[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
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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.
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