[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 97 (Wednesday, July 14, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8113-S8115]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  RECOGNITION OF DR. ROBERT K. STUART

 Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, I wish to recognize and 
congratulate Dr. Robert K. Stuart for his accomplishments in the fight 
against cancer. He is a long-time leader in the medical cancer 
community on a professional and personal level. For his devotion to 
make a difference in the lives of others, Dr. Stuart deserves to be 
honored. He has fought cancer on many levels and is a model of 
inspiration to his community.
  I ask that a recent Post and Courier article be printed in the 
Record, so that all my colleagues can see the extraordinary 
accomplishments of this man.
  The material follows:

               [From the Post and Courier, July 10, 2004]

        Cancer Doctor, Survivor to Join Lance Armstrong on Tour

                            (By David Quick)

       Cancer survival and cycling were forever linked when Texan 
     Lance Armstrong survived testicular cancer and won not one, 
     but five consecutive--and perhaps six--Tour de France races.
       But long before Armstrong would become a household name, 
     oncologist Dr. Robert K. Stuart was in the trenches fighting 
     the war on one of humankind's most deadly diseases and using 
     cycling as an escape and a way to stay strong physically and 
     emotionally.
       This October, the worlds of Armstrong and Stuart will come 
     together for a week during the Bristol-Myers Squibb Tour of 
     Hope, a 3,200-plus-mile relay from Los Angeles to Washington, 
     DC. Stuart is one of 20 cyclists selected to participate in 
     the tour from among more than 1,000 applicants.
       Besides riding four hours every day, Stuart and the other 
     cyclists, along with Armstrong, will be making stops along 
     the way, spreading the message of hope and encouraging cancer 
     patients to participate in new treatments, often referred to 
     as clinical trials.
       Stuart certainly has earned the honor.

[[Page S8114]]

       In addition to being an avid cyclist, cancer doctor and 
     researcher, he survived kidney cancer himself in 1991 and was 
     the primary caregiver to his wife, Charlene, who recovered 
     from leukemia after being diagnosed in 2000.
       And he's been a leader in fighting cancer in South Carolina 
     for nearly two decades--starting the hematology/oncology 
     division at the Medical University of South Carolina in 1985, 
     leading a surgical team in performing the state's first bone-
     marrow transplant in 1987, and being one of two who wrote the 
     proposal for federal funding of what later would be called 
     the Hollings Cancer Center.
       ``He's just done so much for MUSC,'' says Dr. Rayna Kneuper 
     Hall, who heads the research hospital's breast cancer 
     program. ``I'd say he is a true pioneer in the fields of 
     hematology and oncology here. He had a vision of it (the 
     division) and was able to make it come true.''
       Despite his monumental resume, Hall says Stuart is humble, 
     has deep compassion for his patients, and continues to be a 
     good teacher and mentor to medical school students. ``He has 
     an amazing memory. He can remember every patient he's ever 
     seen and is able to recall a specific case to demonstrate a 
     (cancer) situation. For students, it really helps to hear it 
     in the context of a patient.''
       For Stuart, his proudest accomplishment is having a hand in 
     training 40 specialists in the fields of hematology and 
     oncology, as well as having helped his patients.
       ``At this stage in my career, my legacy is more about 
     people than it is publication. I have more than a hundred 
     papers, but to me, the people are so much more important.''


