By: E&P Staff Bill Wundram, perhaps the longest-writing daily newspaper columnist in America, told his Quad-City Times readers Wednesday that he is about to undergo treatment for a "very aggressive type of cancer."
Wundram has been on the staff of the Davenport, Iowa, paper for 65 years. Until a few years ago he wrote a column seven days a week. Now his column appears five times a week in the Lee Enterprises-owned daily.
"I always wondered how I would write about something like this. ... I have cancer," Wundram wrote for Wednesday's column. "There are varieties and stages of cancer, but I have it bad, and that ain't good. What I have is a very aggressive type of cancer. It scares the hell out of me."
Wundram said he had been diagnosed with an inoperable type of prostate cancer, and will soon undergo 55 daily radiation treatments.
He said he has always feared cancer because it runs in his family, killing his father at 63 and a sister at 64. A son "staged a comeback from a severe battle with cancer" in his 50s, Wundram wrote.
"So, I suppose it is my turn and I don't like it," he wrote. "I can't shrug it off. When I brush my teeth in the morning, the thought of cancer gnaws at me. When I drive to work, it fills my mind. As I sit here and write, cancer is taunting me."
He wrote that he is in the "fight of my life," but intends to beat the disease.
"So, that's that!" Wundram wrote towards the end of the column. "I'll keep writing, living and loving."
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