SPRINGDALE - It didn’t take long for Jack Igleburger to get involved.
In 2006, a year after moving to Northwest Arkansas from California, Igleburger and his wife, Temple, founded the Northwest Arkansas chapter of SPOHNC, Support for People with Oral and Head and Neck Cancer, Inc. The chapter meets monthly at the Cancer Support Home in Fayetteville, and offers information and support for cancer patients, survivors and their loved ones. (Information about the chapter is available bye-mailing the Igleburgers at [email protected].)
On Friday, Jack Igleburger will be honored with the Gentleman of Distinction Award during the ninth annual Bill Fleeman Gentlemen of Distinction fashion show at the John Q. Hammons Convention Center in Rogers. Igleburger says he is astounded by the award, and that half of it belongs to Temple, herself a breast cancer survivor and an advocate for those who faced the same types of cancer that threatened Jack’s life.
“They usually are picking doctors and well-known dignitaries and philanthropists [for the award], people that are a little more well known than Jack Igleburger,” says Igleburger, who lives in Bella Vista. “It was rather humbling that they thought I deserved it - that we deserved it.”
In 1994, the same week he retired from a long career with Hughes Aircraft, the then-57-year-old Igleburger was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma, a form of cancer that was located at the base of his tongue. The cancer was stage four, inoperable, and doctors gave him a 50-50 chance of survival.
The cancer had metastasized throughout Igleburger’s lower face, and he underwent twice-daily radiation treatments for six weeks. His body responded to the radiation, but its residue still resides in his lower teeth and jaw, so any sort dental work requires extreme caution. For example, he says that if he were to need a tooth pulled, it would require 30 hyperbaric chamber visits before the extraction, and 10 more afterward.
“The cancer really took the wind out of my sails,” he says. “The treatment was very devastating.”
Still, Igleburger says, he believes he is one of the lucky ones; many people who survive oral, head and neck cancer have it much worse.
He realized how much worse some survivors have it in August 2006, when he and Temple attended the support organization’s national 15-year celebration in New York. On the plane ride back to Northwest Arkansas, he felt that it was “time to give something back to the community.”
Within a month, a local chapter had been born. Three people attended its first monthly meeting, while today, the average meeting draws anywhere from 10-25 people.
“When I moved here, the whole idea was to relax and retire,” Igleburger says. “I was not planning to have involvement like this, but every year this thing gets bigger and bigger.”
More than six years later, the Igleburgers are well aware of all the resources available for people in Northwest Arkansas who are affected by oral, head and neck cancer. That includes Hope Cancer Resources, the beneficiary of the Gentlemen of Distinction, which offers a wide range of services to cancer patients and their families - everything from counseling to gasoline cards, which make trips to faraway cancer centers more affordable.
The Gentlemen of Distinction event is named after the late Bill Fleeman, the founder of America’s Car-Mart, who died from lymphoma in 1999 at the age of 59. In his final years, Fleeman would occasionally pay other patients’ bills anonymously.
The fundraiser is a lively fashion show, featuring locally prominent men in NorthwestArkansas as volunteer models. Tickets are $125 apiece.
For more information about the BillFleeman Gentlemen of Distinction fashion show, call (479) 361-5847 or visit
hopecancerresources.org
.
Northwest Profile, Pages 33 on 09/30/2012