Trail medicine
Iditarod dreams displace health worries of AIDS patient

By DONNA FREEDMAN
Daily News reporter

Out on the trail, musher Chuck King finds peace. The hissing of the runners, the panting of the dogs, the beauty of the north. It's his only escape. For a few precious hours, there's no pain. No fear. No AIDS.

"I actually get through four hours sometimes and forget I'm sick," he said.

King, a former pulmonary trauma surgeon, has lived with the disease since 1992. Whenever he's running dogs, he can ignore the aches in his limbs and joints, the nausea, the fatigue, the migraines.

"It's so serene," said King, 40. "The world can't get you there."

King moved up from Arizona in September, determined to run the 2000 Iditarod. He can't because he finished only one qualifying race. But he's pretty sure he can do the Iditarod next year - and he's absolutely convinced that the goal has kept him alive.

Two years ago, he'd wasted away to 118 pounds. His T-cell count, a measure of the impact AIDS had on his body, had dropped to 40; it should have been 1,000. He was a "walking skeleton," according to his mother, Shirlee King, who went through "all the seven steps of grieving" for her son's imminent death.

But King didn't die. He trusted his doctor, took his drugs, built himself back up and focused on the Iditarod. He said goodbye to family and friends and drove to Alaska with his Jack Russell terrier pup, Okey Dokey.

King ran his first race, the Willow/Mat-Su 300, in January with leased dogs and minimal training time. He hoped only to finish; he won it.

All he needed was one more qualifier. But he scratched in the Nushagak Classic in Dillingham two weeks ago. King was disappointed but not defeated.

"It's been a great experience. It's not the goal or dream itself - it's the journey, the getting there," he said.

His decision to run the Iditarod isn't simply personal. King has a two-part mission. He wants to educate the public about AIDS. But he also wants to tell AIDS patients and people with other chronic diseases not to give up.

King isn't just telling, though: He's showing. To go from death's door to the back of a dog sled is pretty strong testimony.

"God's put a lot of grace on me," he said. "I've made an incredible comeback."

FINDING INSPIRATION

The diagnosis came in 1992, but based on the "viral load" in King's blood, doctors speculated he'd had AIDS for at least a year. He didn't notice any symptoms because he was afflicted with Crohn's disease, a painful, chronic inflammation of the small intestine.

In fact, King wasn't even being tested for HIV, but for tuberculosis. A month after he tested positive for TB, a blood test indicated he also had full-blown AIDS.

Being diagnosed meant he couldn't be a surgeon any longer. The danger to patients was too great; he might cut himself during a surgery. King misses his medical career but tries not to think about it: "It hurts too much."

Over the next few years, he helped found a men's chorus and co-owned and operated an adventure travel business in Sedona, Ariz. And he battled the disease. King went through several different "cocktails," or combinations of AIDS drugs. Each time, the virus would become resistant and the drugs would stop working.

In 1998, he reached his lowest point and was told he had only a few months left. One of those grant-a-wish groups offered him his heart's desire: a trip to Alaska. He'd taken an Alaska cruise once before, with his mother, but this would be different - he'd be traveling with the man he considered his husband.

So the two of them took a two-week summertime cruise to the Last Frontier. When the ship docked in Seward, they went on a dog-cart ride with Iditarod musher Mitch Seavey.

"It was in the back of my head from that moment on to run the Iditarod," King said. "On that cruise, I started my rebound."

But back home, he suffered an agonizing emotional setback: His lover left for good. King was depressed but decided to get better, if only out of spite. The newest drug cocktail made his AIDS symptoms fade, and he began to gain weight.

To learn more about the Iditarod, King flew north to watch the start and re-start of the 1999 race. On the way back, he started reading "Back of the Pack," Don Bowers' story about racing the Iditarod. The book clinched it.

"I was pretty comfortable that I was going to be a musher," King said.

In August 1999, he said his goodbyes and drove north. King had already called ahead to Vi Redington, widow of Joe Redington Sr., the father of the Iditarod. Her grandson Ray Redington Jr. would become King's trainer.

GENEROUS FAMILY LEGACY

In retrospect, Vi Redington admits she wasn't entirely comfortable with King's illness. What if he got tangled up in a dog fight or cut himself on a snow hook? Would her grandson be exposed to AIDS?

"It's so easy to get hurt," she said.

And she worried about King attempting the Iditarod with so little preparation: "He just wasn't ready."

Her grandson said he hadn't really thought the AIDS question through when he agreed to help the newcomer. He was more focused on King's mortality than his own.

"If I was going to die of any (disease) and I wanted to do something, I would really like it if someone were to help me. That's why I did it," said Ray Redington, 24.

Generosity is a family legacy. His grandfather was famous for offering advice, training and even dogs to musher wannabes. His uncle Joee Redington reminded him of that.

"My Uncle Joee said, 'Don't worry about what people are going to say. Grandpa never turned anybody away.' "

Redington lives in Fairbanks, but he'd come down to his parents' home in Knik to train for qualifying races. (He plans to run the Iditarod next year.) So he agreed to teach King, and let him use some of his dogs.

But King's training runs were relatively few. Mat-Su didn't get a lot of snow last fall, and King spent far too much time scrambling for sponsors, flying back to see his doctor in Arizona and dealing with health problems, including constant tooth infections that eventually would have killed him. He wound up having all his teeth pulled.

