William R. Powell: Dust From Father's Work Clothes May Have Doomed Him

http://www.pilotonline.com/special/asbestos/powell.html

By BILL BURKE, The Virginian-Pilot

© May 7, 2001

Residence: Virginia Beach; Age: 51

Exposure to asbestos: Most likely from clothes worn home by his father, an electronics technician at Norfolk Naval Shipyard, 1939-75

Disease: Diagnosed with cancer 1997, mesothelioma November 1998

The eve of St. Patrick's Day teased of spring as family and friends arrived to celebrate Bill Powell's life. Bradford pear trees bloomed. A stiff wind dispatched stubborn rain clouds.

Inside the funeral chapel off Laskin Road in Virginia Beach, a deep-blue ceramic urn rested on a mahogany table flanked by floral arrangements.

Pictures in a frame on an easel told a life story.

Bill Powell with his mother, with his daughter, with his arm around his wife. Bill playing air guitar and clowning with friends. Bill readying for a fishing trip. Bill crossing the finish line at the Peachtree road race in Atlanta. Bill singing karaoke.

Three days earlier -- on March 13, 2001 -- the Visa International executive had died of mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of the lung caused by inhaled asbestos fibers.

Now more than 80 people had gathered to do just what the no-frills son of a Portsmouth shipyard worker would not want them to do -- make a big fuss over him.

The simple memorial program could have been designed by Powell. One side of a 3-by-5 card bore his name, the dates of his birth and death, and these words:

"Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.''

On the other side was a black-and-white photo of a young, rugged, Michael Douglas-handsome Powell.

That was the Bill Powell his friends remembered. Not the man whose once-lean frame had in recent months been bloated by cancer, whose once-thick head of hair had been reduced to graying stubble.

They remembered the rock-'n'-roll-star wanna be wailing Led Zeppelin, not the man whose voice, in those final dark days, was reduced to a raspy whisper.

Christopher E. Hahn journeyed from Santa Barbara, Calif., to eulogize Powell, whom he had never met. Hahn is executive director of a mesothelioma research organization, and Powell was one of its most active board members. The two men had exchanged countless e-mails.

Hahn's voice choked with emotion when he told the assembled mourners, ''The asbestos companies knew many years ago about the dangers of asbestos. But did they stop producing it? The answer is no.

''Did the government regulate asbestos? The answer is no. They kept using it in shipyards.''

Illness attacks without warning

Four years earlier, in March 1997, Powell's daughter Allison flew to California from Virginia to visit Powell and his wife-to-be, Lisa. The three camped in Big Sur and took in the panoramas of rocky seashore and mountain, fog-shrouded redwoods, flower-dappled meadows and California condors, once endangered, now beginning to soar again.

That's when Powell first felt the pain in his left side. He tried to ignore it. But his breathing became labored. By the end of April, tests revealed the cause of the pain: metastatic adenocarcinoma. Cancer of unknown origin, detected in a gland.

Powell's comfortable and prosperous life had been shattered. He had taken a power job in 1996 with Visa in San Francisco. His title was Vice President of Emerging Products. He was earning a six-figure salary.

Powell had traveled far from his humble roots in Portsmouth's Loxley Place.

At 47, he was fit and athletic. He had been a long-distance bicyclist, star softball player, canoeist and road racer, having competed in two half-marathons -- 13-mile footraces.

When doctors found the source of the cancer in November 1998, the news was even worse. Powell had mesothelioma, with a mortality rate near 100 percent.

Events of the next few months were a numbing blur.

In January 1999, a team of surgeons in San Francisco spent 12 hours removing the lining, or pleura, of Powell's left lung, and with it, as much of the invading tumor as they could excise.

Three months later, he sat in a law office as 20 attorneys questioned him about when and where he had inhaled asbestos.

The most obvious exposure would have been the asbestos dust his father had worn home on his clothes from the shipyard each day when Powell was a boy. But Powell had also tinkered with classic cars as a youth. He did his own brake work. And in those days, almost all brake pads contained asbestos.

He had also worked in an auto-parts store where brake work was done, and for two years he had been employed in a power plant where pipes were insulated with asbestos.