                            A LOUISIANA BOY

       Stuart was born the second of five boys to Walter and Rita 
     Stuart in Grosse Tete, La., a small village across the 
     Mississippi River from Baton Rouge. One of his grandmothers 
     was Cajun and the other was Creole.
       Walter Stuart worked for Kaiser Aluminum. Because both he 
     and his wife were worried about the limited opportunities for 
     their children in the village, they jumped at a job transfer 
     to Northern California, where Robert would start elementary 
     school.
       However, when Kaiser planned to transfer Walter next to 
     either British Guyana in South America or Ghana in Africa, 
     the Stuarts decided to move to New Orleans, where Walter took 
     a job as a banker.
       ``I consider New Orleans as home,'' says Stuart, ``because 
     between birth and high school graduation, it's where I spent 
     the most time.''
       For the Stuarts, educating their children was paramount. 
     All five sons received advanced degrees. In addition to 
     Robert, another became a doctor, one a lawyer, one received a 
     master's of business administration and the other a master of 
     fine arts.
       Robert attended Jesuit High School in New Orleans, whose 
     most famous alums include singer Harry Connick Jr. and 
     baseball player Rusty Staub, and got a traditional liberal 
     arts education. He took Latin, Greek, math and physics and 
     was urged to attend a Catholic university.
       He picked Georgetown University.
       Stuart says being in Washington, D.C., at the height of the 
     turbulent 1960s--1966 through 1970--was exciting. ``You just 
     had the feeling that you were living in the center of the 
     universe. I got at least as much education from reading The 
     Washington Post every day as I did going to school and it 
     (reading the Post) was a lot cheaper.''
       He, of course, did the hippie thing. He grew his hair out 
     and had a mustache, which he's shaved only once since then, 
     and believed that the Vietnam War was wrong. Stuart recalls a 
     very moving protest he participated in that involved marching 
     past the White House, shouting the name of a dead soldier and 
     then putting the name of the soldier in a casket at the 
     Capitol.
       ``It took hours and hours to finish naming all those 
     soldiers, and I think it served as a preview of the Vietnam 
     War Memorial,'' he says.
       ``My father thinks it was unfortunate that I lived in 
     Washington at that time because now I question government. 
     I'm more prone to say, `Why should we do that?' than I am, 
     `My country, right or wrong.' But I am an American and think 
     I'm as patriotic as people who don't think about things.''


                        CHOOSING A NEW FRONTIER

       Stuart went from Georgetown straight into medical school at 
     Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
       When he was in his first year, he became acquainted with 
     the chief resident in urology. Stuart asked why he had chosen 
     urology, and the resident said it was because he was 
     influenced by a urology professor in school.
       ``I can remember saying to myself: `That won't happen to 
     me.' I vowed to pick my specialty entirely on rational 
     grounds and, of course, the exact opposite happened.
       ``I ran into some people in what was then a new field, 
     oncology. I thought these guys were like trying to climb 
     Mount Everest with no oxygen and no tools. To me, what they 
     were trying to do was monumental because back then cancer was 
     a death sentence. Everybody died from it. These guys were 
     determined that things were so bad that they had to get 
     better and that they were going to make it happen . . . I was 
     personally inspired.''
       At the time--the mid-1970s--there was no standard therapy 
     for cancer, Stuart says.
       Another inspiration came as a third-year med student. He 
     volunteered for a rotation on the oncology in-patient 
     service. His instructor assigned him only one patient because 
     she was so sick, suffering from acute myeloid leukemia, or 
     AML.
       ``I couldn't do much as a student, but I basically stayed 
     up all night with her. She died the next afternoon and I was 
     shattered. . . . My instructor said to me that AML was the 
     worst leukemia of all and `don't take it personally.' But I 
     did take it personally.''
       After doing his internal medicine residency at Johns 
     Hopkins, the school hired him as a faculty member in 1979. 
     Stuart focused on acute leukemia and bone-marrow 
     transplantation, which he admits remains ``the thing that 
     challenges me most today.''
       About the same time, Stuart and another doctor began 
     studying and treating patients with aplastic anemia, a rare 
     disease where the bone marrow simply fails and stops 
     producing red blood cells. While not a cancer, its standard 
     therapy at the time was a bone-marrow transplant.
       They also developed alternative therapies and worked on a 
     7-year-old, whose father later started a foundation focusing 
     on research that has made numerous advances in treating the 
     disease. ``One of the most satisfying things about having a 
     career in medicine is looking at the progress that's been 
     made,'' Stuart says of the improving rates of survival for 
     both AML and aplastic anemia.


