KENNEDALE — Tanner Walker headed home recently with his best Christmas present – remission from a rare cancer that required grueling chemotherapy treatments at an Arkansas hospital.
But someone denied him his next-biggest wish — to relax in the comfort and security of his Kennedale home for the holidays.
Before he and his mother, Angela Walker, arrived at their doorstep Dec. 18, his grandmother called to break the news that the home that friends and relatives had decorated to welcome the 17-year-old was ransacked by burglars.
They stole thousands of dollars worth of belongings, including a flat-screen TV, a video camera and about 500 DVDs, leaving Tanner and his mother unnerved and even more worried about dealing with about $290,000 in medical bills.
“It was just so disheartening,” Angela Walker said. “He was so excited to come home. It was all he had been dreaming of, to have Christmas and have a break from all that had been going on.”
Tanner added: “I was hoping it would be normal, but it didn’t turn out that way.”
Life-changing diagnosis
He had spent the past month getting his final round of treatment for multiple myeloma, a cancer that causes abnormal plasma cells in bone marrow to multiply and overwhelm the production of healthy blood cells. The disease can cause bones to break easily, the tell-tale symptom when Tanner slipped while walking in June.
“I didn’t even really fall,” he said. “I caught myself before I fell, but my leg just snapped. At first it didn’t feel like it was broken.”
Doctors in Fort Worth found a tumor in his bone and were stunned to learn that it was myeloma, which usually strikes people over age 50 and is almost never seen in people as young as Tanner.
Tanner regretted acting on his first inpulse, which was to search the Internet for information about the disease.
“There’s a lot of bad news about it,” he said. “But when we got to Arkansas, the first thing the doctor said was that he would cure me. So that made me feel better.”
Knocking out cancer
His doctors had referred him to the renowned Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy, part of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.
Specialists there chose an aggressive treatment, using chemotherapy to kill the plasma cells and two transplants of Tanner’s stem cells to rebuild healthy blood-cell production. It took several lengthy visits to the treatment center, but the payoff is that Tanner is in full remission.
Life expectancy with regular drug treatments used to be about 30 months. But stem-cell transplants, added about 20 years ago, and improved drug therapies achieve remission in about 85 percent of cases, and specialists now expect as many as three-fourths of those patients will never suffer a recurrence, said Bonnie Jenkins, a nurse and program coordinator at the institute.
With the good news for Tanner came medical bills, most of which his healthcare provider declined to pay because it considers the treatment experimental.
Angela Walker, who is divorced and earns less than $50,000 a year, had committed to the center that she would pay any uncovered costs. She felt that she had no choice after the diagnosis.
“That night the oncologist called me and said that at his state he would have two years to live,” she said.
Standard of care
James Ford, general counsel for U.S. Health and Life Insurance Co. in Michigan, said two independent medical reviews agreed that Tanner’s regimen was not standard.
“But there are a lot of other bills that are caught up in this situation that are payable once we get the bills and look at them,” Ford said. Those include treatment for the broken leg, he said.
Jenkins was not satisfied, saying many other insurance policies cover the center’s myeloma treatment.
“The first thing everyone has to remember is this is not a pediatric disease,” Jenkins said. “We’ve seen five cases under 18. That’s probably more than anybody else in the world has seen. Any insurance company who believes there would be a standard of care for a 17-year-old with this disease is blowing smoke.”
Coming home
A surprise welcome for Tanner was on Kelsey Ruck’s mind when she went to the Walker home Dec. 18.
Ruck, Tanner’s sister-in-law, was loaded down with presents to put under the tree, which other relatives had put up along with lights and other decorations.
“But when I got over there, the door was unlocked, and I walked in and everything was basically trashed,” Ruck said. “My heart stopped. I couldn’t imagine who would do something like this, knowing what they were going through.”
Kennedale police Capt. Darrell Hull said he has no leads. But he added that his detectives have not had time to spend on the burglary because they are focused on investigating a triple-fatality arson fire that occurred the same day.
Tanner said he suspects that the burglars were young and knew the family, which makes the break-in that much harder to bear.
But he doesn’t dwell on it so much anymore.
“I’m in full remission,” he said. “Everything is good now.”
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