Hauser tumor shrinking

By Dan Linehan
Free Press Staff Writer

June 14, 2009 12:32 am

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A recent X-ray of a 13-year-old Sleepy Eye boy with cancer who reluctantly agreed to chemotherapy shows the tumor has shrunk, a family spokesman said.
“There’s quite a bit of reduction in the tumor,” Daniel Zwakman, a Cottage Grove man close to the family, said of Daniel Hauser.
That indicates the tumor has not become resistant to chemotherapy. Hauser had a single chemotherapy dose in early February, and doctors worried the tumor would grow back resistant to the chemicals.
If that happened, his chances of survival would drop from about 90 percent to 50 percent, said doctors at the Mayo Clinic and Children’s Hospital, who were cited by Brown County’s child neglect petition.
Brown County District Court Judge John Rodenberg ruled child neglect had occurred because Hauser’s mother, Colleen, did not follow a treatment plan recommended by cancer specialists. But the judge allowed the boy to stay with his parents after they relented and promised to follow a treatment plan that included chemotherapy. Daniel Hauser and his parents oppose the treatment on religious grounds, and at one point, Colleen Hauser fled with Daniel to avoid chemotherapy.
Zwakman said using alternative medicine with the traditional treatment has been beneficial. “We’re looking at this as the reason it’s responded as well as it has is the natural therapies that have gone along with it,” he said of the tumor’s reduction.
He said doctors are saying it’s too soon to talk about Daniel Hauser’s chances of recovering from his Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer.
Zwakman said the boy is still “very angry” about receiving chemotherapy, and is suffering through its side effects, including a very sore throat, a lack of energy, vomiting, dizziness and a lack of appetite.
But he said his gums are not swollen this time around, an improvement he attributed to the use of natural therapies planned by his mother.
He said Daniel Hauser received two half-treatments of chemotherapy, one on May 28 and the other on June 4. The X-ray that shows the tumor reduction was done on Monday.
Rodenberg said the court would be kept informed as to whether Daniel Hauser was following the treatment plan.
A court spokesman, John Kostouros, said in an e-mail there are a couple of communications from the hospital treating Daniel Hauser confirming his attendance at chemo appointments. He’s being treated at Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis.
An update hearing is scheduled for June 23.