by Leslie Orr, URMC
Alex Voglewede was 16 and the goalie of the Churchville-Chili varsity soccer team when doctors diagnosed him with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. On the field during the August 2016 preseason, he felt weak and noticed that his heart was racing. A coach sent him home and suggested that he see a doctor right away. A few hours later, he ended up in the pediatric emergency department at UR Medicine – and that very night, he found out he had cancer.
“It was a shock,” Voglewede says. A self-described type-A personality, he had ambitious plans that were instantly derailed. “At 16, I didn’t understand what having cancer would entail. It was a fast start, and by the next morning I had begun chemotherapy.”
The story behind the cancer diagnosis of Paul DeRitis was more drawn-out but just as unexpected.
Twenty years ago, DeRitis was a busy young father and husband, working as an operating room nurse on UR Medicine’s cardiology team. He had a cough that wouldn’t go away, and later, shortness of breath. Doctors initially thought he had asthma, but a subsequent chest x-ray showed a mass. The first biopsy was inconclusive. A second biopsy – conducted at his request by a young surgical fellow that he had befriended, Carolyn Jones, MD, who is now chief of thoracic and foregut surgery at University of Rochester – revealed that Deritis had Hodgkin lymphoma. This is a rare blood cancer that can result in tumors around the chest and neck.
He couldn’t believe what was happening. “Have you seen the show Breaking Bad? I felt like the guy in the first episode,” he recalls. “You know something is wrong. It’s like a dull numbness. But then you think: Wait! I’m a young guy, healthy. We had just bought a house and moved in, and I had a two-year-old and my wife was pregnant.”
Knocked off balance by the news, DeRitis and Voglewede nonetheless did what they had to do to move forward. One was treated in the early 2000s, and the other was treated 15 years later at Wilmot Cancer Institute’s Blood & Marrow Transplant and Cellular Therapies program. They each received a stem-cell transplant, an advanced procedure that replaces a patient’s unhealthy immune cells with healthy ones.
Today, Voglewede, RN, is 24, and DeRitis, RN, is 55 – and they share the bond of survivorship.
The experience also shifted their career goals to focus on helping patients at Wilmot.
A new career, a fresh perspective
Voglewede decided to become a nurse after an oncology caregiver suggested it.
“Initially, I was interested in aviation and the military,” he says. “Nursing school was Plan C or D, but I’m glad I did it.”
He graduated at the top of his class and now works on WCC6, Wilmot’s inpatient floor for stem-cell transplants – the same floor where he was treated eight years ago.
Many of his present-day colleagues helped to care for him when he was lying in a hospital room for 31 days during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays in 2016, feeling “crummy, fatigued, nauseous,” he recalls.
Those nurses were by his side when the star goalie tried to muster the energy to kick a beach ball – but was so weak that he couldn’t do it.
Those same nurses helped him to survive serious infections and to walk out of the hospital, play soccer again during his senior year, and graduate high school on time.
Now that he’s healthy, he says that working with cancer patients is certainly rewarding but it can also sting when treatment is not successful.
“It’s a unique, daily reminder that you’re not guaranteed anything,” Voglewede says.
Given his own situation and youth, he volunteers to talk to other pediatric patients or young adults to offer encouragement.
“It helps me to connect,” Voglewede says. “Not too many of them have met long-term survivors.”
Paying it Forward to Colleagues and Patients
DeRitis’ long nursing career has taken him to several different areas of the University of Rochester Medical Center. But he landed back at Wilmot in 2018 as a nurse leader in apheresis, where high-tech machinery removes a patient’s blood stem cells in preparation for a stem-cell transplant.
“I’m able to walk them through the process and educate them on what will happen during their treatment,” he says.
DeRitis also has strong bonds with the nurses who treated him when he was sick. He recalls their kindness and honesty as he took part in a clinical trial, relapsed, and then underwent the transplant. One special colleague, Allison Vogel, RN, a coordinator on the transplant unit, was with him the day he was admitted to the hospital, and she also administered his stem-cell injection. “She’ll never have to buy another drink if she’s out with me!” he jokes.
With the perspective that 20 years of survivorship brings, DeRitis now enjoys “real conversations” with patients that involve ‘real questions and talking about their real fears.”
“It can be emotional,” he adds. “But I’m in the right place. I’m just paying back what they did for me.”
Rhona Henry Terrell, RN, MHA, nurse manager on WCC6, sees the goodness that DeRitis and Voglewede bring to patients at Wilmot—as well as the camaraderie they enjoy in the workplace.
“We take care of each other, as we take care of our patients,” she says.
Epilogue
DeRitis has worked at Strong Memorial Hospital for 25 years now, with more than a decade in total at Wilmot. His career excellence has not gone unnoticed. He received the Denise Hartung Award for Clinical Excellence at URMC in 2009. He was also nominated for a 2024 Daisy Award, a distinguished nationwide program that honors nurses with outstanding clinical skill and compassion.
His wife is a nurse at UR Medicine’s Heart Transplant unit, and together they have built a life with their three children.
Voglewede’s cancer journey has been documented by the St. Baldrick’s Foundation, in the Democrat and Chronicle, and even in an appearance on the Megyn Kelly Today show in 2017. Lately, he has been able to put that behind him and chase his dreams as a healthy young adult. He got his own apartment last year, traveled to Alaska and to several countries in Europe in 2023, and is looking forward to a college friend’s destination wedding at St. John Virgin Islands.
“I’ve come full circle,” he says, smiling.
