Annie Baggett and Debbie Binder have a close, easy friendship. They laugh at each others’ tales of motherhood. They seem to have known one another for years.
Theirs isn’t a long, shared history. In fact, they just met.
What binds them is a dreaded disease, leukemia. It’s not their illness. No, they bear a greater burden than that.
Baggett and Binder each have a grown child battling chronic myelogenous leukemia, or CML. People with the disease have too many white blood cells being made in their bone marrow.
Binder’s daughter, 19-year-old Laura Binder, was diagnosed last December. The family lives in Brier, and Laura Binder is a 2005 graduate of Mountlake Terrace High School. She’s a student at Western Washington University in Bellingham.
Baggett’s son, 22-year-old Steven Kirkwood, learned in March he has leukemia. He lives near his mother and stepfather, Frank Baggett, in Soddy Daisy, Tenn., near Chattanooga.
Tuesday morning, Laura Binder, her mother and the Baggetts crowded around a table in a 29-foot motor home. I joined them at Maple Grove RV Resort on Highway 99 in south Everett, where the Baggetts’ vehicle stood out in a sea of others.
Their RV is covered in brightly-colored vinyl wrap. It has huge orange lettering: “On the Road to Cure Leukemia.” A closer look reveals first names penned on the RV with black marker. Along with Laura and Steven are Judy M., Jackie S., Roy H., Rachel L., Sara W., Fiona M., Dalton L., Denise F. and many more.
“One woman touched those names, she had tears in her eyes,” said Annie Baggett. Stunned by her son’s cancer, she wanted to help. “When kids are little and get hurt, you pick them up, put a bandage on, and they go back outside smiling,” she said.
To fight their feelings of powerlessness, the Baggetts turned a planned vacation to see the northern lights into a road trip to raise funds to fight the disease. They left Chattanooga in late July on the two-month journey expected to cover 15,000 miles. They’ve gone halfway so far, across the United States, into Canada, and up to Alaska. They are now headed down the West Coast.
Online, Annie Baggett began reaching out to others affected by leukemia as her son began treatment. He and Laura Binder are both taking Gleevec, a cancer medication pioneered by Dr. Brian Drucker at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.
“The really good news is, they’re both in remission,” said Debbie Binder, who met Annie Baggett through a Yahoo discussion group. With a common ground of motherly love and fear of a cancer that mostly strikes people older than their kids, they became fast friends. Their children have never met.
The women met in person for the first time in Fairbanks, Alaska, after Debbie Binder realized a trip to her birthplace would coincide with Baggett’s visit there.
Already, the RV had taken the Baggetts to Glacier National Park and on to Edmonton, Alberta, where Annie met with another woman she met online who suffers from lung cancer.
Steven Kirkwood isn’t along for the trip. Despite his illness, he works long hours in a printing shop and takes night classes at Chattanooga State Technical Community College. This week, the family will reunite when he flies to Portland, Ore., for an appointment with Drucker.
Donations, Annie Baggett said, are slow in coming. She operates a Web site, www.roadrunnersusa.com, asking that donations be made to the Leukemia &Lymphoma Society. The group helped fund Drucker’s research for Gleevec, a drug manufactured by Novartis.
“Debbie’s family has been amazing, and we’ve had people come up to us and give jars of pennies,” Baggett said. The idea, she said, is to do something. “It’s to pay it forward,” she said. “We owe a debt to all the people involved in research before us.”
The women said they’ve spent countless hours learning about leukemia as their children go on with life as normally as possible. Laura Binder works at Old Navy this summer and focuses on plans to study communications and Spanish at WWU.
Her first symptom of the disease was fatigue she attributed to studying for finals. Cancer has changed her outlook. “I don’t take life for granted,” Laura said.
“I want to be the one who worries about it,” said Debbie Binder, whose “Cancer Sucks” bracelet matches the one her daughter wears. Annie Baggett’s bracelet says “Relentless.”
The mothers “should have honorary medical degrees,” said Frank Baggett, who runs a computer store in Tennessee and spends hours and hours behind the wheel.
What they have is friendship, born under frightening circumstances and nourished by understanding.
“Debbie is the only person who can know what I’m going through,” Annie Baggett said.
The trip hasn’t raised a fortune to fight cancer – not yet. Still, Baggett would do it all again. “We saw the northern lights,” she said.
“It has meant a lot,” Debbie Binder said of her new friend’s trip. “Laura’s name rode along the whole way.”
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
Cancer journey
Annie Baggett is on a North American road trip to raise funds to fight leukemia. Her 22-year-old son suffers from the disease. For information go to www.roadrunnersusa.com.
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