                         MAKING A MARK AT MUSC

       In 1985, a friend and ``brilliant scientist,'' Dr. Makio 
     Ogawa at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Charleston, 
     asked Stuart to interview for MUSC's new hematology/oncology 
     division. Ogawa, a bone-marrow researcher, had met Stuart on 
     a few trips to Johns Hopkins.
       ``At the time, I had no interest in leaving Johns Hopkins, 
     but there was something about Charleston and the people at 
     MUSC that made me change my mind,'' says Stuart. ``On July 1, 
     1985, the entire program consisted of me, a lab tech and a 
     secretary. I had to recruit physicians and create a training 
     program.''
       It didn't take long to get the ball rolling.
       Two years later, Stuart led a team in performing the first 
     bone-marrow transplant surgery in the state, and in another 
     two years, Stuart was among a group boarding a plane for 
     Washington, DC, to make a pitch for federal funding for a new 
     cancer center in Charleston.
       U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., who did not attend those 
     first meetings, would embrace the effort and help usher 
     through a $16.8 million federal grant to pay for a building 
     to house what later would be called the Hollings Cancer 
     Center.
       ``It got us in the ball game,'' Stuart says of the grant's 
     ability to kick-start the cancer program in Charleston, 
     leading to comprehensive cancer care and eventually the start 
     of clinical trials at the center. ``It was a very 
     sophisticated undertaking.''


                           THE CANCER PATIENT

       In 1991, the doctor became the patient when Stuart was 
     diagnosed in the early stages of kidney cancer.
       Because of early detection and a rather fortunate location 
     at the tip of the kidney, Stuart was spared losing the organ. 
     He also didn't have to endure chemotherapy because the 
     treatment is not useful with kidney cancer.
       Still, the experience made Stuart a better doctor.
       ``It definitely changed me. I used to be distant from my 
     patients. I maintained what I thought was a professional 
     separation between doctor and patient,'' says Stuart. ``After 
     having cancer, I found myself thinking more about encouraging 
     people. Now, I consider what can I say to a patient that's 
     truthful and gives them hope.''
       He also started hugging patients and calling them by their 
     first names, practices that never occurred before he was a 
     cancer patient.
       During the same year, Stuart married Charlene McCants, who 
     had been the chief financial officer (later CEO) at MUSC and 
     with whom he initially had a rocky professional relationship. 
     At one point, Stuart would not return McCants' phone calls.
       Yet it was she who was instrumental in having Medicaid and 
     Medicare recognize MUSC as a transplant facility. In doing 
     so, insurance providers would help pay for transplant 
     procedures.
       Stuart and McCants both had been married once before and 
     had children from their first marriages.
       Stuart's marriage to Gail Stuart, the current dean of the 
     MUSC nursing school, had lasted 18 years. They have two 
     children: Morgan, now 26 and a medical student at Georgetown; 
     and Elaine, 24, an editorial assistant at Child magazine in 
     New York. McCants had been married to Robert H. McCants for 
     22 years. Their son, R. Darren McCants, is business manager 
     for the physiology/neuroscience department at MUSC.
       ``All three of our children turned out really well,'' says 
     Stuart.
       Daughter Elaine recalls her father early in her childhood 
     as being ``cerebral and quiet'' and seemingly 
     ``impenetrable.'' She adds, ``Looking back now, I realize 
     that he may have been quiet because he lost a patient. You 
     never knew because he made a big effort not to let what was 
     going on at work affect us at home.''
       Elaine Stuart, who attended the North Carolina School of 
     the Arts and was a ballerina with the Richmond Ballet, says 
     that while her father was deeply involved in

[[Page S8115]]

     work, he made sure he was there for important events, such as 
     her dance recitals.
       ``He wasn't all that liberal with praise, so when you 
     earned it, it really meant something. . . . Growing up, he 
     never pushed us that hard. In doing so, he instilled in us a 
     great sense of self-motivation. That was an effective way of 
     driving us, and I attribute a lot of what drives me today to 
     that.''


                          CANCER STRIKES AGAIN

       In 1997, the couple moved to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, when 
     Stuart received the opportunity to be oncology department 
     chairman at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research 
     Centre.
       Three years later, though, cancer entered the personal 
     realm of the Stuarts' lives yet again. Charlene became 
     desperately sick and was diagnosed with the same leukemia, 
     AML, that had taken the life of the patient Stuart had 
     watched over as a med student 25 years before.
       ``My first thought when I learned the diagnosis was that it 
     was cosmic irony--that this almost can't be happening,'' says 
     Stuart. ``In Saudi Arabia, one of my colleagues came up to 
     me, very stricken, and said, `I just heard your wife has 
     AML.' I remember thinking, `No, it's the other way around. 
     AML has my wife.' ''
       AML, Stuart notes, is still nearly lethal--only one-third 
     who are diagnosed with it survive. The couple came back home 
     to Charleston for treatment and stayed.
       ``The blackest time of my life was when she relapsed after 
     three treatments,'' he says.
       The only recourse was to use marrow from her brother, 
     David. The transplant was successful and she is in remission.
       His care for her is a testament of his love. Of the 81 
     nights she was in the hospital, Stuart spent all but the 
     first night on a cot next to her in the hospital room. Then, 
     he took four months off from work, the longest stint of not 
     working as a doctor, to become his wife's primary caregiver.
       ``It was the hardest thing I've ever done,'' he says now.


