June 8, 1990, was a sunny day with a lenticular cloud over the Alaskan peak of Denali, then officially known as Mount McKinley. Dr. Brunvand stood at a camp at 14,300 feet above sea level, getting ready to summit the tallest mountain in North America.
The top of Denali is 20,320 feet above sea level, with mercurial weather and unique challenges. A few months prior to this 1990 climb, temperatures had hit a record low of −57 degrees, bolstering Denali’s reputation as the coldest mountain on earth. The ascent from base camp, at 18,000 feet, is actually greater than Everest’s 12,000-foot vertical gain.
Just ahead of Dr. Brunvand’s group of eight climbers was a Japanese team of seven climbers. They were on the mountain’s West Rib, and they were in trouble. One of the Japanese climbers was suffering pulmonary and cerebral edema. Death lurked. On June 10, a message from the Park Service reached Dr. Brunvand’s group asking them to help the Japanese climbers, now stuck at 19,600 feet.
Dr. Brunvand and three others ascended in whiteout conditions to intercept three disoriented Japanese climbers, reaching them just below Denali Pass at 18,000 feet. The four mountaineers forged onward and encountered two more Japanese climbers at around 19,000 feet, a thousand vertical feet from the summit. One was a physician. The other Japanese climber was the one who had been sick with cerebral edema. He was now dead. Dr. Brunvand and two of his fellow climbers placed the body in a tarp fashioned into a toboggan and dragged it to Denali Pass, where the body was stored until a larger group could move it farther down.
In the end, Dr. Brunvand found himself attempting a rescue of someone at tremendous health risk, getting to the person too late, and winding up as death’s shepherd. This sounds a lot like the job description of an oncologist.
Dr. Brunvand had grown up in Denver, his father a wide-eyed entrepreneur who had a bit of Jason in him. His father, for instance, owned a car wash in 1968; half the crew that worked there were Vietnam vets and the other half were veterans of the “summer of love.” Little Mark Brunvand worked there too, sometimes running the car wash himself. This was not his calling, however. That would be medicine.
In 1985, he finished his medical residency and began a fellowship in immunology under Dr. Anthony Fauci at the NIH, eventually spending three years in Dr. Fauci’s laboratory of immune regulation (small world!). Then it was off to Seattle, where Dr. Brunvand started working with cancer patients. He faced a crossroads of whether to pursue research or continue to treat patients in a clinic. This can be a tough choice for many doctors initially drawn to research, which can be seen as a particularly noble job and thus can be ego-gratifying. The top thinkers in medicine, people sometimes say, do research and treat patients. But that’s just what people say, and it’s simply false; doctors, like lawyers or writers or businesspeople, have particular tasks they are drawn to and that they do well.
When Dr. Brunvand thought about why he preferred to deal with patients, despite the intense suffering it entailed, he came down to a simple answer. “I could connect to them.”
He felt that he understood what it was like to deal with difficult circumstances and loss. Dr. Brunvand had found himself—his voice in this world. It was true to him, the person who liked to connect and to feel connected, and it was an authentically heroic one. He loved the challenge of fighting on behalf of patients, but more than that, he loved “coaching” patients to deal with heinous malignancies on their own terms. On his wall at home hangs a picture and a letter written by a little girl (I’ve copied it here, spelling warts and all).
Dear Santa,
I have been a verry good girl this year. I have a lot of things I want this year
Hear are some: 1. Poo-chi. 2. Wove love. 3. Super Soft Kelly doll. 4. Super Poo-chi. 5. CD-Bah Hah men. 6. Tekno.
Love, Katie
Katie wrote a second note too, also on Dr. Brunvand’s wall. It reads:
Dear Santa,
Never mind all I want for Christmas is for mommy to get better and thats all.
Love, Katie
Katie’s mommy did not get well.
“She died,” Dr. Brunvand said.
Dr. Brunvand is both a highly cerebral oncologist and someone who owns the fact he has insecurities. He developed coping mechanisms, including humor and another trait essential to his authentic self, namely tenacity. On his high school ski team, he made himself run until he vomited or passed out, proof to himself he had trained hard. He took the cancer fight personally. “Once the decision was made to fight,” he wrote, he would “try every ethical, medically sound method to win.
“If I was found to have ‘cheated’ against cancer, I was not going to jail but to Stockholm.”
But it was the nature of the beast for an oncologist: Dr. Brunvand often came up short. He sometimes wondered if that was just his job, to fight and fight and fight, to play the martyr. The more desperate the cause, the more he dug in.
He was determined to save Jason, feeling like Jason was part brother, part son, a true fellow traveler.