Mark Lipman took care of his health, working out five times a week. He was soft-spoken, and someone who didn’t like to argue. He and his wife Kathy loved to travel.
His headstone reads: “Beloved Husband. Sweetest Father. Best Grampy.”
“They used to come into the house and run right by me and go to Grampy,” Kathy Lipman, 68, of Southampton, said in an interview. “They used to run into his arms.”
Last January, Mark said he was short on energy. His gym stats weren’t as good. Something was wrong with the 68-year-old Army veteran who served in Vietnam. In April 2015, his family finally convinced him to see a doctor. The diagnosis: a rare cancer called cholangiocarcinoma. Mark’s health tumbled.
On Oct. 30, 2015, he died surrounded by his wife and their three daughters. He was in too rough of shape for the seven grandkids to make one last visit.
Though the diagnosis is rare, Mark wasn’t alone — an Associated Press investigation has found that about 700 cholangiocarcinoma patients have gone to the Department of Veterans Affairs medical system in the last 15 years.
The cancer can occur decades after parasites called liver flukes attach themselves to the lining of the bile duct. The parasites are common in parts of southeast Asia, including Vietnam.
More than 40 years before his diagnosis, Mark trudged through jungles and swamps around Danang, Vietnam, providing field artillery support as a member of the 101st Airborne Division.
It didn’t take long for Lipman and her children to discover the suspected connection between his disease and his time in a war zone.
“All three daughters and I got online looking for information about this cancer,” Lipman said. “My daughters and I immediately came upon the connection with a liver fluke.”
Mark tried chemotherapy, but that didn’t work. His health declined and procedures to unblock his bile duct tallied up. Kathy started paperwork with the VA, filing a claim for service-related injuries. That claim was denied, she said.
Less than half of the 700 patients have submitted claims to the VA, the AP found. Of those, 3 out of 4 claims have been rejected.
This summer, Lipman filed a claim for death benefits with the VA. That claim was also denied.
In a denial letter Lipman provided to the Gazette, the VA wrote that “we have not received medical evidence indicating that his cause of death was incurred in-service or caused by injury or disease that began during his service.”
That finding despite a letter from Lipman’s physician, Dr. John McCann, of the Baystate Regional Cancer Program, indicating the disease was connected to Vietnam.
“Mr. Lipman had no other significant past medical history and no risk factors for developing cholangiocarcinoma,” he wrote, in part, “outside of previous carcinogen exposure while serving in Vietnam.”
“That wasn’t good enough for the VA,” Lipman said.
Without her husband, who was a financial advisor, Lipman has had to study up on family finances.
She said she’s not poor, but not rich either.
“Even if I was a millionaire, and I’m not, I still think because his death was service-related,” she said, “I deserve the acknowledgement that his death was service related.
“I’d like my claim to be approved.”
She said she is planning an appeal.
A call to the VA’s Washington, D.C. media line went unreturned Friday afternoon.
Federal offices were closed because of Veterans Day.