Mayor's cancer won't stop re-election bid

The mayor previously battled esophageal cancer in 2003.

By James Patrick Schmidt

Published Feb. 13, 2007

Columbia Mayor Darwin Hindman won't let anything keep him from performing his duties, not even cancer.

Hindman announced in a news conference Monday he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The disease was detected early and Hindman is confident that treatment will be effective.

"My treatment is a one-shot deal," Hindman said. "It's called brachytherapy. They put permanent radioactive seeds into the prostate itself and those radioactive seeds will always be there, but the radioactivity gets so minute that it's basically immeasurable after some time."

Hindman said this treatment will have similar side effects to external radiation treatment.

"The best known of the side effects is you tend to have fatigue because your body is busy repairing itself from the damage from the radiation," Hindman said. "I'm going to have to avoid some engagements and late night council meetings for a while. After two or three months, I'll return to normal."

This statement came after Hindman's Jan. 5 announcement that he is running for re-election, a decision that was delayed by his diagnosis in late December.

"One of the problems with this is making a decision on what treatment and the different treatments have different side effects and so forth," he said. "So I was not willing to decide to run until I was convinced that I would be perfectly capable of handling my duties as mayor and I knew what treatment I would be using."

The mayor also said that his decision in treatment was not affected by a desire to run again; he decided on treatment based on what he felt was best for his health.

Hindman survived esophageal cancer in 2003, but it is totally unrelated to the current prostate cancer, according to the city's news release.

The mayor also announced a cancer awareness program with the help of his wife, Axie, a survivor of breast cancer.

The program, which is linked to the city's Web site, gocolumbiamo.com, is meant to raise awareness for healthy lifestyles and early detection of cancer.

"For the second time, due to early detection, the odds are very, very much in my favor, so I am using this to encourage people to have a preventative lifestyle," Hindman said. "To get plenty of exercise, to not smoke, to eat a healthy diet and do everything to prevent cancer and at the same time to go seek early detection."

He said early detection is especially important because a healthy lifestyle does not guarantee that cancer will not develop.

"In my case, even though I think I have a very good lifestyle, I still got the cancer," he said. "Early detection has made it so the disease can be taken care of and I feel quite comfortable about the future."

Hindman's awareness program, which is posted through the Columbia/Boone County Health Department, relies on outside sources for the bulk of the information.

"It's mostly just reputable links to programs that are in existence," Public Health Director Stephanie Browning said. "There's a lot of information that's out there. Sometimes people have a hard time filtering through good information and bogus information, so we were just trying to link to good information to make it easier."

Browning also said it would be difficult to expand the program beyond awareness because there isn't funding.

"Doing programming actually requires funding, and unfortunately, Missouri doesn't have much funding for screening programs," she said.