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A week ago today I completed the last of 33 radiation treatments to my face for basal cell carcinoma.
Early in this course of this therapy at the Teramana Cancer Center in Steubenville, a staff tech told me my doctor was at Chernobyl.
"Doc, they told me you were at Chernobyl," I said at my weekly meeting with Dr. Kirichenko. "It wasn't your fault, was it?"
He laughed. A good sense of humor is among his many fine personal traits.
I told this story to one of my grandsons, then had to explain Chernobyl for it to make sense.
"Chernobyl was a nuclear power plant in Ukraine," I told Lamppost Head. "The operators intentionally shut down safety systems during a safety drill and caused a meltdown. The world's worst nuclear disaster."
I asked Dr. Kirichenko to tell me about Chernobyl. He earned his MD from Kyiv Medical University in 1981, then did his residency in radiation oncology and nuclear medicine, followed by a PhD in radiation biology and D.Sc. in radiation medicine.
In the course of his research he had developed a treatment using amino acids and other proteins to try and save the bone marrow in people who had suffered massive whole-body radiation. That was exactly what happened to those at Chernobyl in the 1986 disaster, where heroic firefighters with no protective gear poured water on the burning atomic pile. He went to Chernobyl and used his method, which became standard treatment as doctors tried to save people by saving their bone marrow.
"Did you have any effects from radiation?" I asked. He pointed to his throat, said, "My thyroid," and shrugged.
Dr. Kirichenko later came to America to do a fellowship at MD Anderson Cancer Center at Houston and also trained at University of Virginia. Ukraine's terrible economy eventually prompted him to consider a permanent return. He was accepted back at UVA, where, he said with an ironic smile, he had to go through another radiation residency to get a license to practice in this country.
I asked how he came to be at Pittsburgh and Steubenville.
Not a fan of life on the eastern seaboard, after residency he looked around the Midwest and found a home at Allegheny General Hospital. The Allegheny Health Network's partnership with Trinity Health System and the Tony Teramana Cancer Center explains how l'il old me, and my l'il old facial skin cancer came under care of one of the world's best radiation oncology physicians and researchers, not to mention a hero of the Chernobyl disaster. What were the odds of that?
Dr. DiBiasi, the ENT who did surgery on my skin cancer, recommended following up with radiation essentially to be sure they got it all. I forget the exact analogy he used, but it was something like using a hand grenade to kill a mosquito. In that same vein, we could say that having Dr. Kirichenko as my radiation therapist was like having Einstein teach second-grade math.
My thanks go to the medical staff at Teramana for my care, along with Dr. Mark Trombetta, clinical director, who collaborated with Dr. Kirichenko in my case. I met with Dr. Trombetta once and we had a nice talk about my friend and former boss Nick Trombetta, his cousin.
There is not space here to relate all of Dr. Alexander V. Kirichenko's achievements, awards and credentials. Search his name along with the words "World Top Scientists" and prepare to be astounded.
I don't normally look forward to follow-up physician appointments, but I will truly be delighted to see Dr. Kirichenko again.
Hopefully he will look critically at my healing face and say, "Yes, good, good."