2025 letter to Sen. Rounds: Don’t turn your back on cancer patients
An Open Letter to Sen. Mike Rounds, May 18, 2025
I was deeply saddened by the news of your wife's death due to cancer in 2021. Jean Rounds, age 65, died too young. I understand your grief but am puzzled by your lack of compassion for other cancer patients.
It might seem cruel to use your tragedy to make a political point. However, you are not just a man grieving the loss of a spouse. As a U.S. senator, you have the power to alleviate suffering and save lives.
When we were both students at Pierre Riggs High School, my 40-year-old mother got breast cancer. In the late 1960s, as you might remember, cancer was considered by most to be a death sentence.
My mom underwent extreme treatment — a mastectomy followed by radiation so intense that it burned her skin from her lower chest up her neck, leaving flaming red scars that could not be exposed to sunlight for the rest of her life. Her ovaries were removed vaulting her into menopause. She suffered from those burns, the removal of lymph nodes that eventually rendered her right arm useless, and years of debilitating night sweats.
But she lived. Until the cancer came back in her bones. She died in 1993, shortly before turning 65, and six weeks before my second son was born.
My family understands the anguish cancer causes.
Fortunately, since my mother’s first cancer, remarkable advancements have been made.
When my mother went to Mayo years later, the doctor asked if she was willing to be an example of the “barbaric” cancer treatments in the past. A generous, brave woman, she showed medical students the mutilation and burns. I imagine they stifled gasps.
Currently, a cherished friend is battling stage 4 metastatic breast cancer in her bones. Her son was diagnosed with a rare liver cancer when he was 30. His original prognosis gave him two years to live. He is now 37.
What’s saving their lives is cutting-edge cancer research that gives their doctors at Mayo Clinic new and amazing options. What will keep them alive is ongoing research into innovative treatments. Given your wife's death, your willingness to stifle, subvert, and gut cancer research is inexplicable. Here are only two ways in which you are complicit.
First, the National Institutes of Health, home of the National Cancer Institute, funds more cancer research than any entity in the world, including significant research into the cancers that killed your wife and my mom.
Yet you voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-science fraud with no medical or scientific background, as the head of Health and Human Services, which includes NIH. Kennedy, at the direction of an unelected South African immigrant, Elon Musk, who has said empathy is a weakness, slashed the budget not only of NIH but of the entire Health and Human Services Department.
Among the catastrophic consequences of these actions are clinical trials interrupted or canceled, researchers fired, support resources eviscerated, and potentially breakthrough research destroyed.
Second, the highest-rated university internationally for oncology research is Harvard. This petty president you support is freezing $2.2 billion of grants, which will devastate that research as well.
This insanity costs lives, including those of babies and children.
I had breast cancer in 2018. Thanks to advancements in detection, my tumor was found early, so I had surgery and site-specific radiation. Also, because of the revolutionary progress in cancer gene studies, I was tested for the Braca gene, which I was relieved to find out I don’t carry, but many women do. Those women, thanks to scientific research, now have the information that can save their lives.
Of course, it’s not just cancer research being decimated. Research into Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, schizophrenia, muscular dystrophy, and ALS are only a few of the research areas being dismantled. Why would you and other Republicans, including four medical doctors, be so cruel as to cut funding for that research?
Having grown up in the same era as you within blocks of your family, I hadn’t been able to comprehend your lack of concern. The core value I was taught during my South Dakota childhood was compassion.
But then I got it.
You are up for re-election in 2026 and you, as well as such Republican senators as Dr. Cassidy of Louisiana and Susan Collins of Maine, will do anything to avoid being primaried, even if it means bowing down to a president devoid of humanity.
Even it means confirming the worst possible choice to lead the health services of Americans, a felon who feeds lies to vulnerable parents and claims he knows more than the most respected scientists in the world.
Even if your actions result in more Americans experiencing the loss and grief that your family and my family already have.
What would the late Pope Francis have told you, a devout Catholic, about your willingness to sacrifice lives to your political goals?
It's not too late. Dedicate yourself to restoring the research funds so that current and future cancer patients have the best possible chance to beat this disease. Then their families, unlike yours and mine, can celebrate their loved one’s survival, not mourn their absence.
Misti Snow, a Pierre native and 1971 graduate of Riggs High School, is a retired author, editor, and teacher. She wrote for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 20 years and then taught writing to international students, refugees, and immigrants in Virginia, where she lives. Her newspaper work was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and she’s a former Bush Leadership Fellow. Her family's roots date back to 1868 in the Dakota Territory. The original homestead is still owned and farmed by her Snow cousins in Gayville.
Photo: public domain, wikimedia commons
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