Healing Amid the Herd - Don Imus

Over the last 11 summers Don Imus and his wife, Deirdre, have welcomed nearly 1,000 children with cancer to their cattle ranch here in northern New Mexico for weeklong stays intended to be more work than play. But this is the first season they have done so since Mr. Imus himself learned that he had cancer. In March a biopsy confirmed that Mr. Imus, the outspoken talk show host, had Stage 2, or intermediate, prostate cancer. Though he was initially advised to begin radiation treatments, he has so far chosen to treat the disease holistically. He has been dutifully ingesting habanero peppers and Japanese soy supplements as part of a regimen partly devised by his wife, a natural foods proponent, and monitored by a urologist at Columbia University Medical Center. “The kids want to know why, if I have cancer, I have so much hair,” Mr. Imus, 69, said in a recent interview in the Imus Ranch kitchen, rustling his shaggy, reddish-gray mane. The Imuses modeled the ranch, which is set on more than 4,000 acres dotted with juniper and pinyon trees, at least partly on the 35,000-acre working cattle ranch in Arizona where Mr. Imus grew up. After establishing the ranch as a nonprofit organization, Mr. Imus raised $40 million in donations for it, some from companies whose names appear like billboards on ranch buildings, like the Aflac Rodeo Arena. Over the years the couple have contributed $10 million of their own money to the ranch, they said, and Mrs. Imus said they also pay the ranch’s annual administrative expenses, which are more than $250,000...NYTimes