In The News

Driver gets his truck back after cancer battle

ODESSA, Texas — Several years ago, Odessa truck driver was somewhere in the Midwest, eastbound in a make-do truck when he looked in his rearview mirror and saw a familiar sight — a purple 2000 model Kenworth.

It looked a lot like the one he sold when they told him he was going to die.

“I looked in my mirror — now, I know there’s a lot of purple Kenworths out there, thousands — but I just knew that was my old truck,” the 56-year-old trucker said.

Andersen flagged down its driver, “a real big kid,” and approached him when they pulled over at the next truck stop.

The two had the same purple Kenworth in common, and Andersen confirmed it before telling the other driver that it was his old truck.

“He said, ‘You’re supposed to be dead,’” Andersen recalled. “I said, ‘Everybody keeps saying that!’”

The story of Andersen’s truck begins several years earlier during a time when life was relatively simple for the Phoenix native who moved to Odessa with his wife, Murray.

He’s the owner operator of a trucking company — meaning you could guess his age in miles, and he tells stories with big eyes, rapid arm movements and almost entirely through dialogue.

In 2003, he noticed a strange lump buried under his chest-length beard, which abruptly had begun to fall out.

One week before Thanksgiving, Andersen said, the doctor didn’t mince words or take long to diagnose.

“It went like this: ‘Hi, how are you,’the trucker said.'” “‘Good. Open your mouth. Yep. You have cancer.’ I’m like, ‘Whoa. Slow down.'”

“This is a shock to me because I’ve never been sick a day in my life,” Andersen said. Not only had he always been healthy, but he wasn’t a smoker, which is almost always the cause of his condition.

The doctor diagnosed him with stage-4 cancer, Andersen said, meaning he had very little time left to live and told him he had two options: go home and die within 14 days or undergo “radical” radiation and chemotherapy.

But he said he was more angry than he was scared at the time, so he defiantly told the doctor he refused to let the disease — which Andersen said kills 999 out of 1,000 people diagnosed with it — get the better of him.

“He said, ‘Keep that thought,’”Andersen remembered the doctor telling him. “‘You’ve got a bad attitude. You’re gonna fight.’”

An intensive cancer treatment regimen followed, and Andersen’s weight dropped from 217 pounds to 114 by the spring of 2004.

Andersen’s truck, the purple Kenworth, had to go. The payments alone were too much for the out-of-work cancer patient to bear during his treatment.

“When they told me I was gonna die, I didn’t want to keep the truck,” he said.

He remembered waking up in the middle of the night at one point — taste buds singed off his tongue, no saliva in his throat, frail, skinny and sickly — and turning to his wife with a renewed dedication.

Andersen said he looked her in the eye and told her he had “turned the corner on this thing.”

“I told her this ain’t gonna kill me,” he said.

And it didn’t.

The cancer went into remission, but it left what Andersen called “residual damage,” such as lingering frailty and an inability to produce enough saliva.

Today, you’ll be hard-pressed to catch him without a drink of some sort in his hand.

“None of that is anything worth complaining about,” he said. “It’s just not. I’m standing here.”

But illness did leave him penniless and without a truck to earn a living again. Andersen managed to buy another truck, the make-do rig he was driving when he looked in the rearview mirror and found his old Kenworth.

“I ended up with nothing,” Andersen said, “so when I finished up with my treatments, I didn’t even know how I was gonna get back to work.”

The truck’s new owner, the “real big kid,” as it turned out, had a bit of a soft spot for Andersen and offered to sell it to him at a bargain.

Andersen recalled the conversation.

“He said to me, ‘And this truck, this truck, this is your truck,’” Andersen said, his arms never still and complete with a low-octave voice impersonation of the other man. “‘This truck is a monster.’”

A bargain was key, because Andersen, after all, was struggling to pay the bills from his cancer treatment, not to mention care for his mother, who had died of a brain tumor in December 2007, not long after his own recovery.

His wife, too, suffered two heart attacks in one day, and the couple had her hospital bills to contend with as well.

But what Andersen didn’t realize was what his grandchildren were doing behind the scenes, sending several letters to the television show “Trick My Truck” imploring them to help their grandfather.

Andersen, meanwhile, said he had no idea his name had been submitted to the CMT show, which takes ordinary truckers’ rigs, pretends to “steal” them, spends several months putting what some may call ridiculous modifications to the trucks and giving them back, and all this in the name of entertainment.

His grandchildren’s efforts worked.

“Chris Andersen epitomizes the heart and determination of the American truck driver,”supervising producer Prema Ball wrote in an e-mail. “We felt his ability to fight through what he did and on truckin’ sends a great message in this time of economic troubles. A message that we can get through this and find a better day on the other side.”

“I thought beating cancer was awful damn good,” Andersen said, “But this? I’m not that lucky.”

Kelvin Locklear, co-owner of K Chrome — the truck fabrication company that tricks the show’s trucks — and one of the show’s regular characters, said he and his crew took one look at Andersen’s purple Kenworth and knew they had their work cut out for them.

“The first thing all us thought was, ‘Man, Barney came back as a resurrected demon,’ “ Locklear chuckled.

The show’s mechanics outfitted the truck with a broad array of wow-factor features, including a waterbed and chromed-out instrument panel.

They also installed a water fountain for Andersen.

Locklear said every feature they added to the truck has a deep symbolic meaning — whether the sandstorm paint job that symbolizes Andersen’s victorious emergence from troubled times; the cave in the sleeping compartment that compliments Andersen as the timeless “ultimate man” who knows how to put up a fight; or the armor plating on the truck’s exterior to express his toughness and inability to let life get him down.

“We think deeper than just what makes a cool truck,” Locklear said. “We think, ‘What did this person go through?’ “

“These are the greatest people,” Andersen beamed. “You say thank you so many times.”

But the truck, which is now named “Survivor,” hardly seems fit as a workhorse, so Andersen currently is keeping it in an Odessa garage, where it’s burning a hole in his wallet.

He said it costs him $2,000 per month to keep the truck, a large expense for something that is earning nothing in return.

Andersen hopes to take it out on a tour to pay for it. He already signed up to participate in several fundraising events for local cancer centers, but the future of “Survivor” remains to become clear.

“The truck is one small part of the whole episode,” Locklear said. “It’s not really about how many people see it on Saturday night. The thing that’s going to make this truck successful is what good it can do for the community.”

Dorothy Cox of The Trucker staff can be reached for comment at [email protected].