Gail Zimmerman

by Michael Moore
Tuesday, July 24, 2007 2:37 PM MDT

After battling three types of cancer and losing a wife to the dreaded disease, Gail Zimmerman has one word of advice for those who have been diagnosed with cancer: stay positive.

Zimmerman, 74, first was diagnosed with hairy cell leukemia in 1984. It’s a rare, non-aggressive form of the disease that lowers the white blood cell count rather than raises it. He was being treated in Casper by Dr. Paul Johnson, who sent him to the University of Chicago for treatment.

“We tried several different things,” Zimmerman recalled, “but no chemicals; no chemotherapy.”

Instead, doctors removed Zimmerman’s spleen in August of 1985. After the operation, he became a “responder” to the treatment n his blood cell counts and platelet counts returned to the low end of normal.

“This August will be 22 years,” he said. “The longest anyone had gone without chemotherapy at that time … in 1985, when I had this done, was 12 years.”

Ever since then, Zimmerman has been part of a study that the University of Chicago has undertaken on hairy cell leukemia. He has blood tests done every six months, and goes to Chicago every August for a check-up. Doctors haven’t found any hair cells in his system for eight or nine years.

“They haven’t told me I’m free of the disease,” Zimmerman cautioned. “They still want to do tests.”

Twenty years after being diagnosed with hairy cell leukemia, Zimmerman prepared for a second battle with cancer. In 2004, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Because of his experience with hairy cell leukemia and his low white blood cell count, chemotherapy was too risky to be considered.

Zimmerman flew to California to undergo cryosurgery, which wasn’t available in Casper at the time. It’s a technique that freezes and kills abnormal cells, and is less expensive and possibly has fewer side effects than other types of cancer treatment.

“They froze my prostate to 25 below zero three times in two hours,” Zimmerman said. “Froze it, thawed it, froze it, thawed it.”

Zimmerman beat that disease, but he also has been diagnosed with skin cancer. Fortunately, that disease was caught early enough to be treated.

He also undergoes annual tests for colon cancer, because his grandfather died from that disease.

“My daughter and her husband, they keep telling me, quit trying to set a record,” Zimmerman said with a laugh.”

His own battles weren’t Zimmerman’s first experience in dealing with cancer. His first wife, Lois, died from breast cancer in 1975. She was 41, and left behind Zimmerman and four children.

The couple had adopted their three oldest children, and then Lois gave birth to a daughter, Renee, in 1969.

“She nursed for 11 months, which is supposed to help protect (against cancer),” Zimmerman said. “She did everything she was supposed to.”

“Stay busy and stay positive”

Zimmerman recalls his first trip to the University of Chicago, when he and other cancer patients underwent psychoanalysis. One of the questions was, “What did you do when you first found out you had cancer?”

“I went to the courthouse and signed up to run for the Legislature,” Zimmerman said.

He advises anybody who has been diagnosed with cancer to “stay busy and stay positive,” look on the bright side of things and find out whatever you can about the disease, including all of the treatment possibilities and symptoms.

He shared his own story from when he first was diagnosed with leukemia. One of the symptoms of that disease is night sweats, and one night he woke up pouring with sweat.

“I thought, ‘Oh no, it’s not started already,’” he recalled. “But then I turned over and looked, and my grandson had turned the electric blanket up to 10. I just laughed and went back to sleep.”

He also suggests that people own the disease; know what the symptoms are, and what the medications will do.

“Meet it head on,” Zimmerman said. “Find out all you can about it. If you know somebody that’s had that same cancer, go talk to them and see if they would do anything differently.”

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