CancerSurvivorMt.Climber

Martin Benning welcomes a challenge. Back in 2005, he founded the Seven Summits Cancer Climb to scale the highest peaks on each of the seven continents while bringing attention to cancer support organizations, such as the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the American Cancer Society. Both of these organizations supported Martin and his family during his cancer battle.

So far, Martin and his team have climbed five of the mountaintops. Two remain: one in Antarctica’s Sentinel Range and the second—the highest—in Asia’s Himalayas. Martin is close to coming full circle in a life of climbing and surviving, considering that his childhood was as great a challenge as Mount Everest.

In 1983 at the age of three, Martin had what his parents thought was a bad cold. But it lasted for four weeks. His mother Cathy Clark, who worked in health care, took him to a physician for an examination, which revealed an illness immensely worse than a stubborn cold. Martin had leukemia. For the next four years, he spent much of his young life in and out of hospitals, where he underwent bone marrow biopsies, radiation, and chemotherapy.

During hospitalizations that lasted anywhere from weeks to months at a time, Martin’s mother and father would rotate their visits to spend as much time with their little boy as was possible. As months turned into years, being in hospitals became such a normal part of Martin’s life that it was not until he was eight years old that he realized that not all kids have to do this. After four years of treatment, seven-year-old Martin was cured of leukemia.

Less than twelve months later, he was diagnosed with cancer of the central nervous system, meaning the cancer had metastasized in other parts of his body including his spine and his brain. This type of cancer is extremely difficult to treat because the cancer drugs are blocked by the blood-brain barrier. The year was 1988, and Martin was given a 10 percent chance of survival.

He had to endure even more radiation, spinal taps, and excruciating rounds of chemotherapy by injection. Martin remembers that the pain would make him curl up into a little ball, and his mother would have to hold him down as the needle pierced his spine. Frequently, the needles would break.

To make the treatments somewhat easier, a catheter—developed and administered by pediatric nephrologist Dr. Robert Hickman at Seattle Children’s Hospital—was inserted into his neck and out through his chest to deliver the cancer drugs more effectively and less painfully.

The last resort was to implant a dome-shaped Ommaya reservoir into his head to allow the blood-carried chemotherapy to reach the brain and spinal column. To this day, Martin still has this plastic device embedded in his skull.

Fortunately, the chemotherapy—so dam­­­­aging to the body that it often kills the patient—was effective in killing his cancer cells. However, Martin remained cancer-free for less than a year. At the age of ten, he was re-diagnosed with testicular cancer.

More bouts of radiation and chemotherapy followed. Eight to twelve months is the usual protocol, but Martin’s lasted until just before he turned thirteen. “It was the last day of June in 1993 when I received my final chemo,” recalled Martin. “The doctor shook my hand and said he never wanted to see me again!” He had undergone ten years of radiation and chemotherapy and survived the challenges of three life-threatening cancers.

In 2004, Martin crossed paths with another cancer victor, AIM Royal Emerald Director Linda Cole, who chose AIM’s natural health products to fight breast cancer and won. Martin became an AIM-sponsored athlete and began taking AIM products, which he credits with maintaining his health, keeping cancer at bay, and giving
him the fitness level required to climb the highest peaks on seven continents.

At thirty, Martin has been cancer-free for nearly eighteen years. He has a check-up once a year, but his healthconcerns as an adult are far more typical, such as maintaining healthy cholesterol levels.

Last year, Martin married Emily Garner, whom he met in college. After Emily accompanied him on his team’s fifth climb up Mt. Kosciuszko in Australia, seven years of friendship turned into romance in 2008.

Following in the footsteps of his mother, Martin works in the health care field and recently accepted a position as the director of operations in the primary care division of Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center—one of the hospitals he was treated in as a child.