John Burns, New York Times London Bureau chief and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, for the first time publicly shared the details of his struggle with cancer to a full auditorium of approximately 150 attendees at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center on Thursday. The man who had reported on the Cultural Revolution in China and apartheid in South Africa said that nothing prepared him for his personal battle with lymphoma 17 years ago.
"Cancer patients go through a war," Burns, the third Montgomery Fellow to visit the College this fall, said. "You are draftees -- it's not a battle you choose for yourself. Like the wars going on now, it has an uncertain outcome. And finally, it calls on great reserves of courage."
Burns "stands as a testament to the wonders of American technology and medicine," he said.
Though England's National Health Service system covers health=care costs for all British citizens, Burns' cancer was too advanced to receive coverage when he was diagnosed in 1991. Burns sought health care in America after his Times editor, a friend of the head of hematology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, urged him to seek treatment overseas. Burns' wife also pressed him to travel and insisted that everything would work out, he said.
"The United Kingdom has the type of medical system you want for your country. The United States has the type of medical system you want for your family," Burns said.
Laying in the hospital bed, "too weak to pick up the telephone," Burns said he pondered the differences between British and American health care. The National Health Service, which offers free health care, could not cure his disease, but his ability to pay for treatment under the American health care system allowed him access to a cure.
After nine months of "the highest wire act" he had ever been through, experimentally high doses of chemotherapy eventually sent his third-stage lymphoma into remission.
Immediately following his doctors' announcement that the cancer had disappeared, Burns' editor sent him to Belgrade on assignment. Reporting from the middle of the bombing grounds, Burns sped up his re-entry into professional journalism, he said.
"Within a week I felt almost normal, one month very good, three months better than I ever had," he said.
Having come to loathe the ordinary during his illness, Burns said, the 10,000 artillery shells hitting ground around him each day was the best therapy he could have.
Burns kept the details of his cancer private, telling colleagues that he had spent the nine months away from work writing a book, he said.
For the next 17 years, Burns served as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, spending most of his time abroad. He returned from Afghanistan on Oct. 19, only four days before delivering his speech.
Burns concluded his speech with an inspirational message to cancer patients in the audience, comparing them again to the soldiers he covers.
"You are as brave as the people who are on the front lines," he said. "It's a tough battle you're fighting, and it's not easy to find your way through it, but I wish you the great fortune that America afforded me."
Burns' lecture, "With a Little Help from My Friends: Surviving Cancer, from Sloan-Kettering to Sarajevo, Kabul and Baghdad," is the inaugural speech of the series "The Friends of Norris Cotton Cancer Center Present: Conversations in Survivorship."
