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#Post#: 208--------------------------------------------------
FIREFIGHTER SUCCUMBS TO TOXIC DUST CANCER FROM 9/11
By: wolfie Date: March 3, 2011, 12:44 am
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9/11 firefighter dies of cancer linked to toxic dust
By Dana Garrett, CNN Senior Producer
March 2, 2011 10:50 p.m. EST
New York firefighter Randy Wiebicke lived "in a way that
inspired everyone around him," his wife says.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
"I thought I was bulletproof," firefighter said in 2010
interview
Experimental procedure for cancer damaged his immune system
Multiple myeloma showing up in younger patients than normal
RELATED TOPICS
September 11 Attacks
Multiple Myeloma
New York (CNN) -- Firefighter Randy Wiebicke who, like so many
New York City firefighters, toiled in and around ground zero in
the months after 9/11, died Wednesday following a nearly
three-year battle with multiple myeloma, an aggressive and fatal
blood cancer.
Wiebicke underwent an experimental stem cell transplant
procedure last summer, when his cancer was in remission. But
just two months after the transplant, he developed viral
infections that, ultimately, his weakening body could no longer
fight.
Wiebicke's wife, Madeline, said Randy was "a man who lived his
life in the spirit of what being a firefighter meant to him.
When others were in danger, running out of a burning building,
he was there to run in," she wrote in an e-mail. "He lived his
life beautifully, in a way that inspired everyone around him.
Having Randy around not only made you want to be a better
person, but it showed you how to get there," she wrote.
Hundreds of firefighters and other ground zero workers have died
of cancer in the years following the attack on the World Trade
Center, according to New York state health officials. So far,
however, doctors have been reluctant to link those cancers to
9/11, saying that most cancers take longer than nine years to
develop.
But a 2009 study published in the Journal of Occupational and
Environmental Medicine suggested a link between the type of
cancer Wiebicke had and exposure to the toxic dust at ground
zero. "We found a predominance of multiple myeloma in younger
folks than we would have expected," said Dr. Jacqueline Moline,
the study's author.
Moline is the former director of the World Trade Center Medical
Monitoring and Treatment Program at Mount Sinai Hospital. She
said doctors monitoring the health of first responders are
paying close attention to blood cancers, since they usually
develop in a shorter time frame than other cancers.
"Those are the things that all of us in the World Trade Center
programs have been focusing on and we're working to see if there
are patterns," she said. "We know that it looks like people
(with multiple myeloma) might be affected at an earlier age."
Typically, multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer that affects
blood plasma cells in the bone marrow, affects people over age
70. "So seeing folks in their 30s and 40s with myeloma was
striking to us," Moline said. Randy Wiebicke was diagnosed with
the cancer when he was 52.
Though it will take many more years of study to prove a link
between ground zero and cancer, Moline said her gut tells her
that "we are going to find that myeloma is in some fashion
involved with the World Trade Center."
Wiebicke, who was stationed at a firehouse just blocks away from
the twin towers, was not scheduled to work on the morning of
9/11, but raced to get there following the attack. In an
interview last summer, Wiebicke told CNN's Deborah Feyerick that
he rushed into the city with the mistaken notion that he would
be rescuing people.
"I started getting equipment together, you know ropes and
things, and I stopped at the local firehouse and got stretchers
and went down and went right to the site and there was hardly
anybody," he said, tearing up as he spoke. "It was just silent.
Nothing, nothing, nobody alive."
Madeline Wiebicke said her husband came home after three days
working in "the pit" with his gear covered in soot and ash. In
the months that followed, she reminded him in an interview,
"every time you drove to work and would come home you'd have a
coating of dust on your car."
He soon developed the respiratory problems that came to be known
as the "world trade center cough." But after retiring in 2002,
the cough faded and Wiebicke looked forward to spending time on
home projects, like building a new chicken coop in the backyard.
"I thought I was bulletproof," he said last summer, while
sitting near that almost-completed coop.
In the summer of 2008, he began feeling sick and, in what he
described as "hitting a brick wall," his kidneys began to fail.
"It was like somebody shut a switch on my whole digestive system
and, you know, it felt horrible."
The kidney failure was only a symptom of a larger problem,
however. A blood test proved what doctors suspected, that the
source of the kidney problems was multiple myeloma.
The Wiebickes said that many of the doctors they saw believed
the cancer was related to his work at ground zero.
"When I told them I was a fireman they, you know, immediately
put two and two together and suspected that it had something to
do with, you know, 9/11" Wiebicke said.
After dialysis helped his kidneys recover, it was time to attack
the cancer, and in February 2009 he underwent chemotherapy and a
stem cell transplant.
By last summer, Wiebicke's doctor told him that he was in
remission. But the good news was tempered with a harsh reality.
The Wiebickes were told that Randy's cancer was very aggressive
and would come back sooner rather than later.
It was with that understanding that Wiebicke decided to undergo
an experimental type of stem cell transplant in August that has
been shown in clinical trials to lead to a much longer
remission.
Dr. Guenther Koehne from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer
Center pioneered the procedure. He explained that traditional
stem cell transplants for multiple myeloma frequently had poor
outcomes. In the experimental procedure, officially called a
"t-cell depleted allogeneic bone marrow transplant," the immune
cells or "t-cells" are removed from the bone marrow stem cells
before being transplanted in the patient, reducing the chances
of the graft vs. host disease that is often fatal.
Koehne said while he couldn't promise Wiebicke the procedure
would be a cure, his hope was "to achieve a long-lasting
duration of a remission with the best quality of life."
Watching her husband fight through his illness brought Madeline
Wiebicke back to the days after 9/11.
"I just thought that it was over with," she said in the
interview last summer. "You know, we went through six months of
crying and funerals and I thought it was over. I didn't expect
to have to go through it all again."
In addition to his wife, Randy Wiebicke leaves behind a son and
two daughters. Services are scheduled for Monday.
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