Doug Noah will run to raise money for cancer research Friday and Saturday in the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life, but the one person he most would have liked to help is gone.

Michele Noah as a Ben-gal cheerleader | ZOOM |

Doug Noah will be running in the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life. (Craig Ruttle photo) | ZOOM |

        Mr. Noah, 32, of Clermont County's Union Township, is running in memory of his wife, Ben-Gal cheerleader Michele Noah, who died at age 28 in February of malignant melanoma. He's also running to help people living with and battling cancer.

        His participation is only fitting, Mr. Noah says: Michele, a veteran of the Ohio Air National Guard, served as coordinator of the benefit run for the American Cancer Society. She was looking forward to wearing a cancer survivor's medal as she ran this year's race.

        “I'm acting through Michele for what Michele would do. This is something we're doing together,” he says.

        An estimated 51,000 new cases of melanoma, the rarest and deadliest form of skin cancer, will be diagnosed in the United States this year, according to the American Cancer Society, and about 7,800 Americans will die of the disease. Since 1973, diagnosed cases of melanoma have more than doubled, and the mortality rate has increased about 44 percent.
       

She was bullet-proof
       

        Mr. Noah describes Michele as “intelligent.” But there are many other adjectives: Athletic. Determined. Loving. Beautiful. Optimistic. Even, as one of Michele's doctors described, her, “bullet-proof.”

RELAY SCHEDULES

Several Relay for Life sites have been set up in the Greater Cincinnati area. To find one near you, call the American Cancer Society at (800) 227-2345 or log on to (www.cancer.org).

        “I asked her oncologist some really tough questions,” Mr. Noah says. “Michele would rather not know. She just said, "The bottom line is, I'm going to beat this, so I'm not going to ask the tough questions. If you ask the really tough questions, do it alone.' So I'd take the oncologist aside and ask what her prognosis was.”

        She tried out for the Ben-Gals squad three times before she made it. “The deal was, she would do it for a year and then we were going to have children. But she kept changing the deal. In 1999, I said, "OK, done. Kids. Let's do this.' And she said, "One more year.' And I knew it was going to be "one more year' until she was a Ben-Gal.”

        When she made the squad, Mr. Noah gave the news to everyone they knew “and she literally got mad at me,” he says. She didn't want him bragging about her accomplishment. “And of course, I didn't stop telling everyone.”
       

Courtship, marriage

       

        Mr. Noah remembers the first day he saw Michele. It was January 1993, and he had just landed at Rickenbacker Air National Guard Base in Columbus with his father, Col. Donald L. Noah, commander of the base hospital. Mr. Noah, also a member of the Air National Guard, is a crew chief for a KC-135, a refueling aircraft.

        As they came in from the flight line, he noticed a tall, beautiful blonde, and said to his father, “Who is she, and tell me everything you know about her.”

        The colonel told him that she was a new medic, a great girl and he was planning to set her up with Mr. Noah's brother, Davie.

        “I said, "Dad, what are you thinking?' ” Mr. Noah recalls, and tracked down her phone number from a duty roster that his father supplied. Then he asked her out.

        He proposed in November.

        It took some planning. During the day, Mr. Noah did his best Robert De Niro/gangster impression, complete with a pistol and shoulder holster. That night, they went out to dinner with friends. As they were eating, the restaurant hostess brought a police officer to their table, and the officer said, “These gentlemen fit the description.” Then the officer said they'd received a report that two men in the restaurant were carrying concealed weapons, and he needed to pat them down.

RISK FACTORS

• Certain types of moles.     • Fair skin, freckling and light hair.     • Family history.     • Immune suppression.     • Excessive exposure to ultraviolet radiation and sunburn, particularly during childhood.     • Age.     • A rare genetic condition called Xeroderma pigmentosum, which causes the body to be unable to repair sunlight-damaged DNA.     Sources: American Cancer Society, American Melanoma Foundation, CancerCare.

PREVENTING MELANOMA

Tips for limiting the chances you'll contract melanoma:     Stay in the shade: Limit your time in the sun, especially during midday when UV light is most intense. Wear protective clothing, including a hat and sunglasses. (Melanoma can develop in the eyes.) Use a sunscreen with an SPF of 15 or higher, and re-apply it every two hours.     Stay out of the tanning booth: Tanning beds and sunlamps are just as dangerous as sunlight, and sometimes more so.     Remember the little ones: Experts believe sun damage suffered in childhood — all those blistering sunburns you got during summer camp — are the culprits behnd melanoma. Make sure your kids limit sun exposure with sunscreen, hats, sunglasses and protective clothing.

