‘I’ve regenerated:’ Drain Commissioner Pat Lindemann wins a round with cancer

Ask Pat Lindemann how things are going, and he answers the way you expect Ingham County’s longtime drain commissioner to answer.

“The snow has been melting slowly, so we aren’t looking at any serious flooding.”

Let’s refine that question.

About four years ago, Lindemann was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a rare and lethal form of cancer that slowly takes over the bloodstream. He felt tired and scared and thought about calling it quits.

But an experimental treatment developed at James Cancer Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, has Lindemann, who is 72, nearly cancer free and back in trim, just in time for the spring melt.

“It’s wonderful,” Lindemann said. “It works. I’m sitting here in front of you. Instead of a year to live, I’ll be here until I’m 110.”

Four years ago, while putting a roof on a shed in his backyard, Lindemann fell off a ladder and cut his leg. Days later, the cut showed no signs of healing. Lindemann’s wife, Melody, herself a physician, insisted on taking him to the emergency room.

He already thought something might be up. A healthy Lindemann is in perpetual floodwater mode. He routinely works 70-hour weeks and can talk your scalp off for 90 minutes about proper storm water management. Yet even before he fell off the ladder, he was feeling tired.

Blood work revealed a shocking white blood cell count of over 100,000. (About 7,000 is a normal figure.)

Tests further revealed that 93 percent of his white blood cells were cancerous.

Lindemann’s initial reaction was twofold. In his 28 years as Ingham County’s drain commissioner, he has accomplished a lot. He’s championed low-impact water management projects like the Tollgate Wetlands that scour storm water of pollutants and win national, state and local environmental awards. On his own time, he’s pursued photography, sculpture, poetry and music, plays a Native American flute he carved himself and dabbles in who knows what else.

“When I first found out I was looking at a potential death sentence, it didn’t scare me,” Lindemann said. “I’ve had a hell of a life. I’ve traveled all over, been fortunate to be part of all kinds of new ways of looking at the environment. I was ready to go through whatever I had to go through.”

But those, he said, were his “outward thoughts.”

“On the inside, of course, I was scared shitless,” he said. “No one wants to die.”

Lindemann and Angel did some research and learned that the top researcher at Ohio State University’s James Hospital, Dr. John Byrd, was looking for ways to treat leukemia without chemotherapy or radiation.

Byrd’s work is at the cutting edge of a new frontier in cancer treatment — monoclonal antibodies that genetically target a specific form of cancer, mark it for doom and recruit the patient’s own antibodies to kill it off.

Lindemann contacted Byrd’s lab, thinking he’d have to wait several months to get in.

A staffer called him right back.

“Can you be here next Tuesday?” she asked.

In short order, Lindemann became No. 71 out of 75 “human guinea pigs” (in Lindemann’s words) to try a cocktail of three medications.

One is an infusion that takes about seven hours to inject into the bloodstream. The other two are pills.

The results were dramatic. One day after his first infusion in September, the percentage of cancerous cells in his blood plunged from 93 to 30 percent. By the end of the following week, it was down to 2 or 3 percent.

He felt no side effects, aside from a brief spike in blood pressure as his body adjusted to the medication.

He was also hit by a wave of fatigue, as his liver and kidneys worked overtime to process billions of dead cancer cells.

The treatments moved to once a week, then once a month. When 14 months are up, Byrd’s team will collect the data from Lindemann and his cohort in the clinical trials.

In December, his blood counts came back normal and the cancer was “close to zero.”

“It’s wonderful,” Lindemann said. “I could feel my recovery happening while I was going through all this. For me, there were almost no side effects. None.”

Using animal and human proteins, Byrd and his technicians create a specific antibody that attach to the target antigen on the cancer cells. These monoclonal antibodies attach to matching antigens “like a key fits a lock,” according to a brochure from James Hospital.

“If they can get an antibody to attach itself to that protein, your body sees it as ‘other’ and just kills it,” Lindemann said. “My healthy cells just went after all the bad ones and killed them.”

Young stem cells in the bone marrow regenerate into healthy new blood cells.

“That’s me,” Lindemann said. “I’ve regenerated.”

However, the success of the treatment, and Lindemann’s great experiences with the staff at James Hospital in the past few months, left him with a problem.

“I’ve fallen in love with Columbus,” he said. “When MSU plays Ohio State, I don’t know where my heart’s going to be.”

Monoclonal antibodies have the potential to treat many types of cancer, possibly even all of them.

In a 2017 interview with City Pulse, Sparrow Hospital’s cancer genetic counselor, Corrie Bourdin, called genetically tailored treatment “a brave new world, amazing and life-saving.”

“Cancer treatment and genetics are converging very, very quickly,” Bourdin said. “I would not be surprised at all if we actually have a cure for cancer in the next 10, 20 years, or we’ve at least made such advancements that you just go to your doctor and take a pill to fix your gene and you’re cured.”

In another 2017 interview, Gordan Srkalovic, oncologist and director of Sparrow’s clinical trials program, didn’t go that far, but he said it’s likely that cancer will be cut down to size, from a “deadly, progressive disease” to a chronic one that can be treated, comparable to hypertension or high blood pressure.

Last fall, before starting treatment, Lindemann thought about stepping down as drain commissioner — which, after nearly 28 years in the office, is almost like Queen Elizabeth quitting Buckingham Palace.

Now that he’s back in trim, he’s decided to make another run in November. If elected, it would be his eighth consecutive four-year term.

The next four years would be a watershed term for Lindemann, figuratively and literally. His office is taking bids on the biggest and most important project of his career, the $32-34 million Montgomery Drain. The rebuilt drain will use a natural filters, a series of water cascades and filtration walls decorated with sculpture to crack open the carapace of concrete that covers the Frandor shopping center and surrounding tangle of roads and highways.

Lindemann wants to bring the water back to the pristine condition of 150 years ago, when hardwood forests absorbed the rain that fell upon the watershed, filtering it and slowing its progress to the Red Cedar and Grand rivers.

In the Frandor era, a toxic stew of automotive dribblings, garbage, cigarette butts and toxic chemicals flushes straight from the parking lots and roadways into the river. Lindemann said the rebuilt Montgomery Drain will reduce an estimated 50,000 to 75,000 pounds of pollutants that flush into the Red Cedar annually by 94 to 96 percent.

“Think of it,” Lindemann said. “We can reverse the mistakes of the last 100 years, but it you can’t do it overnight. There are tons of things I have to do yet. Saving the world, one drop at a time, is not an easy task."