Chapter 08: More Lung Cancer Studies and Impressions of Changes at MD Anderson
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Description
Mrs. Hermes talks briefly about her husband and children (she married in 1955), then talks about her work with Dr. Mountain collecting data for a pathology reference center on lung cancer.
Next she shares her observations on how much the institution had changed during her work hiatus (1956 – 1973).
Identifier
HermesKL_01_20180122_C08
Publication Date
1-22-2018
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Topics Covered
The Researcher; Personal Background; Professional Path; Portrait; Overview; Growth and/or Change
Transcript
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Dipped snuff, yeah, interesting. Huh. So, I’d like to hear about the other roles that you served at MD Anderson. You left in 1956 and got married.
Kay Hermes, BS:
I married in 1955.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. And tell me your husband’s name.
Kay Hermes, BS:
My husband’s name is Lawrence Michael Hermes. He graduated from Rice as part of the V-12 program. He was in the Navy, and he graduated from Rice. They allowed his group of V-12, or whatever they were called, students, to finish their education. So, he graduated in February 1944, so they kind of accelerated it and so on. I met him in about 1953, I think, and we were married in 1955, and then I worked for Eleanor until after my first child was about three months old.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
And what’s your child’s name?
Kay Hermes, BS:
What?
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Your child’s name.
Kay Hermes, BS:
Oh, the same, Lawrence. Lawrence Michael Hermes III. And so, in the ensuring eighteen years, I had four other children.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
And their names?
Kay Hermes, BS:
And their names, Lawrence was born in 1956. Arthur Hermes was born in 1958. Mariah Hermes was born in 1960. Emily and Carolyn were twins, and they were born in 1964.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
All right. So, you definitely had your hands full as a stay-at-home mom.
Kay Hermes, BS:
Well, I did, and it was a good thing I did, because I said, that was—everybody used to say, well how could you do that with Larry gone all the time? I said Well, you know, the daddy earns the money, and that’s how he earned the money. And of course, he became very well known in his field and had a very good track record for finding minerals, [phone ringing] but he did have to travel a lot. One year he was in South America for four months and Ireland for almost another four or five months.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Excuse me just for a sec. We’ve got a funny noise, like some music playing. Oh, there it is. It must have been a phone. It must have been a phone ringing.
Kay Hermes, BS:
Oh. Well, my phone is—I don’t know who’s calling me.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, that’s funny. Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you.
Kay Hermes, BS:
That’s all right. So, anyway, I had all these children and I thought I didn’t really do anything for eighteen years, except clean off the kitchen cabinet. Anyway, Dr. Mountain called me and I think it was probably 1973, and I think Emily and Carolyn, by that time, were in junior high school, so I told him that I would come to work for him but I had to be home every day at three o’clock.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Sure.
Kay Hermes, BS:
At that time, people didn’t do that much you know, and so he said that was fine, that was fine.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, what department was he in?
Kay Hermes, BS:
He was Chief of Thoracic Surgery.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. And so, what did you do for him?
Kay Hermes, BS:
Well, I collected all the data, I organized and collected all the data for one of his sections of this project was a pathology reference center, and all of the members of the North American Lung Cancer Study Group, one group from Toronto, in Canada, a group from Rochester, a group from Memorial, a group from California, different surgeons. They were, I think mostly—no, they weren’t all surgeons, they were, some of them, chemotherapists and so on. But they were participating in—the first study they were doing was a surgery for stage one lung cancer. I think their other one may be were—that was the one Dr. Mountain, of course what we were doing most of the day for. But anyway, the people would submit the records and I’d check them against the pathology reports and get them into a database, and so on. And then, eventually, the treatment didn’t do any good of course, but there was a couple of remarkable findings in that data. The first one was that the first sign of recurrence in people that had surgery, apparently a complete resection, that people had surgery for primary lung cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, the first recurrence of these people was distant metastasis, and that was a very unusual finding. I remember at the meeting, the first meeting, Dr. Mountain was very instrumental in reigniting the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer. I think it was founded a couple of years before he took over, but it was kind of dormant, but he really got busy and got a very fine international conference organized with the speakers. Well anyway, at that meeting, I remember when he presented that paper, showing the time to recurrence and the sites of recurrence, of people that had surgery for stage one lung cancer. I remember two or three doctors standing up and challenging what he was saying, because they said, one doctor I remember specifically said, “I have never had a patient with stage one lung cancer that had distant metastasis.” Well, maybe he never did have, I don’t know, but our data didn’t show that. So anyway, that was data collected from the North American Lung Cancer Study Group, that was the population.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, you were away from the institution for a long time. What were your impressions when you came back?
