Riding to Recovery

Lowell Petersen, “Omaha’s Lance Armstrong,” Wins the Most Important Race

By Julie Cerney

Try to toss a compliment Lowell Petersen’s way, and he’ll shrug it off with an embarrassed grin. “I’m nothing special,” he says.

While he clearly believes what he’s saying, those who know Lowell, or know of him, disagree.

At 49, Lowell Petersen is fitness personified. Six feet tall and 170 pounds, Lowell carries only about seven percent of his weight in body fat -- one-third that of today’s average American male and on target with the world’s top athletes. A cycling fanatic, Lowell is a Blair resident, Omaha bicycle cop, devoted family man, relentless practical joker, eternal optimist and enthusiastic charity fundraiser.

He is also a cancer survivor.

An uncharacteristic drop in Lowell’s fitness level nearly nine years ago signaled trouble ahead. By August 1995, headaches and fatigue were slowing Lowell’s bike race times. Cycling his usual 70-mile workday, complete with Blair-Omaha commute, became oddly tiring. A doctor prescribed vitamins.

Then one October morning, Lowell’s wife, Terri, found him huddled on the sofa, gray-faced and weak. “Go to Omaha and see another doctor,” she insisted. “Something is wrong.”

Diagnosis: Leukemia
By lunchtime, Lowell had the answer. Blood tests revealed leukemia, a blood-related cancer, so advanced that Lowell required immediate treatment. This doctor offered to drive him to the hospital.

Instead, Lowell met Terri at a prearranged restaurant for a lunch they never had. Chattering on about the morning, Terri eventually asked what the doctor had said. Lowell told her.

“No, what is it really?” Terri asked. When she saw the teardrop on his cheek, she felt the world stop. But they couldn’t let shock or fear delay action. Lowell was due at Methodist Hospital within the hour.

Adam Kyle, Lowell’s good friend and fellow officer, remembers getting the call, certain it was a joke, and saying, “Lowell is a bike god. He’s way too healthy for cancer. It’s ludicrous.”

Adam was the first of the family, friends and co-workers who raced to join Lowell and Terri at the hospital. Donning surgical masks to protect Lowell’s weakened immune system, visitors struggled to accept the news.

“I assumed this was no big deal -- have chemo, get well,” Adam remembers. “But it was never that simple. After I heard the odds, I told folks to say their good-byes.”

As Lowell’s oncologist, Robert M. Langdon Jr., MD, medical director of oncology research for Methodist Cancer Center, explains, “Lowell had acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, a particularly aggressive cancer of the bone marrow. Most AML patients at the time did not survive, and given the subtype, severity and genetic factors of Lowell’s case, his prognosis wasn’t good.”

Resolving to Just Deal with It
Yet Lowell counts Dr. Langdon as the person who may have motivated him most, strengthening his resolve to get through this. “We talked about our kids, soccer, cycling, anything,” Lowell remembers. “It became a friendship.”

The Methodist Hospital doctors and nurses, Lowell says, surrounded him in a comfort zone of caring. “They made me feel from the first day that they would do, and they would help me to do, whatever was needed to save my life.”

Throughout the first 29-day hospitalization, the rigors of chemotherapy, the setbacks and treatments that followed, Lowell lived his personal mantra: Just deal with it. This is the message he’d printed on racing jerseys. This is the answer he’d given cyclists daring to grumble about tired backs or sore feet on a 100-mile ride.

Lowell did deal with it, with humor and a determination to regain his health. Even when he could barely walk, he’d push himself to “run” the stairwell. Seeing his patient’s resolve, Dr. Langdon gave in to Lowell’s pleading and authorized a stationary bike in the hospital room.

Lowell put on a brave face, but Terri knew the truth. “Being ill and confined indoors was torture for him,” she admits, “especially being away from the kids.”

Lowell longed to be there for his family, and his darkest hour came when a falling blood count suggested the battle was lost. “Megan was 12 and Ben only five. He wouldn’t really remember me,” Lowell says, “and that hurt.”

Fortunately, Lowell was able to achieve and maintain remission through successful chemotherapy at Methodist Hospital and a bone marrow transplant in May 1996.

Although Lowell’s siblings were eager to donate, none matched. A transplant from an unrelated donor offered a much lower success rate and put Lowell at risk of chronic graft-versus-host disease, effectively barring a return to cycling. Instead, he underwent an experimental procedure at the time, an autologous transplant using his own stem cells.

Cycling On, Giving Back
Lowell battled his way through nausea and weakness to be back on his bike two months after the transplant. Four months after, he was racing. A year after the transplant, he set out on an unthinkable quest, cycling 550 miles across Nebraska in just three days, raising $50,000 for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and registering 170 volunteer bone marrow donors.

It was a triumph of spirit and strength, an affirmation of life and possibility. It was also Lowell’s founding of Ride to Recovery, now called Tour de Hope, an annual benefit that has raised more than $250,000 to fight blood-related cancers.

Cancer free since 1997, Lowell Petersen is acutely aware that life is a privilege. Others might only revel in survival, but he chooses to give back. Determined to raise money and awareness so others will have a chance at life, Lowell is likely to be hand-numbering raffle tickets, coaxing merchants to donate prizes, rallying friends and communities for another benefit or quietly visiting leukemia patients. He wants them to see him and see hope.

People see that and more. They see a champion.

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