Cancer survivor wants to meet Kennedy

By Laura Frank, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 25, 2008 at 12:13 p.m.

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DENVER — Sen. Ted Kennedy is in Denver and has not yet said whether he will speak to the Democratic National Convention. But one local resident has a message for the senior senator.

Highland Ranch resident Charlie Wolf has survived six years with glioma, the same aggressive and usually fatal kind of brain cancer the senator was diagnosed with in May.

“I would like to talk to him,” Wolf told the Rocky Mountain News. “I think I could offer him hope.”

Wolf also would offer Kennedy a copy of a book he wrote, “Alive and Fighting: Coping with a brain tumor and a bone marrow transplant.” It chronicles how Wolf beat the odds – his doctors originally gave him six months to live – and offers advice on everything from what to expect from cancer treatments to how to enjoy life under any circumstances.

Wolf is a former projects manager at several nuclear weapons sites, including the former Rocky Flats site near Denver. His story was recently featured in Rocky’s investigative report, “Deadly Denial,” which showed the failings of a government program to compensate sick weapons workers, such as Wolf.

Kennedy, who is chairman of the Senate committee on health, education, labor and pensions, has headed hearings into the troubled compensation program

• August 25, 2008

  6:16 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  soreloser writes:

  Thank-you Rocky for the terrific series of articles, "Deadly Denial". We wish the best for Senator Kennedy. He will be fighting one of the deadliest forms of cancer. A number of the former Rocky Flats workers have been developing this rare type of cancer in their 40's. We hope that Senator Kennedy and the HELP committee will reflect on how cancer effects peoples lives. Maybe they will get the point that many nuclear workers are suffering out there, waiting forever on a very poorly run government compensation program. The program is not timely or compassionate to the sick workers. As stated in your articles the overhead for running this program is clearly out of line. Too many highly paid PhDs at NIOSH and the DOL are making careers out of the workers misfortune. The intention of the Congress when they put this program into place was to compensated former nuclear workers who had been given cancer in the workplace. The DOL has given the lionshare of this program over to NIOSH and claim no responsibility for their actions. The Dose Reconstruction is so complicated that a sick individual cannot possibly mount a defense to their dose calculations. We workers have tried to explain to them what the working conditions were like at the Flats but DOL/NOISH has turned a deaf ear to us. We know that the dosimetery records and incident reports tell only a small part of radiation and toxic exposure history. We have stood and bared our souls at the DOL's Advisory Board meets and have had no response. The board members told us that they aren't really the people we need to talk to about working conditions and unaccounted for exposure. NIOSH tells us that they already know everything and that we just don't understand because we aren't as smart as them. We workers are the only people who know about the hazards and mishaps encountered daily on that plantsite. Unfortunately for us these hazards were much more deadly than we were informed. The workers have no forum to present our stories and demonstrate how bad the data is that NIOSH is using in the Dose Reconstructions. A town hall meeting is needed with representatives of Senator Kennedy's HELP committee and the whole Colorado Delegation attending. We are very excited that the H.R. 6766 CARE act is being pushed forward. We hope that it will get the bipartisan support in Washington that it deserves. An audit by the GAO is long overdue. The taxpayers have a right to know how the DOE and DOL have turned this health care benifit program into a reseach project and a welfare system for the former DOE scientists.

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