Cancer can't break her stride

Longtime leukemia survivor and marathoner Tamara Stevens trains her way through chemotherapy

by Lorena Anderson

By most people's standards, training for a marathon is hard.

For Tamara Stevens, the training regime is probably one of the best parts of her week. Sore feet and aching muscles aren't much compared with the nausea and other side effects of chemotherapy treatments.

But pain and duress are familiar companions for Stevens.

Diagnosed with leukemia at 16, Stevens underwent a bone-marrow transplant done by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center's Dr. E. Donnall Thomas, the physician who pioneered the procedure and won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1990. Stevens, of Bellevue, Wash., is one of the world's longest-living survivors of her type of cancer, acute myelogenous leukemia.

But cancer wasn't done with Stevens, now 44. Four years ago, she found a lump the size of a 50-cent piece in her breast. Doctors told her the recurrence of cancer likely resulted from previous treatments. They found one tumor in her breast and several in her liver.

"Back in 1972, they gave me three weeks to live," Stevens says. "I refused to give up."

That kind of attitude has helped her battle her breast cancer and given her strength to endure three-hour chemo treatments every week. It helps her persevere through the procedures and refocus on her immediate goal—preparing to power-walk the Dublin City Marathon in Ireland in October.

"Tamara is one of the most amazing women you'll ever meet," says Darcy Valentine, senior campaign director for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. "She's determined to (finish the marathon), and anyone who knows Tamara knows she will."

This isn't the first time Stevens has had to alternate between treatments and training.

Besides a mastectomy, the treatment for her Stage 4 breast cancer included high-dose chemotherapy that hospitalized her for two months. She began receiving cards from Pat Morosic, a woman who learned about Stevens through her nurse and nutritionist at the University of Washington and ran the Alaska Marathon in Anchorage in Stevens' name for the society.

Morosic sent Stevens cards and called every few days—"a real positive shot of energy for me, considering we'd never met," Stevens says.

After the marathon, Morosic visited, hanging the medal she won for completing the race around Stevens' neck. Morosic also brought a picture of herself and the other two women she ran with, Stevens' nurse and nutritionist.

Stevens was convinced that when she was well enough, just going through the training program for a marathon would help her feel better and ensure she got plenty of exercise, even if she never did race.

Although she has always been athletic, Stevens says she wasn't sure she could ever complete a marathon. Power-walking is harder, in some ways, than running. The walker's feet are on the pavement twice as long because strides are shorter, and for walkers, the race takes so much longer.

Because of how hard it is on the body, people familiar with marathon training were both horrified and amazed when told of Stevens' intentions, asking why someone would power-walk a marathon.

Regardless of what others might think, Stevens trains anyway — five days a week.

"By the time I got up to 18 miles, I figured I could do 26," she says.

She did the San Diego and Honolulu marathons, and although she had vowed to call it quits, chose to power-walk a marathon in Alaska just because she wanted to see 24 straight hours of sunlight. Now she's looking ahead to Dublin.

"(The doctors) ask you if you have your will in order, and it starts you thinking about your priorities," she says. "I pray a lot. I'm doing all I can to stay around."

She's a regular part of the Team in Training program of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Stevens is burning up the trails, rain or shine, and giving advice to others in training. One Saturday after her treatment, she walked 18 miles from Mercer Island to Bellevue, helping others get ready for the Maui Marathon, which took place March 18.

Even though the diagnosis of the second round of cancer shocked and discouraged her for a time, Stevens, a project manager for The Boeing Co., considers herself fortunate. Now the only thing that discourages her about the treatments is when she has to "waste" a sunny day.

She and her husband, Jack, recently renewed their wedding vows on their 10th anniversary. She works full-time, is writing a book, makes hats with fringes of real hair for other cancer patients who are balding from the treatments, and is often called upon to give pep talks to them. During the Honolulu Marathon, Stevens sang "I Feel Good" every time participants started to grumble about their pain.

Her strength, she says, comes from something inside her.

"I don't think God's done with me yet," she says. "There are still things he wants me to do."

(Lorena Anderson is a reporter for the Eastside Journal in Bellevue, Wash. This story has been reprinted with the permission of the Eastside Journal. Tamara Stevens is one of the world's longest surviving bone-marrow transplant recipients. She received her transplant in 1972.)

Stevens helped pioneer important GVHD treatment

Diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia in 1972 at age 16, Tamara Stevens underwent what was then an unproven, experimental treatment-a bone-marrow transplant. Under the care of the Hutchinson Center's Drs. E. Donnall Thomas and Rainer Storb, Stevens also was the first to receive an immune-system suppressant called ATG, which would prove key in treating graft-vs.-host disease, a life-threatening side effect of bone-marrow transplants.

Back in those early days of transplantation, the survival rate for AML was around 16 percent.

Today, Stevens is one of the world's longest-surviving bone-marrow transplant recipients. Thanks to the Hutchinson Center's work with patients like Stevens, many AML patients today have a 70 percent chance of surviving five years or more.

In celebration of the Hutchinson Center's 25th anniversary, we will pay tribute in Quest to some special former patients who helped researchers pioneer successful new treatments to battle cancer. Tamara Stevens' story is the first in a series of four articles.

	From the Director
	A Legacy of Life
	Cancer Can't Break Her Stride
	Research Notes
	Partners in Progress
	Hutchinson Heroes
	Events Roundup
	Gallery
	Credits