Cancer personal issue for Crapo

BOISE – Cancer is an unwelcome but familiar part of U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo’s personal landscape.

His older brother, Terry, died of leukemia, and his sister survived a bout with cancer. The senator, who has just completed three months of radiation treatments for a recurrence of prostate cancer, noted that that means three of the six kids in his immediate family have battled the disease.

But Crapo, a leading advocate for including Idaho in a program that compensates downwinders whose cancers are linked to fallout from nuclear testing in Nevada in the 1950s and ‘60s, doesn’t consider himself a downwinder.

“I have never thought that, though I have wondered,” said Crapo, who grew up in the Idaho Falls area. He’s seen the studies. “In the case of prostate cancer, they have indicated that the connection was not very strong.”

The Republican senator, who had his prostate removed in 2000 due to cancer, has just been through three grueling months of radiation treatments because the cancer recurred. Every day, Monday through Friday, he left his Washington, D.C.-area home at 5:30 in the morning and drove an hour and a half to Baltimore for an eight-minute radiation treatment, and then drove back.

Staffers offered repeatedly to drive Crapo, but he insisted on driving himself. Once, when he was delayed by traffic, the Senate recording studio piped a Senate hearing into Crapo’s hands-free cell phone so he could listen in.

“I worked full time the whole time, but I have to admit I took a few naps in the afternoon because of the fatigue,” Crapo said last week, three weeks after he finished the treatments ahead of schedule. “I’m off the naps. I’m feeling strong.”

Crapo faces more testing over the next three to six months, but his doctors say his prognosis is good.

Because of a fiber-restricted diet related to the treatments, Crapo gained a few pounds during his treatments and is a little puffy, but overall he’s looking healthy now. He continues to urge men to get PSA tests, the simple blood test that first identified his prostate cancer. He’s even sponsored booths at Idaho fairs in the summer to offer the tests.

“Everyone, take good care of yourself, because your good health is a tremendously, tremendously important thing,” Crapo said.

Crapo considers himself a cancer survivor and because of that, he said, he identifies with the plight of Idaho’s downwinders, who have been excluded thus far from a government payment program that compensates stricken residents of certain counties hit by fallout from the Cold War-era tests.

“I am very dedicated to seeing affected survivors compensated for the impact it has made on their lives,” Crapo said.

He’s still planning to introduce legislation to include Idaho in the compensation program – even though a long-awaited National Academies of Science report recently recommended a different approach, one that looks at dosage and effects nationwide, rather than by geography.

“The way I see it, we have a law right now … and the law right now is based on geographic boundaries,” Crapo said. “The report will undoubtedly generate a review in Congress as to whether to transition to a new law.”

But the way Congress works, he said, that could take six or seven years. “During that transition time, there’s no reason not to include Idaho,” the senator said. Several Idaho counties received higher doses of nuclear fallout than those already included in the compensation program, which pays victims $50,000.

Crapo has been working on an array of issues in the Senate, from the federal budget to transit funding, from rural development to wilderness issues, from fisheries to Social Security.

With his own cancer, he said, “My main concern has been with the treatment, and making sure that I beat the cancer, as opposed to try to figure out what the cause was.”

Most men will develop prostate cancer at some point in their lives, he said – he just developed it earlier than most.

Crapo, 53, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1998, after serving three terms in the U.S. House, and won re-election to the Senate in 2004. He was an Idaho state senator from 1984 to 1992, and served as Senate president pro tem for his final four years there.

An attorney with degrees from Harvard Law School and Brigham Young University, Crapo is from Idaho Falls, where he has returned home nearly every weekend since he’s been in Washington until his cancer treatments made him cut back his travel schedule in recent months. He and his wife, Susan, have five children.