Photos By Tim LaBarge
"Mister ease;" that's his e-mail address. Sitting back to settle his athletic 5-foot-10-inch frame in for his two-hour flight from Santa Barbara, Calif., to Portland, Mike Easley does seem the epitome of ease - confident, comfortable, in control. Just what you'd expect from a retired Army colonel. This trip has become a routine: rental car, overnight at an airport hotel, morning meeting, back to the airport, lunch and board the plane home. The 70-year-old Easley isn't a businessman.
His trips to Portland are to participate in research so new that fewer than 20 people have received this experimental treatment so far. For several months, he's been participating in a Providence clinical trial through the Robert W. Franz Cancer Research Center in the Earle A. Chiles Research Institute. Easley has prostate cancer - Stage IV - the worst it could be.
"When I realized how serious my prostate cancer was, I knew I was in desperate straits," Easley remembers. "I started looking on the Internet for clinical trials because conventional treatments weren't helping much."