Back in early May, KARE 11 reporter and “Land of 10,000 Stories” host Boyd Huppert saw his doctor for a checkup two years after he successfully underwent a bone marrow transplant in his ongoing fight against multiple myeloma. He wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
“To quote my doctor, ‘Your cancer is on the move again,’ ” Huppert said. “She gave me a brochure and said, ‘Here’s the bad news, here’s what we’re going to do about it.’
“I was surprised because I had been feeling great. But bone marrow biopsies don’t lie. We’re back in the fight again.”
Huppert said he still felt great Friday as he was on his way to Omaha to spend the weekend with his granddaughter Tess, who was born on St. Patrick’s Day a month before his 2022 transplant. He said he feels no physical symptoms from the cancer and wouldn’t know it had returned if not for the biopsy.
When he gets back home next week, Huppert will undergo a cutting-edge new treatment that he noted wasn’t even FDA approved for multiple myeloma when he was first diagnosed with the relatively rare blood cancer in September 2021.
CAR T-cell therapy involves removing healthy T-cells, which doctors did in June, and re-engineering them in a lab, adding a protein that turns the cells into cancer fighters. Huppert is about to undergo new rounds of chemotherapy to kill off the T-cells left in his body, which will then be replaced by his own, newly supercharged ones.
“I can’t even begin to figure out how anyone came up with this,” he said with a laugh. “It’s amazing. Once I get the cells back, they immediately go to work attacking the cancer. This is new to me, I’d never heard of this before. All my doctors say this is the future of fighting cancer, particularly blood cancers at this time, but research is being done to target tumors as well.”
Once the new T-cells are back in his body, Huppert will spend seven to 10 days in the hospital. “There can be some not so great side effects and they want to keep a close eye on me,” he said.
After that, he’ll return to his home in Edina and spend 30 days in isolation, much like he did after his bone marrow transplant. As was the case in 2022, six weeks after his latest procedure, he hopes to be back to work reporting “Land of 10,000 Stories,” his ongoing series of off-the-beaten path feature stories that has won Huppert nearly every broadcast award imaginable, including almost 140 regional Emmys and two dozen national Edward R. Murrow awards.
Ever the workhorse, Huppert has no plans to retire and, indeed, just signed a new contract with KARE. If things go as planned, he’ll maintain a presence on the air while he’s recuperating.
“I’ve got six stories in the can that we’ve been putting away since early May,” he said “I think I have pieces scheduled through Labor Day. With any luck, I’ll be back to work after that.”
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