He's adjusted well to his new false teeth and admits to enjoying having "a nice white smile" again.

That smile is flashed often; King is a gregarious guy who talks easily about his recent travails. To look at him, you'd never know he had been ill: His 6-foot frame now carries 170 pounds, and he's fit from lifting weights.

Still, a 300-mile race can tax even a perfectly healthy musher - and despite his appearance, King is not a healthy man. Crushing fatigue can set in without warning. A migraine can flare up (although his headaches are fewer since moving to Alaska).

He needs heavy painkillers to deal with the neuropathy, or neurological pain, in his limbs. King must also take AIDS medication every four hours, and he has to take it with food.

Bowers, the author who inspired King and marshal for the Willow/Mat-Su race, thinks King was lucky the weather was relatively warm both there and in Dillingham. Extreme cold might make it hard for the musher to take his AIDS medications since liquid freezes quickly in syringes.

A bouncing and jouncing sled might damage the medications, Bowers pointed out. Also, if the musher lost his team, the meds would go with it - and for an AIDS patient, it's vital to stick to the schedule.

Still, he remains "very optimistic" that King could find a way to run the Iditarod. Sure, it'll be tough and dangerous. But so what, if it's what he wants to do?

"I can't see it's a lot different than Norman Vaughan hopping on a snowmachine to go to Nome another time," said Bowers, referring to Vaughan's commemoration of the serum run.

AIDS AWARENESS

Bowers is glad King will have another year with dogs because he had "an awful short span of time" to train this year. Even so, King won the Willow race, which turned from 300 into 340 miles when heavy snows forced a re-

routing. He even edged out Ray Redington by two minutes.

Dillingham was a different matter. Conditions weren't the best, with temperatures too warm for the cold-weather gear King wore. At one point, he became dehydrated.

The warm weather also made the trail so punky that a snow hook couldn't be set. That made it impossible to anchor the sleds when fights broke out between his team and Redington's.

King scratched in Ekwok. Disappointed as he was, he was still high on the race thanks to an incident during a mandatory four-hour layover. Several mushers and trail volunteers had gathered in a cabin to rest. They'd all heard a guy would be mushing for AIDS, but no one knew much more than that. King's presence was obviously on everyone's mind, but no one would say anything.

Finally, race volunteer Russ Rolf broke the silence and asked King why he was mushing for AIDS.

"I'm a blunt guy. If I want to know, I'll ask. I didn't want to go through another day without knowing a little bit more," Rolf said by phone from his home outside Dillingham.

King said he was delighted at the question.

"This is what God sent me here to do," he said.

He told the group that he had the disease himself, and he explained how it was transmitted.

"It made me a little bit more aware of it, and I think it's made everyone else a little more aware of it, too," Rolf said.

And although King had been a little wary about his reception in Dillingham, he found everyone friendly. He even got invited to come back and go hunting sometime.

"Great bunch of people," he said.

WILL TO LIVE

King doesn't pretend to be the world's greatest musher. He knows he's a rookie. But he's enraptured with the indescribably beautiful terrain, the encounters with wildlife (he once had a wolf follow his team, apparently out of curiosity), the privilege of being in country "that so few human beings will ever get a chance to see."

"It's heaven," he said.

Heaven doesn't come cheap. King spends a lot of time looking for sponsors. He has a web site, www.mushingforaids.com, and has joined forces with the Alaskan Aids Assistance Association, which is helping him raise money.

He lives in a Wasilla apartment, but he'd like to get a place with land so he can build his own team. Ideally, the dogs would be Siberian huskies, a breed he thinks would be more agreeable to the stop-and-start pace he must keep in order to take his medicines.

He can't afford to buy dogs. King lives on a disability payment and has no insurance; Medicare picks up the cost of his AIDS drugs, approximately $7,800 per month. With luck and perseverance, King thinks he can raise "a bigger war chest" for next year's race.

Once his race expenses are met, any extra monies will go toward the local AIDS association's education programs and to fund a scholarship at an Arizona university. He'd like to fund another one at the University of Alaska Anchorage if there's enough money.

The scholarship, if it happens, will be a legacy. So will his running of the Iditarod - if it happens. David Pohl, who's known King for 10 years, thinks it will.

"If you think beyond your immediate restrictions and think toward your goal, you find a will to live," said Pohl, a Las Vegas resident.

He's coming to Alaska next week to learn some mushing basics because he fully expects to drive King's second sled next year at the ceremonial Iditarod start. The goal of Iditarod 2001, he said, will keep King alive another year.

"He's not going to give up on life easily until he's accomplished something big. He wants to leave his mark."

It's important to King that his life - and his death - makes a difference.

"I don't think I'm going to beat AIDS by any fashion," King said. "At some point, because of my high viral load, permanent organ damage is going to rear its ugly head. I'd be a fool to try and deny that."

But by the time he dies, he will have really lived. And he wants other chronically or terminally ill people to learn from his example.

"People get diagnosed and they just let it be a downhill spiral. So I hope that at least I'm showing you can take this the other way," he said.

"You have to put your illness out of your mind. It's got to be secondary to your dreams and goals."

* Reporter Donna Freedman can be reached at dfreedman@adn.com.