Cruisin organizer also works to overcome cancer

By Ellen Spitaleri

The Clackamas Review, Jun 9, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

ellen spitaleri / clackamas Review

Mark Weidkamp, right, pictured just before last year’s first Cruisin for Hope, was diagnosed with a brain tumor last February.

Mark Weidkamp has a philosophy that he borrowed from the movie “Shawshank Redemption.”

It is: “Get busy living or get busy dying, but there is nothing in between.”

Weidkamp, the organizer of Milwaukie’s Cruisin for Hope, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping those in crisis, said those very words to 2008 MHS graduate Jacob VanVoorhis last year, a young man who was fighting bone cancer.

This year those words apply to Weidkamp himself, who discovered in February that he had a golf-ball size mass on the right side of his brain.

“I returned from a trip to my hometown of Whitefish, Mont., and had some strange numbness in my left side that would come and go in 20-to-30-second intervals,” Weidkamp said.

He knew those were signs of a possible stroke, so he went straight to his doctor at Kaiser, who scheduled him for an immediate MRI. The test revealed that the tumor was the type that contained tissue that was fast-growing.

Surgery in March was successful in removing the tumor, and Weidkamp went back to work about a week later.

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