Hanging on to the back of a moving rail car, Jim Kurtz maintained a tight grip and craned his neck to watch where it was headed.
On a recent Friday morning at a rail yard in Littleton, Kurtz, a railroad conductor, oversaw the train’s movement and made sure nothing was on the tracks or in the way.
It’s part of the job the Arvada resident has held for 33 years.
The work requires strength and stamina, and Kurtz, 53, had no problem with that as he moved almost nonstop, tying hand breaks, walking back and forth and preparing rail cars for their next destination.
But it’s a dramatic change from his condition last year.
Kurtz in March 2005 was diagnosed with an aggressive form of bile duct cancer that spread to his liver.
The prognosis was simple, he recalled.
“If the cancer was limited to the bile duct … (maybe I) could get a donor,” he said. “If the cancer moved outside of the bile duct, it was just a simple I had 12 months to live.”
Now, after several painful procedures, a transplant operation, chemotherapy and radiation, Kurtz has not only recovered, but spends his free time supporting tissue and organ donor awareness efforts.
In June, he participated with Team Rocky Mountain in the U.S. Transplant Games in Louisville, Ky.
He won a gold medal in the 5K, placed third in the triathlon and already has plans to participate in future games. The team won 56 medals.
And he raised about $2,000 for the National Kidney Foundation of Colorado, Montana and Wyoming.
The 2006 games were the largest gathering of transplant recipients and donor families internationally — more than 7,000 — with athletes who had undergone kidney, heart, liver, pancreas and/or lung transplants, according to the foundation.
The games are a way to honor the donors, and many from donor families attend, Kurtz said.
“I have to be involved in this,” he said. “Someone gave me the opportunity to live.”
Diagnosis – a pain in the chest
A native of Salida, Kurtz is a fifth-generation railroad worker who started as a brakeman in 1973 and became a conductor in 1976.
At work, he is a tough, detail-oriented go-getter, said supervisor Phillip Howland, road foreman of engines with BNSF.
“He wants to do the job, get it right,” Howland said. “Your mind has to be in the job because the cars and engines are unforgiving to a person.”
The railroad requires them to protect the movement of the trains, and conductors serve as the eyes for the engines in case they have to stop for anything on the track.
Kurtz ensures trains have paperwork and clearance to be on the tracks.
“It’s all done by hand,” Howland said.
Kurtz’s transplant hasn’t affected his work at all, Howland said.
“He’s as intense as before,” he said. “I don’t think that cancer would have ever killed him … I just think he’s one of those kind of guys that’s so tough inside that nothing will ever slow him down.”
But the ordeal did slow Kurtz down to battle the disease.
It started with a pain under his rib cage on his right side.
“For a few days I just shrugged off,” he said.
Kurtz thought he had pulled a muscle at work, but the symptoms got worse.
“My urine turned dark brown,” he recalled.
The diagnosis came March 18 — he had cancer. In the following weeks Kurtz had 12 procedures to find the exact location of the cancer.
Kurtz went through everything from having a camera go down his throat to take a look inside to having surgical tubes going through his liver and bile duct into his small intestine – a procedure he had to repeat and did without anesthesia because it made him sick.
In May, he went on the national transplant list and was given one of the lowest numbers he could receive.
But his surgeons, confident he could recover, appealed, and Kurtz was moved up the list.
By May 5, Kurtz finally had to stop working after the many procedures compromised his strength.
Then, on May 26 – the day after his 52nd birthday – at 4:11 a.m., he got the call to come in for surgery because a liver was available for a transplant.
The Road to Recovery
The surgery took more than three hours, and then at the end of July, he began chemotherapy and radiation and felt the painful side effects of nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.
Done with treatment on Sept. 2, he had lost 31 pounds, had to have a hospital visit because he was so dehydrated and could barely eat.
“For about five weeks straight the only thing solid that I ate was Ramen noodles,” he recalled “It was the only thing I could keep down.”
By Nov. 1, he returned to work.
“It was kind of tough going back,” he said. “I didn’t have the strength that I did at one time … I do now.”
Now, Kurtz does regular blood tests with the transplant department at the University of Colorado as well as CT scans.
And his physical being may be back to what it was, but his outlook has changed.
“The more important things are my family, my friends,” he said. “I have life back. I was given a rebirth basically. I was given a new lease on life.”
Who is Jim Kurtz?
Age: 53
Family: Married to wife, Susie, for 30 years; two sons, Jesse, 28; Jonathan, 25
Occupation: Railroad conductor with the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway.
One interesting fact: After having had a liver transplant last year that helped save his life, he participated in the U.S. Transplant Games, which bring awareness to this cause.