Ken Dykes - City Magazine

Is it common for a community
cm: cancer center to be coowned
by hospitals?
Ken Dykes: The effectiveness of the
cooperation that’s resulted in the Bismarck Cancer
Center is unique in my experience. You can see
across the country jointly-owned facilities, but you
rarely see the kind of success in making it work
that you see in this community. This market size
produces patients in sufficient quantity to support
one quality radiation treatment center. We just
purchased a new accelerator, it won’t be delivered
for another year, and we’ll be upgrading one of our
existing machines. That’ll run about $3 million.
We’re planning to add a PET-CT, at a cost of $2.5
million. You could have two radiation treatment
centers in Bismarck, but they wouldn’t have the
kind of technology one center can have when it’s a
cooperative effort.
cm:
Tell us about your own battle
with stage 4 colon cancer.
Ken Dykes: When the doctor told me I
had a tumor that had grown through the wall of
my colon, affected lymph nodes outside of the
colon and metastasized to my liver, I phased out,
I hit overload, my mind was reeling. One of the
disadvantages I had was that I knew something
about the odds. The thing that saved me, and if
You get to see the very best in
some really remarkable people.
you talk to survivors this is not unusual, is the
technique of being able to see yourself in the third
person as if you were an observer. Life is essentially
a series of decisions. Surviving versus thriving is
basically the ability to consistently make logical,
proper, positive decisions for yourself. You can
decide to play “poor me, ain’t it awful,” or you can
choose to say, “This isn’t good, but it is a pretty day
out there.”
cm:
What’s your prevention
message for everyone?
Photo by Glasser Images
Ken Dykes: For each of the primary sites
of cancer, which would be lung, breast, colon
and prostate, there are markers that ought to
be followed. For example, if you have a family
history, you need to get checked at a certain age.
If you don’t have a family history, there is still a
point at which you ought to be checked. The best
thing someone can to do for themselves is to be
somewhat faithful to following those guidelines.
Don’t assume because you’ve never been sick and
don’t feel bad that you don’t need to get checked.
To find that information, contact us or go to the
resource page of our website.
See Ken Dykes’s answers to the
“City Mag 10” questionnaire by visiting
thecitymag.com and clicking “Extra Content.”