Pete Moon Faces Another Front In Cancer Battle

The light is fading in Pete Moon.

He’ll admit it only in a weak moment, this truck-driving guy with a gold hoop shining from his left earlobe. He’s 37 and has cheated the melanoma that’s dogged him for 15 years. But it’s gaining on him.

“I feel things are folding up at a fairly consistent clip,” Pete says as if he’s talking about someone else. “It’s hurtin’ for certain.”

His friends at Hayden’s Faith Presbyterian Church want to send Pete to Denver for an experimental treatment. It’s not likely to cure him, but might extend his life in the same way insulin keeps diabetes in check.

Pete has never shied from new treatments. But his body may backfire before he can get to Denver.

“I think if I don’t do anything in two to three weeks, I won’t be able to move,” he says.

The metal cane across his lap is the first sign that Pete’s not as healthy as his tanned face suggests. He flicks at the peeling skin on his sunburned forearm, a little ashamed, and taps his left leg. It’s swollen from toe to hip.

“I should know better,” he says. “This all started because no one worried about the sun in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.”

Pete blames his melanoma on the perfect summers of childhood, swimming, boating and skiing unprotected in Lake Pend Oreille’s Rocky Point Bay.

“As soon as school was out, I don’t think any of us wore clothes till fall,” he says.

His sister spotted the scary mole on his left calf when Pete was 22. Two weeks later, it had tripled in size and turned rough, red and purple.

“There was no way I could look at it without the hair standing up on the back of my neck,” he says.

Doctors excised the malignant mole and everything around it. A test of his lymph nodes indicated the cancer hadn’t spread.

Five years later on a sunny spring day, Pete’s doctor declared him cured.

“I was briefly convinced I was free of it,” Pete says. “I figured after my brush with death I could enjoy the next 60 years in the sun.”

That fall, he found a lump in his left thigh, then another behind his knee. His hopes rose when the doctor said melanoma was unlikely. His lymph glands said otherwise.

“They were black as coal,” Pete says. “I figured I had two, three, maybe six months to live” because his doctor had told him a recurrence would be bad news.

Chemotherapy made Pete shake and sweat, but corralled his cancer for more than two years. Success gave him confidence. He was young; cancer was conquerable.

He felt fine and kept working. But the strain of living with the threat of death killed Pete’s first marriage, then his second.

He found a knot in his ankle just before his 32nd birthday in 1992, then another in his calf. He wanted his leg removed.

“I figured if it’s going to kill me, get rid of it,” he says. “Death is a condition I’d rather avoid.”

Instead, he agreed to a new treatment in Maryland where doctors isolated his leg from the rest of his body and shot it with a deadly dose of chemotherapy.

“Holy mackinaw, that hurt,” Pete says. “The bottom of my foot came off in a big, thick chunk.”

It healed and doctors marveled at their success. By early 1996, even Pete believed he’d beaten the cancer. Then doctors found a slow-growing tumor in his pelvis. Pete took a deep breath and went camping.

“I felt great. I lived the summer on faith, refused to worry about it for the first time in a long time,” he says.

The cancer hit harder and faster this time. He quit working in October after he couldn’t lift his leg while driving. The tumor was fist-sized. By Thanksgiving, it was the size of a football and crowding his organs.

Co-workers at URM Stores Inc. in Spokane couldn’t stand seeing Pete down. They gave him money and their vacation time. Their generosity embarrassed him, but allowed him to postpone applying for Social Security disability benefits.

“That one’s hard for me,” he says. “It’s like admitting, ‘Gee, I’m disabled.”’ Chemotherapy didn’t work this time. Pete’s general health and attitude were good, so his doctor suggested him for an experimental treatment at the University of Denver.

Doctors there are trying to stop tumor growth by teaching cancer cells to quit reproducing so rapidly. It’s cancer management and Pete’s been accepted.

The weekly, three-hour treatment won’t cost Pete anything but airfare - $700 a week. The treatment could go on for months. Pete wants to participate but can’t justify the cost to his family.

In one of the many waiting rooms he’s been in, Pete heard about a woman with cancer who charged nearly $200,000 in travel and lodging in her hunt for a cure. She died and left her daughter the debt. Pete says he won’t do that to his wife.

“I love life, but I have to be realistic,” he says.

Barbara Tennery at his church launched a full-scale fund-raising blitz for Pete last week. If this treatment works for him, it could help others, she says.

Pete gripes a little now because he’s too weak to stand at the skeet range and at his teenage daughter’s softball games. Cancer has seemed surreal to him until lately. Now, it’s wearing him down.

“It’s strange to watch yourself go downhill,” he says, staring at the birdhouse he built with his 11-year-old son. “I’ll admit, I’m so wore out I just want it to end, somehow. It’s been a long winter.”

To help Pete, call Faith Presbyterian Church, 772-5251.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo