Some of the patients at Fred Hutch Cancer Center come to Seattle from as far away as Alaska, Montana and Hawaii for a few days or as long as a month for treatment.
When they finally arrive at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the first person they meet representing Fred Hutch could be one of about a dozen volunteer drivers who fight Seattle’s notorious traffic, so patients don’t have to.
One of those volunteers, Bill Conquergood, said driving for Fred Hutch reminds him of his first job in high school when he delivered flowers.
“This is a close second, but bringing flowers to people’s houses, there’s really nothing better in a day,” he said.
His first experience helping Fred Hutch was nine years ago this summer when he participated in the Obliteride fundraising event shortly after his father died of liver cancer.
He did the 50-mile bike ride and leveled up to the 100-mile bike ride during the COVID-19 pandemic, but he wanted to do more for Fred Hutch after he retired in 2022 from AT&T, where he negotiated wholesale roaming agreements with international partners.
About a year ago, he started as a volunteer driver.
Conquergood makes the hour-long trip from his home in Carnation, Washington about twice a week using one of his own cars, depending on requests for airport pickups and drop-offs.
He likes to make patients’ journeys a little better with some friendly talk and a bottle of water or iced tea to quench their thirst after a long flight.
He’s picked up many passengers from Alaska.
“I brought a lady from Homer, Alaska,” Conquergood said. “She spent the whole day traveling on ferries and airplanes to get down to Seattle for 30 days of treatment — yeah, 30 days.”
Other passengers stay just a few days, like the woman from Fairbanks he’s driven to Fred Hutch many times.
“She comes in, meets with her doctor, comes in the next day, meets with her doctor, and flies out either that evening or waits one more day and flies home,” he said.
Often the patients and their caregivers and companions want to offer him money or a gift, which he politely declines, with one exception.
A fisherman from Ketchikan, Alaska often brings cans of salmon and tells him: “Bill, you’re going to take this can of salmon because I don’t want to carry it back on the plane through TSA.”
But the friendly banter doesn’t dispel the difficult reality of why they’ve come to Fred Hutch from so far away.
“You don’t know what people are dealing with, what results they just found out,” he said.
Read more stories in our series on Fred Hutch volunteers:
Volunteering strikes a chord with piano teacher
Vaccine trial volunteer works to empower her community, end HIV
Conquergood was bringing a couple in their 50s, about his own age, back to the airport on one of his trips when he noticed a little stuffed alpaca hanging from the backpack of the woman receiving treatment.
As he was getting her luggage out of the car, he asked her about it.
‘’I said, ‘Hey what’s the alpaca for?’ and she said, ‘Oh, it’s my lucky charm. But today I wasn’t … I wasn’t lucky.’ And her husband right then just broke down and started crying,” he said.
Occasionally, Conquergood might have passengers on different flights arriving at about the same time, and he’ll offer to take them all in one trip.
One time he picked up two men coming in for treatment, accompanied by their wives, and he wondered how they were going to get along.
“The first couple was from Alaska. He was a truck driver. His route was from Anchorage, Alaska down to Georgia,” Conquergood said. “He was kind of rough. He was saying how he used to be, I don’t know, 80 pounds heavier. He had lost some weight.”
The other patient and his wife were from Kalispell, Montana.
“He was a retired schoolteacher, sweet man,” he said. “I didn’t know how this was going to go down. They were so different.”
They all got in the back of his Honda Odyssey, and he drove them downtown.
“The wives started talking, and then the guys started talking, and they had all these connections with the medicine they had taken, the reactions to medicines they had taken and how they were feeling,” he said. “And they both had a strong belief in God.”
Patients who come to Fred Hutch from out of town may feel isolated, but these couples connected on the car ride from the airport and discovered someone they could have coffee with during the difficult days to come.
“I don’t think I said two words the whole way,” he said.
Maybe it wasn’t like delivering flowers, but it was a close second.
Interested in helping out? Sign Up to Become a Volunteer.
John Higgins, a staff writer at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, was an education reporter at The Seattle Times and the Akron Beacon Journal. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, where he studied the emerging science of teaching. Reach him at jhiggin2@fredhutch.org.
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Are you interested in reprinting or republishing this story? Be our guest! We want to help connect people with the information they need. We just ask that you link back to the original article, preserve the author’s byline and refrain from making edits that alter the original context. Questions? Email us at communications@fredhutch.org
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