basking shortly after, he wasn't quite as dejected as before because he still was limping badly.
"I started to compensate with my left leg, and then that began to hurt, so I began race-walking. If I hadn't been doing the running in May and known that I could run that far, I probably would have quit.
Culture firm stops paying its growers
By Jill Ovens Staff Reporter
Jeff Scott, customer representative for Culture Farms Inc. 13th and Massachusetts streets, said a number of companies are discussing the company's difficulties.
Staff Reporter
A revised cease-and-desist order from Kansas authorities and a California court order freezing $1.4 million in accounts from Activator Supply Co., a related firm in the city, Nev., were issued last week.
Officials of a Lawrence culture-growing operation were expected to meet last night or early this morning with their attorneys to iron out mounting legal problems, a spokesman for the company said yesterday.
"Everyone is wondering what is going on, including us," Scott said. "We have stopped paying out cash for the cultures."
John Wurth, state securities commissioner, in his June 10 order attempted to prohibit Culture Farms and Activator Supply from selling activator kits to consumers both within the state and nationally, to prevent the purchase of grown cultures if they were merely to be used to make new activator kits and to block shipment of recycled activator kits from Culture Farms to Activator Supply for resale.
Wurth alleged that the sale of the kits, with a guaranteed buy-back of grown cultures, constituted the sale of unregistered securities in the state and that the companies involved in operating a Poniz pyramid scheme.
The second cease-and-desist order was appealed to Shawnee County District Judge James Bueche who interpreted the original order to limit the ban only to the sale of activator kits inside and outside Kansas.
On Friday, Wurth issued a revised order against Culture Farms and Activator Supply and Wurth's lawyers have asked Buchele to interpret that order at a hearing to be conducted at 8 a.m. tomorrow in Topeka.
Also on Friday, the California attorney general's office obtained a temporary court order to freeze withdrawals on accounts held by the state in that state, said Al Shelden, deputy attorney general for California.
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