Kay Hermes, BS:
I was absolutely floored. In the interim time, computers had become everyday work tools, and I didn’t have a clue. So, I was doing a study, I did a study on surgery for pulmonary metastasis, and I sat down with—they had just developed a software called the SPSS, and that was a software for people that didn’t speak all these different computer languages. I can’t remember now, what they called the rest of them, but anyway, I sat down with a book, and I got a bunch of records, and I learned the SPSS system all right. I learned to send my data to the Statistics Department. Dr. Brown was in charge of the Statistics Department. They had—the IBM computer took up a whole room, and it wasn’t in the building, the MD Anderson building, it was across the street, in this other building. Well, I think it was originally in the insurance building, but it had been bought by the University of Texas.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
The old Prudential Building, I think it was.
Kay Hermes, BS:
Yeah, the old Prudential Building. The interesting thing about that building, there was a marvelous mural in that building, by a very famous West Texas artist. I wondered what happened to that when the building was demolished, because it was a beautiful panorama, and it was really exquisite. Actually, I found out, only a couple years ago, that someone in West Texas had provide the money to preserve that mural and it’s in, I think, a museum in New Mexico.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, that’s interesting.
Kay Hermes, BS:
Yeah, because I really wanted to go and see it, and we couldn’t get there on that trip. There were a lot of real interesting things in that building. I worked with this Lung Cancer Study Group project, with my compatriot, Anne Murphy, was my data manager, and we had another person that coded records and was a very good secretary, for a while, while the money held out. There was always a money problem in this kind of data. This isn’t your all-time priority for funding. So anyway, working in that building, we used some of the equipment. We were on the sixteenth floor, and on the seventeenth floor were the people that were working on these genetic tumors, and so we had a very nice interaction with them. There was a lot going on in those years, a lot of experimentation, a lot of research and so on. I wrote a lot of lectures for Dr. Mountain, did the background work, and what I did was I wrote up the data, and that kind of became the paper, so I started writing papers for him. He was a very busy surgeon. So, I started writing papers for him and making slides based on the papers.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Did you get your name on them at all?
Kay Hermes, BS:
Oh, no. Well, I did some. Let’s see, what was my name on? I had my name on a few. I’m trying to think. Well, the first thing I had my—I didn’t have my name on it but I did the work on it. Dr. Clark had wanted to produce this clinical tome about each system in the body, examine it and the diseases and so on, a chronicle of each system in the body. I did the background work for the digestive system and after I did all the research on all the worms that you could get, the tape worms and so on, I had it all. Every study I did, I got all the diseases. I don’t know how I remained so healthy. Anyway, what else did I have? I had my name on a couple of things.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, when did you do this project for Dr. Clark, the chronicle?
Kay Hermes, BS:
Pardon me?
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
When did you do the project, chronicling all the different diseases in different parts of the body?
Kay Hermes, BS:
Oh, that was way back, that was 1950.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
In the ‘50s.
Kay Hermes, BS:
Dr. Martin was in charge of one section, Dr. Mountain was in charge of another section, and so you know, my name was supposed to be in that index, but it wasn’t.
Recommended Citation
Hermes, Kay L. and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 08: More Lung Cancer Studies and Impressions of Changes at MD Anderson" (2018). Interview Chapters. 1038.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1038
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