                           CYCLING FOR SANITY

       In the mornings of that uncertain time, Stuart took a break 
     by riding his bike. The exercise, he said, helped him ``keep 
     my head straight.''
       But he first started cycling out of necessity. It was cheap 
     transportation in his Georgetown days. For two years, 1983-
     1985, Stuart was a licensed bicycle racer, but ``wasn't 
     good'' due to his late start. He backed off cycling after 
     arriving in Charleston because of his career demands, but 
     started back in earnest after his cancer diagnosis in 1991 
     and began participating in charity rides.
       He continued cycling during the 1990s and even rode with a 
     group of doctors in the Saudi Arabian desert.
       Perhaps his first true cycling feat came last year during 
     the first Tour of Hope. Stuart made the first cut of 50 for 
     the inaugural tour ride across the country, but wasn't chosen 
     for the final group. He, however, was invited to Washington, 
     DC, for the final day's ride and a chance to meet Lance 
     Armstrong.
       Because he wasn't picked the first year and because he was 
     unsure the sponsors would take on tour expenses again, Stuart 
     didn't think the opportunity would come his way again. Even 
     when the sponsors announced the tour would happen again, he 
     applied thinking that his chances weren't good. The Stuarts 
     even booked a vacation in the south of France at the same 
     time as one of the tour's training camps, thinking that he 
     wouldn't be picked.
       But he was picked. When he heard the news, his feelings 
     were mixed.
       ``At first, I was really fired up. Then, I was really 
     scared. I'm not an elite cyclist, though I'm probably better 
     than your average Joe,'' says Stuart, noting that the five, 
     four-person relay teams have only a week to get from Los 
     Angeles to Washington.
       He says the organizers also changed the route and made it 
     harder, specifically going over both the Sierras and the 
     Rockies in a route connecting Las Vegas, Denver, Omaha, 
     Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Baltimore to DC.
       Stuart, however, is getting some expert training advice and 
     equipment, including a custom-fitted Trek road bike that 
     he'll get to keep after the tour. He's already flown to 
     Princeton, N.J., the home of Bristol-Myers Squibb, and 
     Colorado Springs, home of Carmi-chael Training Systems (Chris 
     Carmichael is Armstrong's coach), for training weekends. He's 
     to fly back early from his family vacation in France to go to 
     Madison, Wis., home of Trek, in August for a final meeting 
     before the fall ride.
       Meanwhile, his current regimen consists of about 11 hours 
     of training a week, or about 200 miles. It will peak out at 
     about 16 hours a week. That's a lot of time on those small 
     bike seats.
       Stuart is enjoying the experience. The group of riders--of 
     whom 13 are cancer survivors, five are physicians and two are 
     oncology nurses--already are feeling close to one another. 
     Stuart has been getting 10-15 group e-mails per day from 
     them.
       Stuart is among the millions of Americans who are wishing 
     Armstrong wins his sixth Tour de France, in part because it 
     will make the Tour of Hope an even higher profile event.


                          LIVING, LOVING LIFE

       One of Stuart's closest cycling buddies, Clark Wyly, has 
     grown to know him well, as they regularly meet on Saturdays 
     and Sundays for rides ranging from 30 to 60 miles.
       ``He is a very caring physician,'' says Wyly. ``He takes 
     each of his patients so seriously and so personally. When 
     they don't make it, it's really hard on him. . . . Rob is not 
     extroverted, but once you get to know him, he's very 
     personable and easygoing. I have never seen him lose his 
     temper and get out of control.''
       Wyly adds that Robert and Charlene live each day fully.
       For those who know them, the couple have a deep, loving 
     relationship. For a former CEO and the extrovert in the 
     couple, she admits to truly enjoying ``loving, supporting and 
     caring for him'' and describes herself as ``his professional 
     valet.''
       ``I'm so devoted to him and I love taking care of him,'' 
     she says.

     

                          ____________________