Five Wendel siblings woke up to two surprises on a Saturday morning. For one, it was an unusually warm March day for Lockport in 1973, and the unexpected sunshine had melted the snow into puddles, much to their delight. But the presence of their parents in their countryside home was a bigger surprise that morning.

The children hadn’t expected their parents to come back for at least two days from Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, where Eric, a sixth Wendel sibling, was being treated for acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Tim, Susan, Chris, Bryan and Amy soon found out why their parents had returned so early.

On March 3, 1973, Eric died from ALL after fighting the disease for seven years. He was 10 years old. Forty-five years later, Tim — the oldest Wendel sibling and a Syracuse University alumnus — will publish a book titled “Cancer Crossings: A Brother, His Doctors and the Quest for a Cure to Childhood Leukemia.” The book, which will be released Sunday, is part-memoir, part-medical narrative. It will tackle the family’s loss, the doctors at Roswell Park and the somber survival rate of cancer in the ‘70s.

Before writing “Cancer Crossings,” Tim said he wasn’t fully aware of the progress made in the fight against ALL. When his daughter, a first-year medical student, came to him with questions about leukemia and how Eric had died, Tim was embarrassed he couldn’t tell her much. So he began looking up the disease on the internet.

The first thing that jumped out at him was that the survival rate for ALL had been 10 percent in 1966 when Eric was diagnosed, he said. Today, it is 90 percent.

Tim began looking at clinical trials and reports, and several names were recurring. Dr. James Holland, Dr. Donald Pinkel and Dr. Lucius Sinks, among others, were referred to as “Cancer Cowboys.” They had been at Roswell Park in the ‘60s and ‘70s and were working hard to change the odds. Tim tracked them down and began speaking with them for what would eventually become a memoir laced with stories of medical breakthroughs.

He was taken by surprise when he discovered how mindful and down-to-earth the doctors were.

“I was expecting by-the-facts, straight Western thinking, which was true to some extent,” he said. “They could take the most devastating clinical trial, but they could find the sliver of optimism or hope to build on to the next thing they were going to try.”

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It took four years for Tim to finish the book, a “smidge” more than he had taken with his 12 previous books. Tim wanted the book to reflect the incredible arc of the survival rate for ALL going from 10 to 90 percent, paying homage to the doctors who pushed for more trials and medicine and also paying homage to the children and adults today beating cancer in its various forms.

“I think the ultimate message of ‘Cancer Crossings’ is hope, taking lessons from the past and applying them to a certain degree today,” he said.

He enlisted the help of his siblings Susan and Chris in digging up accounts of family memories, including sailing trips across Lake Ontario. Susan — today Susan Och — recounted memories in Tim’s book, crediting him for the hard research on medical facts and figures going back 50 years.

Och, who lives in northern Michigan, said it was essential to work with a timeline when constructing the book because the passage of time was crucial to the development of cancer-fighting technologies.

“This was the 1960s … we watched ‘Star Trek,’ and now we have pretty much what the crew was using to communicate with the mothership,” she said. “Everything seemed possible back then, everything seemed new. Curing cancer seemed like, ‘We can do this.’”

Tim credited his editors all the way back to his first one at SU: Bill Glavin, a former magazine journalism professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Though Tim had always been more of a hockey fan, he said Glavin turned him on to baseball, which he’s previously written about. Tim’s brother Chris said he gets the feeling that Tim has become solely known for sports writing, so Tim’s latest book is good for him because it shows another side of him.

Glavin had a piece of advice for Tim that resonates with him even today.

“Professor Glavin said, ‘Tim, you could be very, very good. But you’re going to have to work very hard,’” Tim said. “Nobody ever told me that before. I had to knuckle down, and he was the one who opened the door to that.”

It was harder for Chris to speak about Eric for “Cancer Crossings” because the two had shared a room as children, and Chris had put those old memories up on a shelf, he said. But he and Och agreed that they didn’t want people to view the story as sad, or Eric’s life as one without a legacy.

“The kids who were treated at the time, that’s their legacy. All these kids are helping people today,” he said. “Eric knew that what he was going through was painful, and those treatments helped. For somebody who lived only 10 years and have their life be that significant, that’s a good thing.”

Published on April 11, 2018 at 9:24 pm

Contact: dmurthy@syr.edu