Lombard cancer patient counsels others on living with the diagnosis

The calendar marks Oct. 20 as the 15th anniversary of when Gary Grieger was told his non-Hodgkin lymphoma probably was going to kill him. Reminders of how close the father of two came to dying still arrive daily through phone calls from other people just beginning their cancer journey.

“Usually several calls a day,” Grieger says. “I've been calling some people for more than 10 years.”

As a “first-connection volunteer,” Grieger takes and makes phone calls from and to newly diagnosed patients across the nation.

“I try to help them find a way to be strong,” he says. He listens, and offers advice, perspective and hope, sometimes staying on a call for more than an hour. He still attends a support group at Wellness House in Hinsdale and says he gains strength there that he puts into other volunteer work.

“Wellness House taught me to be strong when it isn't easy to be strong,” Grieger says. “I always wanted to make a difference, and my cancer diagnosis gave me many more opportunities to do that.”

Lingering over a 2-year-old photo of one Wellness House support group, the 58-year-old Lombard man softly mentions, “Six of these people are gone.” He knows that some people share his positive attitude, enjoy wonderful support systems, work hard to beat cancer and die anyway. Patients might not be able to control how long they'll live, but they do have options about how they live.

“I wanted my kids to see me go down swinging,” says Grieger, his eyes tearing at the memory. “Even when I was throwing up doing chemo, I'd come home and walk up and down the drive.”

His ordeal begin in October of 1999.

“I had a lump that I noticed on my neck while shaving, and, like most men, I blew it off,” Grieger says. “It was like a big mosquito bite that kept getting bigger.”

His wife, Karen, insisted he get it checked. A doctor took a biopsy.

“I have terrible news,” Grieger remembers the doctor saying. “You have cancer.”

The couple came home and got ready for their son's 12th birthday party the next day.

“My wife and I didn't tell anyone for a while,” Grieger says. “Within a week, I started chemo.”

He already was considered Stage III because the cancer had spread to his stomach and groin.

“My prognosis was not very good. I was looking at a year to a year and a half,” Grieger says, aware that meant he'd die before his son graduated from eighth grade.

“But that was great incentive because I knew I could beat that,” Grieger says. “I never thought I'd make 15, but I knew I could make more than a year or a year and a half. They keep coming up with new treatments and new procedures, so the longer I survive, the better the chances.”

He was right. His first chemotherapy treatment — four hours of drugs delivered intravenously every three weeks for eight sessions — made him lose his hair and vomit frequently, but didn't do enough to stop the cancer. Neither did the second chemo therapy. He lost 60 pounds off his 6-foot-2 frame and was a gaunt 170 pounds. He finally found some success with an experimental drug that stabilized his cancer.

“I was literally radioactive, so I had to live in the basement,” he says. “My wife had to make me dinner and leave it at the top of the stairs.”

Instead of dying, Grieger and eight other family members ran in the San Diego Marathon in 2002 and raised $35,000 for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. They still support that charity, Wellness House and other causes, such as walking a marathon in April to raise money in the fight against juvenile diabetes.

“Our entire family is difference-makers,” Grieger says. His sister Cherie lives in Glen Ellyn and has taught kindergarten for 30 years. His sister Gaye, of St. Charles, develops programs for seniors and people with disabilities. His kids, John, 26, a civil engineer, and Laura, 24, a special-education teacher, join in the family's charity causes. His cancer made a close family closer, he says.

“My wife came down to see me 30 days in a row,” Grieger says of the time he spent a month at Rush University Medical Center for a successful stem-cell transplant procedure.

The couple will celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary next July, and his wife continues to go beyond the call, says Grieger, who has had two spinal surgeries and nearly a dozen bouts of pneumonia as a result of the ravages of chemotherapy.

In addition to her career as a social worker at Hadley Junior High School in Glen Ellyn, Karen Grieger picks up extra work teaching at local colleges to supplement his income working part-time as a counselor at a homeless shelter for Catholic Charities.

“I'm not good with business or money. I need to work with people,” says Grieger, who says his latest project has been training to become a Make-A-Wish volunteer.

“He's a strong, independent man's man, not quick to wear his emotions on his sleeve, but he's strong enough to go there when it's warranted,” says Michael Williams, a psychologist and senior oncology counselor at Wellness House, which offers more than five dozen support groups and other therapies and lives by the motto, “You'll Feel Better Inside.”

“Live every day like you're on vacation” is Grieger's mantra. He's used that theme in a handful of articles that he's had published in health magazines.

One wall of his garage sports his “Hall of Fame,” featuring photographs of his family, extended family, friends and all the important people in his life.

“I'm not out of the woods by any means,” he says, stressing that his non-Hodgkin lymphoma, with survival rates greatly improved from the 1990s, is under control, not cured.

“But I really do believe I'm the luckiest man in the world,” Grieger says, breaking into a broad smile. “Not a bad way to go through life.”