Donald (Dee) RoweMelanoma |  Diagnosed 2005

It was about 10 years ago, late fall, and I got this terrible pain in my stomach. I went home and was out walking and then I went home and the pain got worse and I was sweating. My wife called 911 and they sent an ambulance and two attendants. They rushed me to the hospital and did all kinds of research and tests. At about 6:00 am, a doctor came in and told me that I had cancer. They determined that the cancer was a tumor on my liver. Right away, my wife called Peter Deckers, M.D., who is a renowned surgeon, and an oncologist, who came from my hometown of Worcester. He was the Dean of the University of Connecticut Health Center. 

The interesting thing here is that a doctor at UConn named Pramod Srivastava developed what they call heat shock protein vaccine and, instead of giving me radiation or instead of giving me chemo, I had maybe 20‑some shots of this. It’s a vaccine made from my tumor.
 
And from that point on, they gave me shots of this heat shock protein vaccine, and I recovered. It was a number of months, but I did recover well enough to be able to go to some games. I could fly and I would go to games at the tail end of the season. I felt like I was a millionaire.

I've had four cancer surgeries. The worst one was they took a foot and a half of my small intestine. The last one was five or six years ago, and the one before that was maybe another eight years before that. They removed a tumor from my liver the size of a baseball. And then they took out the spleen, gallbladder, and adrenal gland. There was some thought that I might not get through that. But thankfully, I did.

But no chemo, no radiation.

I like to tell people that cancer is not the end of the world. Sadly, it can be for some, but there are so many people that work every day on research to help develop a cure. That's the main thing I want to convey—to give other people courage that you can get through it. Not everybody does, but that’s why people need to contribute dollars to help all the people who are doing research to save lives. It's really making a difference. I always say the real measure of a person's life is that they can make a difference. That's pretty special.