Her first visit as a teen involved life-threatening cancer. Her return is all about gratitude and purpose.

At the age of 60, Robin Rutkowski returns to the hospital she first came to as a frightened high school senior with a rare, life-threatening form of cancer. She wants to say thanks and share her story. So after Rutkowski takes a tour with Terry Day, M.D., director of the Wendy and Keith Wellin Head and Neck Clinic at MUSC Health, she describes the summer that changed everything.

“I turned 17 in July of 1976, and less than a month later, I’m at cheerleading camp before my senior year in high school.” The camp was at Newberry College, not far from the town of Clinton, South Carolina, where Rutkowski lived with her family.

That day, the sweltering summer sun took a toll on her. “I got overheated and fainted. When I woke up, my best friend, who is still my best friend, said, ‘Your cheek is swollen.’”

Rutkowski was surprised and curious. She didn’t think it was related to her fainting. “And so I stuck my tongue over there, and it felt like a gollywhopper. A big marble.”

She wasn’t really alarmed — yet. But when she got home, she asked her mother to take a look. “My mom was a nurse.”

Rutkowski was scheduled to get her senior photo taken that day, and she went ahead with it. Forty-three years later, looking back, that photo shows no obvious signs of what was happening to the smiling teenage girl.

But right after the photo shoot, Rutkowski’s mother got her in to see a doctor. What he found during an examination worried him enough to immediately refer her to a surgeon in nearby Greenwood. “They didn’t know what it was,” she says.

 

Now, Rutkowski was worried. “Honestly, in my gut, I knew it was bad. I had a premonition in the tenth grade that I was going to get sick. People would think I was going to die, but I was really going to be OK.”

The surgeon carefully removed the tumor, which had affected the left side of Rutkowski’s face from her eye socket all the way down to her jaw. When she woke up, her father was crying. “I knew it was what I suspected it was. They kept me in the hospital for a whole week.”

The diagnosis was mesenchymal chondrosarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer that grows in bone and soft tissues. It tends to show up in people between the ages of 15 and 35. Doctors aren’t sure what causes it, but there’s no question that it’s bad news.

Rutkowski’s doctor, Fred Butehorn, Jr., M.D., referred her to MUSC Health, where he’d done his residency, for her next steps. Butehorn knew and trusted F. Johnson Putney, M.D., the chief of the head and neck cancer surgery program — Putney had been Butehorn’s mentor. Putney worked with maxillofacial prosthodontist Dalton Keith to come up with a plan.

“It happened fast,” Rutkowski remembers. “At the time, there had been a 50-year study with the Mayo Clinic, and nobody with this type of cancer had ever lived at that point. The way they explained it to me was, you don’t feel bad till it’s a brain tumor or whatever. So the fact that we caught it early was important. There wasn’t a sore in my mouth yet. The tumor hadn’t eaten through.”

That fact gave her family hope.

Putney’s team was hopeful, too, that the teenage girl could grow up and lead a healthy life. So in a marathon 13-hour operation, Keith created a prosthesis to replace Rutkowski’s damaged eye socket, cheekbone and jaw and Putney put it in.

The prosthesis is still in her face today. So is the memory of how she and her family were treated during an extremely difficult time.

“I felt like it wasn’t just a teaching hospital. They brought together faith and science and humanity. It was a community.”

Rutkowski went on to marry, have children, earn a Master of Business Administration degree and enjoy a successful career. She cared for her parents when they grew older and her husband when he was dying as well.

Today, she’s figuring out her next chapter. “I feel like God has a purpose for me. I want to find that.”

She says coming back to thank MUSC Health and share her story may be part of that purpose. Rutkowski will go to the F. Johnson Putney Lecture in Head & Neck Cancer in November to express her gratitude. “I feel blessed.”