        When he frisked Mr. Noah, he pretended to find the shoulder holster. But instead of a pistol, he pulled out the jeweler's box. “He says, what is this? And I said, It's not a lethal weapon, but it will cut glass.”

        And then he asked Michele to marry him. She said yes.
       

Grave prognosis
       

        It was 1998 when they realized something was wrong. Michele found a lump under her left arm. “I wouldn't even say she was sick,” Mr. Noah says.

        Her doctors treated it as a rash at first, prescribing creams and salves. But the medicines didn't work, and one day, Michele found an article about melanoma in old issue of Good Housekeeping. “This looks like my arm,” she told her husband. When she showed the article to her doctor, “he literally turned white,” Mr. Noah says.

        A trip to an oncologist followed, then surgery to remove 16 lymph nodes.

        For the next several months, her quarterly checkups were fine. But in October 2000, the melanoma resurfaced, and Michele had six more lymph nodes removed.

        By that time, she had auditioned for and won her slot on the Ben-Gals squad. In spite of the surgery, the radiation and the chemotherapy, she only missed one game.

        “She was taking radiation treatments on Friday, and cheering in front of the crowd on Sundays,” Mr. Noah says.

        But by February of this year, her condition was rapidly getting worse. On Feb. 18, she went in for a checkup, and was admitted immediately to the hospital.

        “Michele knew that the prognosis was pretty grave. She had about a 20 percent chance of medium recovery. It didn't faze her. She said, "I'm that 20 percent. I've got too much of my life, at 28, to go.'”

        She and her doctors chose the most aggressive treatment: Interferon to boost her immune system and heavy chemotherapy to kill the cancer cells. Over the next few days, she got so many visitors, including round-the-clock visits from the other Ben-Gals, that she had to have a private room.

        “I'm thinking, she's kicking this thing,” says Mr. Noah, who says his wife was the “life of the party” as her friends came to call. “But it wasn't in the cards.”

        She died Feb. 23.
       

Not your story

        The best way to cure melanoma is to catch it early and remove it surgically, says Dr. David Waterhouse, a medical oncologist with Oncology-Hematology Care of Cincinnati.

        That's why skin checks are so important. Moles, freckles, discolorations from previous sunburns can all mask the malignancy.

        And melanoma can spread quickly from the epidermis to the lymph nodes, and then throughout the rest of the body. Once chemotherapy and radiation are necessary, the patient's prognosis gets much trickier.

        Australia has the world's highest incidence and mortality rates from melanoma, and public health officials there put a strong emphasis on catching the disease early, Dr. Waterhouse says.

        In this country, patients and doctors are becoming more educated about looking for melanoma and about taking action to prevent it with sunblock and protective clothing. But sun worship hasn't died out entirely, and past sun damage — the kind suffered in childhood — seems to be the real culprit.

        “Before World War II, pale skin was a sign of culture, wealth and breeding. After World War II, pale skin was an evil,” he says. All that tanning has led to a lot of skin cancers over the yars. “I've got teen-agers I fight with about going to tanning beds,” he says.

        Depletion of the atmosphere's ozone layer, which helps shield the Earth from the sun's dangerous rays, is also believed to be a factor in the increase of melanoma incidence, but experts disagree how large a role it actually plays, Dr. Waterhouse says.

        Treatment options include surgery, chemotherapy and radiation and immunotherapy using alpha Interferon to stimulate the patient's immune system in the hope it will kill the cancer cells. Vaccines against melanoma are in the works, but are still in the testing stage, Dr. Waterhouse says.

        Treatments for more advanced stages of melanoma “aren't very effective at all,” he says.

        “The surgeons fix this disease,” Dr. Waterhouse says.

        Melanoma does have a quirk that fascinates oncologists: From time to time, the disease spontaneously disappears, a rarity among cancers. That's why experts are convinced the immune system plays an important role in defeating the disease.

People need to listen

       

        Hope is important too, Mr. Noah says, and so are research dollars.

        “I want to tell people that Michele's story is not their story. People out there who are battling cancer need to hear that,” he says. “It seems like I'm hearing more and more cancer stories and people are younger and younger, and part of it is probably that I'm more attuned to it.

        “There are many people out there that want to hear, this is not your story. People have full recoveries all the time. This is about raising money and love and hope and caring and finding better cancer treatment and cure development.”
       

Destined to distill
Derby Day recipes
Here's How
Attacking anxiety attacks
Concert review
Running to remember his wife
Texas study links tattoos, hepatitis C
Warmer weather adds new incentives for weight loss
Body & Mind
Get to it