Cancer hospital breaks ground for expansion

The Huntsman Cancer Institute Hospital is doubling in size, less than five years after opening its doors and not quite a decade after Utah businessman and philanthropist Jon M. Huntsman Sr. announced plans to create a cancer-fighting campus on the east bench of the University of Utah.

Friends, dignitaries and cancer survivors surrounded institute and hospital founders Huntsman and his wife, Karen, on Friday during a groundbreaking ceremony capped by a surprise $5 million donation to further the cause of cancer research. The check was presented by Dr. Jeffrey Wilkins on behalf of the Lincey Foundation of Beverly Hills, Calif., to a clearly stunned Huntsman.

For patients, caregivers and researchers, the expansion means 50 more inpatient hospital rooms, 25 more outpatient exam rooms, four new operating rooms, an expanded personalized medicine clinic, a larger Cancer Learning Center, additional molecular imaging technologies, opening of a Breast Health Center, a new Center for Investigational Therapeutics where early-phase clinical trials will be conducted and an expanded center dedicated to wellness and survivorship.

Architectural Nexus and Okland Construction will turn dreams of the 156,000-square-foot expansion into reality to the northeast of the existing hospital building. It's scheduled to be done in 2011.

There were so many public officials and luminaries there — including Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr.; President Thomas S. Monson of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah; U. President Michael K. Young and the U. health-care systems CEO David Entwistle; as well as state lawmakers — that the governor joked if something knocked down the tent, Utah would have to move its capital back to Fillmore.

President Monson told the story of a little girl who came to him with her parents when she was 12 and newly diagnosed with a malignant leg tumor. Jami Palmer was seeking a blessing and the two of them have stayed close since, through treatment, recovery, life. When she came in that day, balloons were tied to her wheelchair and he told his assistants to take the air out and hang on to the balloons for the day when she was cured. When that day came, he told his assistants to "stop everything and blow up the balloons."

The LDS Church has and will continue to donate to the institute, using funds from its businesses, he said.

Both Karen Huntsman and her son, the governor, reminisced about the day in 1991 when Jon Huntsman Sr. gathered his family to tell them he'd been diagnosed with prostate cancer. We will start tomorrow to make a difference in the lives of people with cancer, his wife said he told them.

"The ship that he sails does not sail through smooth waters. He wouldn't want it to," she said, adding that it is the winds, the storms and the hard times that create personal growth.

Jon Huntsman Sr. shared sobering cancer statistics — one of two men and two of three women will have cancer at some point in their lives. "We must end cancer," he said, adding he'd like to see "this beautiful hospital" turned into a classy Ritz-Carlton hotel when the disease has been vanquished. As important as the doctors and researchers are to the process of curing cancer, though, the greatest tool, he said, "is hope."

Mary Beckerle, HCI executive director, called the groundbreaking a "celebration of healing and hope."

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E-mail: Lois@desnews.com