MINNEAPOLIS — He’s told thousands of your stories over the years, and now Boyd Huppert is sharing an update on his own story as he battles multiple myeloma.
While he has suffered a serious setback, there is also reason for hope.
A newly approved, cutting-edge treatment could help Boyd, and many others as well. We sat down with him, and his wife Sheri, to find out how they are processing it all.
It was early in the morning on Thursday, June 13. We met Boyd in the lobby of M Health Fairview to talk about his latest news and to join him as he started the first step of this new treatment. It would be an all-day process.
“I've got my lunch, some work, Sheri’s loaded up with books,” Boyd laughs.
Admittedly, this isn't the update Boyd was hoping to share. And it certainly isn’t the update any of us wanted to hear.
“You could almost see it on my doctor's face when he came in the room that it wasn't going to be great news,” he says.
Boyd's multiple myeloma is on the move. After his bone marrow transplant two and a half years ago, Boyd knew, with no cure, he was living on borrowed time. But still, he thought he'd have a little more of it.
“I don't know, I was thinking five years, you know, some people get 10, some people get more, but did not expect to be back here in two years, yeah, that was disappointing,” he says.
“I think we were both pretty stunned because he's been active and working and not slowing down,” says his wife, Sheri.
OK, so it's a setback, but it's not all bad. Boyd's sense of humor is still fully intact.
“You'll want to turn your sound down when I scream,” he jokes as the nurses get ready to put needles in both his arms.
And in the last two years, Boyd and Sheri's faith has grown, along with their sense of peace and acceptance.
"Maybe I can let myself be hopeful that this is going to be a solution for me,” he says.
With the cancer gaining ground, Boyd's doctors decided a new treatment was necessary. Something completely different. Boyd is going through CAR T-cell therapy. A treatment so new, it wasn't even FDA approved for multiple myeloma when he was diagnosed less than three years ago. And up until April of this year, patients had to relapse four times before it was offered.
"He's the very first patient that we enrolled as second line therapy, I mean hot off the press,” says Boyd’s doctor, Aimee Merino, MD, PhD, at M Health Fairview.
Dr. Merino says CAR T-cell therapy uses your own immune system to fight the cancer. They are taking Boyd's healthy T-cells and sending them off to a lab to be re-engineered. That's where a protein will be added — a chimeric antigen receptor or CAR — it's how CAR T-cell therapy gets its name. The CAR is trained specifically to fight multiple myeloma, then the T-cells will be returned and put back into his body.
“So basically it becomes its own living drug, replicating itself in the body, and that continues on as it continues engaging multiple myeloma, killing it, and continuing to proliferate,” explains Dr. Merino.
While not a cure, it is promising. And not just for Boyd or other multiple myeloma patients. CAR T-cell therapy is already being used on other cancers, and Dr. Merino says they are studying it in solid tumors as well.
The fact is the bone marrow transplant gave Boyd two more years. He didn't waste them.
He's been working at the job he still desperately loves, traveling the world with his wife of 40 years, and the new love of his life, granddaughter Tess, was born.
"Somebody asked me if you knew it was only going to last two years would you do it again? In a heartbeat. Sign me up. I'd go through anything to get two more years. I would do that a 100 times over again,” he says.
And here he goes again. But this time, the hope is that there will be many more years on the other side of this new treatment.
“If I want more time, and I do, this is what I have to do. And that's OK,” he says.
Adding, “That in the hopes of when this stops working, they will have developed something else that they can try on me.”
And that's the thing, Dr. Merino says the oncology field is moving so fast right now. Two years ago this procedure wasn't available. Who knows what the next two years might bring. Maybe a cure?
“That's really an exciting time, when the people in the field are very convinced that we are getting close to that, and I think we are. I think we'll see that in Boyd's lifetime,” says Dr. Merino.
I ask again almost in disbelief, “You do? A cure?”
“Yes,” she says, with what feels like certainty in her voice.
A cure. Two words have never delivered more hope.
“I'm hoping that he does die a very old man, because I need him, but I feel like the world needs him too. He's such a bright light and there's so few people that are like that,” says Sheri.
Amen to that.
The next steps? Boyd will get three days of chemo to prep his body for the T-Cells to do their job. He'll spend seven to 10 days in the hospital, then will need to isolate at home for a month.
He hopes to be back to work in six weeks but has worked ahead so far that he thinks people won’t even notice he’s gone. Not a chance, friend. And at home, you'll still see brand new Land of 10,000 stories while he is gone.