HERSHEY, Pa. — “Why me?” Tim Card asks.
It’s far from a lament over bad luck, although the 45-year-old has had more than his fair share. In 2018, his diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and the innovative treatment doctors at Penn State Cancer Institute gave him had weakened him so much he had to struggle just to make it up the stairs of his Mount Joy, Lancaster County, split-level.
Instead, four years later, Card’s question is spiritual. “Why am I still here?” he asks. “How do I not squander this?”
Aside from the ethereal, Card owes his second chance to his family’s support, guts and perseverance, and a new cancer treatment called chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR-T. Card was the first patient to receive the leading-edge treatment at the Cancer Institute, which has since used it to treat 43 others living with cancer.
Card, a former CrossFit gym owner, is back to riding his bike to stay fit and keeping up with his seven kids. Life since CAR-T hasn’t been without setbacks. Some, like another family member’s bout with cancer, have been staggering. But Card, the inveterate trier of things – the youth pastor turned banker turned fitness geek turned realtor, with guitars and motorcycles sprinkled in – continues down his twisty, turning life with more gusto than ever.
Never had he experienced a turn as pivotal as cancer and CAR-T. The treatment, he was told, would shrink months of painful therapy into weeks and days.
It did. And it may have bought him years.
Climbing back
The cancer started as a pain in his side that wouldn’t go away. He was healthy. “I was just kind of loosely sporty,” he said, but he’d enjoyed fitness enough that he started his own gym out of a small warehouse and kept it running for eight years. He didn’t smoke or drink. He was 40. Cancer didn’t enter into the picture.
But that was the diagnosis in September 2017. Card figured chemotherapy would make short work of it, but after three rounds, doctors discovered the mass on his side was still growing.