The asbestos-product companies, many of them in bankruptcy by then, were eager to settle, and the lawyers knew it. They did not relish the prospect of a trial in which a mesothelioma victim as young and athletic as Bill Powell took the stand and told of the horrors that had beset him.

The lawyers knew that jurors would also hear that some of those companies had concealed from the public -- and from workers like Powell's father -- the awful truth about asbestos.

Soon, before Powell had finished receiving a series of 29 radiation treatments, he got his first settlement check. Details of such settlements are almost always confidential. Powell later would say only that the sum was ''substantial.'' It is not unusual in a case such as Powell's for a victim to receive more than $1 million.

But for Powell, who had treasured his good health, it was a Faustian bargain.

Powell left Visa in October 1999. Allison was a student at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, his alma mater. Hampton Roads beckoned.

In April 2000, Bill and Lisa Powell moved into a three-story home at Croatan in Virginia Beach. It had no grass to mow, only patches of juniper growing near the driveway.

There were large carpeted rooms, and windows and skylights that flooded the house with sunlight. When an onshore wind blew, they could sometimes hear the crash of the ocean two blocks away.

Once Powell had competed in 13-mile footraces. Now the short walk to the beach with Lucy, his Jack Russell terrier, tired him as though he had run one of those half-marathons.

Mesothelioma victims usually die within a year of the disease's onset. On a balmy fall day last year, Powell sat in his sun-dappled kitchen and said he hoped the new treatment would be the magic bullet he had hoped for. But he insisted that his doctors never divulge his prognosis.

Angered that virtually no research dollars were being spent on the relatively rare form of cancer that afflicted him, he joined the board of directors of Hahn's group, the Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation.

He made new friends on a support-group Web site for mesothelioma victims, where he spread good cheer, encouragement and an occasional aphorism from what he called the ''Book of Bill.'' He posted two on Aug. 2, 2000:

''No one on his or her death bed says, ''Gee, I wish I'd spent more time at the office.'''

''Work . . . it's just something to do between the weekends. Focus on what's important.''

Good news, rays of hope

On Nov. 22, Powell spread the good news into cyberspace.

''Hello friends,'' Powell said in a message on the Web site. ''Lisa and I just returned from Duke University Medical Center where we learned my cancer has stabilized and even subsided a bit in a few places.

"This is the best news we could have hoped for. The treatments I've been getting have done all they can do for now, so I get a break from chemotherapy for the holidays.''

For months, doctors had treated Powell with an experimental cocktail of cancer drugs in a clinical trial. They hoped that aggressive treatment would succeed with a relatively young man, strong in body and spirit.

Almost four years after his cancer diagnosis, Powell was still alive and seemed to be beating the odds. Most victims of mesothelioma would have been long dead. The tumor was shrinking. Powell hoped the doctors had found the magic bullet.

But he remained wary. ''My story,'' he said ominously in November, ''is not a medical-miracle story.''

In December, he attended his daughter's graduation from ODU and spent what he described as a ''chemo holiday'' with his wife.

Decline comes swiftly

As a new year began, the clinical trial had run its course and doctors began a new treatment. But the tumor was winning. A Jan. 12 CAT scan at Duke Medical Center showed that it was growing.

By late January, his voice was hoarse. By February, barely a whisper.

Powell checked into Virginia Beach General Hospital in late February, where he received two transfusions. On March 8 he went home, where hospice workers watched after him. He was on a morphine drip. Lisa rarely left his side.

During one of his final lucid moments, as his wife, daughter, sister and mother gathered around his bed, he said, ''There are too many women here.''

Then he took Lisa's hand and said, ''I think I'll keep you.''

Bill Powell died at 1 a.m. on Tuesday, March 13. In that final moment, Lucy the faithful terrier jumped on the bed, licked her master's face and curled up beside him.

Powell's Virginia Beach oncologist, Dr. Thomas Alberico, has cared for mesothelioma patients for 14 years. Bill Powell beat the cancer for almost four years. The former distance runner was the longest-surviving mesothelioma patient Alberico has ever treated.

Tax-deductible contributions for mesothelioma research can be made to:

Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation
1609 Garden St.
Santa Barbara, Calif. 93101

*** POSTED MAY 11, 2001 ***