Beating Stage IV Cancer
It was a grim day for Jeff Campbell and his parents as they traversed the winding corridors of Allegheny General Hospital in June 1998. Their destination: the office of Dr. Mark Roh, AGH's chairman of the department of surgery and a surgical oncologist specializing in liver cancer. Their goal: find a miracle that would allow 27-year-old Jeff to beat a diagnosis of Stage IV cancer.

Patient Jeff Campbell sings
Dr. Roh's praises for his
uncompromising determination
to do whatever is best for
the patient.

In a perfect world, no patient wants to see his name in Roh's appointment book. Liver-cancer patients who have heard their condition described as "terminal" look to Roh as their last hope. And so it was for Campbell on this summer day, just a month after he had been diagnosed with an aggressive colon cancer that had greedily overtaken his liver as well. Surgeons at his hometown Punxsutawney Area Hospital removed 18 inches of his colon - and then Campbell and his parents sought out Roh to tackle the liver cancer. Campbell, who was engaged to be married, had a cancer with an average survival rate of six months.

"I can picture it like it was yesterday," Campbell says, as he recalls his Punxsutawney doctor giving him the diagnosis that would make cancer - and fighting it - a permanent part of his life. "I never once thought this was a life-threatening thing for me. I basically remember accepting (the metastatic-cancer diagnosis), and my first reaction was, 'What do we do next?'"

Roh had a few options in his medical bag of tricks, but no certain miracles. "I really felt for Jeff. And his parents were having a very hard time," Roh recalls. "The approach we adopted was 'let's not hold anything back.' If we don't treat it aggressively, we know what's going to happen. There's no reason we shouldn't use everything we have" to give Campbell a chance at living.

Allegheny General's Dr. Mark Roh says
Jeff's remission is "the exception."

Enter "the pump," a hockey-puck-sized device that delivers a continuous stream of strong chemotherapy to the liver. Roh is one of only a handful of surgeons in the United States who still uses the pump to treat Stage IV liver cancers like Campbell's. The therapy, which shoots chemotherapy to the affected organ only, was used more extensively in the mid-1980s. But it has fallen out of favor because it requires intense medical monitoring, and most doctors believe the therapy is not worth the effort. Roh, however, says he uses it when there are literally no other options and the patient is in otherwise good condition, as Campbell was.

Campbell, who now resides in Cheswick, sings Roh's praises on a number of different notes, including his uncompromising determination to do whatever is best for the patient. When Roh first opened up Campbell in June 1998 to put in the pump, the surgeon found that the liver cancer had spread to nearby lymph nodes. Roh stitched his young patient back up and told him they needed to clear the lymph nodes of cancer before the pump could be used. Roh sent Campbell to doctors at UPMC, a competing health system, where doctors were studying an experimental chemotherapy drug.

Seven months of chemo treatment later, Campbell's lymph nodes had cleared. Roh put in the pump in March 1999, and over the next year, performed three surgeries to remove parts of Campbell's liver. By March 2000, Campbell's cancer was declared to be in remission - a feat Roh says is truly "the exception."

Since then, Campbell has resumed his life, and he remains thankful every day. He and his wife, Julie, were married in May 2000. He has a new job as a sales rep with the Warrendale-based Association for Iron and Steel Technology. And he thanks his lucky stars that he did find himself sitting in Roh's office eight years ago. It saved his life. "To us," says Campbell, "he's the best doctor in the world."

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