Stewart Grosser at the age of 22, a few weeks before he started showing symptoms of lung cancer. by jestevens

The American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life 2011 will take place this Friday evening through Saturday morning at Free State High School track, 4700 Overland Drive. Hundreds of cancer survivors, their families and their friends will remember those whose lives have been claimed by cancer. Survivors celebrate one more year of life. Stewart Grosser, a 50-year survivor of cancer, who will participate in Relay for Life for the 11th year, tells his story.

In the summer of 1961, Stewart Grosser was 22 years old and on top of the world. He’d just entered the U.S. Navy Officer Candidate School in Newport, R.I., and was looking forward to a career in the Navy. He’d graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, and married the love of his life, Eileen Katsur.

A couple of weeks after starting OCS, he developed a high temperature and began coughing up blood. He became very weak, was hospitalized and treated for pneumonia.

During OCS, he had one more bout and was hospitalized. Even though he wasn’t feeling his best, he finished school at the end of November. He was home on leave when he was hit again with a fever so high that he became delirious. He was admitted to a civilian hospital, where physicians determined that he had a tumor in the bottom lobe of his right lung.

“The doctors told my wife and mother that it was malignant,” recalls Grosser, now 72. “But they didn’t tell me.”

Those were the dark days when the word “cancer” rarely crossed people’s lips. Cancer was usually an automatic death sentence. When it was referred to at all, it was called “the Big C”. Patients who had cancer often weren’t told. Families kept it a secret, because it wasn’t unusual to lose friends if you told them you had cancer.

Grosser was transferred to Philadelphia Naval Hospital, where he had the lower lobe of his lung removed. He was given temporary duty at a reserve center in Pittsburgh. “I just hung out there,” said Grosser. “They couldn’t make me active duty. I would’ve loved it, but I was pretty ill.”

One evening, he heard his wife tell her mother during a phone call that Grosser had cancer. He confronted her, and she suggested they talk to his physician.

“Your growth has come back,” his doctor told him. “You have 24 months to live.”

Grosser was shocked. And dismayed. His wife was expecting their first child.

“What are my options?” Grosser asked.

“We’d just like to send you home,” his physician answered. “Home to die” was the unspoken message.

“What about surgery?” Grosser pressed.

“We can try.”

Grosser had never touched a cigarette in his life. Looking back, however, he can see the factors that may have contributed to his lung cancer. “Cigarettes were everywhere,” he says. “In the movies, in restaurants. My mother and dad were smokers. I grew up with smoke everywhere. In Pittsburgh, we lived closed to a steel mill. It was a dirty town.”

A copy of physician's notes about Stewart Grosser's lung cancer, just before he had his second surgery. by jestevens

The second surgery, to remove his entire right lung, was done at St. Albans Naval Hospital in New York City (it’s now a Veterans Administration facility). After the operation, Grosser was put in a ward with other cancer patients to begin rehabilitation. He had to regain use of his shoulder, arm and hand while muscles cut for the surgery were mending.

“A lot of my roommates were cancer people,” he recalls. “A lot of them went very fast. They didn’t have any dignity. Their families, their friends stopped coming. They died in the same hospital bed they’d been in the whole time. They cried, they screamed in pain. That was always upsetting to me.“

To give each other moral support, the patients of the cancer ward watched each other’s surgeries from seats that overlooked the operating room theater. “We would go into each other’s rooms and give each other a lift,” said Grosser, “just like you see at Relay for Life.” For seven months, the people on the ward and the medical staff became his family.

When he was released from the hospital in March 1963, he was given an honorable discharge and sent home to Pittsburgh. “They didn’t think I would make it,” said Grosser. “I felt they were wrong.” A year later, the cancer had not spread. “What was in my favor was that I was young.”

Stewart Grosser, 72, father and grandfather. by jestevens

Grosser started a new life. He found a sales position with a company in St. Louis and eventually ended up in Overland Park, KS, where he and his family lived for 30 years. He and his wife had four more children.

In 2002, he retired to an 80-acre farm in Eudora that he and his wife bought.

Having just one lung hasn’t stopped Grosser from living an active life. Although he can’t run a continuous mile, he nevertheless officiated at high school football games for years. Until last year, he sang in the Barbershop Chorus of Kansas City. He walks every day. He loves to joke and hang out with his card-playing friends of the Quilting Club of Lawdora, and, of course, visit his family.

Some people who have a near miss with death just walk on as if it never happened. Others take it to heart. When information emerged that cigarettes were linked to lung cancer and heart disease, Grosser became an advocate for stop-smoking policies, even visiting restaurants in Kansas City to lobby them to ban smoking from their dining rooms. He takes care of himself, doing preventive maintenance such as getting colonoscopies, and encouraging others to do so. This will be year No. 11 at Relay for Life.

“For people who have had an illness like this, when you do survive, it’s a gift. It’s a gift of life,” says Grosser. “A friend once told me: ‘You don’t even have to play the lottery, you won the biggest prize.’”

Having survived lung cancer changed him, says Grosser. Instead of being uptight, it made it easier to accept the big letdowns of life, as well as the small aggravations. “When a guy beeps his horn behind me because he thinks I’m not going fast enough, it’s no big deal,” shrugs Grosser. “I just move to the side and let him pass.”

Grosser, his wife, and some members of their large family of five children and 13 grandchildren will celebrate his 50 years of surviving the Big C at Relay for Life 2011. Opening ceremonies begin at 6:45 p.m. at the Free State High School track. The luminaria ceremony starts at 9:15 p.m., the fight back ceremony at 3 a.m. and the closing ceremony at 5:30 a.m.