Boulder Daily Camera

Published on December 23, 2005

Butcher fighting the odds

Iditarod champion and former Boulder resident is battling leukemia

By Joshua Lindenstein, Camera Sports Writer

December 23, 2005

Jane Butcher is used to watching her stepdaughter run a different kind of race. But she's never wanted Susan Butcher to win so much as she does now.

Susan, a four-time champion of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska, was diagnosed three weeks ago with acute myelogenous leukemia, a malignant disease of the blood and bone marrow that kills 80 percent of its patients within five years, according to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Every day, Jane speaks on the phone with Susan, who has been undergoing chemotherapy at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle where she had an exercise bike placed in her room so she could work out.

Jane knows if anyone can beat the disease it is Susan, who spent a good portion of her teenage years living in Boulder with her father Charles, who died a year and a half ago, and Jane.

"She's a fighter," said Jane, who still lives in Boulder. "But it's very scary. She's got two little kids."

Jane's seen Susan overcome steep odds before.

Susan, now 50, learned to mush from a Boulder woman in the early 1970s and competed in her first race at Grand Lake at the age of 18. She left town for Palmer, Alaska, to work at the Musk Ox Farm in 1975. Two years later she began training with Joe Redington, the father of the Iditarod, and soon became a perennial factor in the 1,160-mile race from Anchorage to Nome in which competitors battle blizzard conditions and temperatures well below zero degrees, all the while sleeping about an hour a day on the 11-day-plus trek.

After dropping out of the 1985 race while leading because a moose along the trail stomped her dogs, Butcher came back the next year to become only the second woman to win the Iditarod. She then won three of the next four years to establish herself as one of only two people to win a race traditionally dominated by men at least four times.

In 17 attempts at the race, she garnered eight top-five finishes, missed the top 10 only twice — with one of those times being the 1985 race — and racked up nearly $400,000 in prize money, much of which she and her husband, David Monson, put back into raising and training Alaskan huskies at their kennel outside of Fairbanks.

But now Susan, who last competed in the Iditarod in 1994, faces the most important race of her life.

Monson and friends have set up www.susanbutcher.com as a resource with links to educate people on the disease. There are also near daily updates on her condition on the site and a message board where supporters can send Susan best wishes.

With David and daughters Tekla, 10, and Chisana, 5, by her side in Seattle, Susan is waiting for the chemotherapy to send the cancer into remission. She will, however, need a bone marrow transplant if she is to complete the 6-7-month recovery process.

Her bone marrow type results are currently being run against those of her family and siblings, her best chance at a match.

While the odds of any person being an exact match are as low as one in 50,000, chances that Butcher will find a donor are better than one might think. The National Marrow Donor Program has 5.5 million potential donors on its registry, which is also being scanned for a match for Susan.

"It's a very scary situation," Jane Butcher said. "The statistics are much better than they were 10 years ago but they are far from perfect. When it's somebody you love the numbers don't mean much."

That is why — like the Blood Bank of Alaska, which is organizing a state-wide donor drive on Dec. 30 — Jane is recruiting everyone she knows to get the simple blood test that determines if donors are a match.

Friends and family members of hers from Massachussetts to Boulder to California have been getting tested. And it's not just Susan they could save.

Those who are tested can, if they wish, become a part of the national donor registry.

"I'm not twisting anyone's arms. It's a very personal thing," said Jane, who at the age of 61 is too old to become a donor. "Most who are available are (getting tested). People around the country, when they hear this realize the importance of the national bone marrow registry. Because even if you don't match with somebody in your family, you might be able to match someone else and save their life. I'm always touched with the way people respond in a crisis."