Overcoming Obstacles

Pursing degrees through life’s storms

Adam ’15 and Kirstin ‘13 (Huot) Hockhausen could accurately be labeled driven students—premed and prepharmacy students, respectively. Both

focused on getting professional degrees despite having two children born to them in their first 2 1/2 years at State.

But on spring break 2012, when they were nearly three years into their higher education pursuit, grades and term papers were the last thing on their minds.

En route to Rapid City, where both had grown up, the Hockhausens got the jarring phone call that Kirstin’s mother, Elizabeth, had unexpectedly died. That was the beginning of the trials soon to be facing the young couple. Adam Hockhausen hadn’t been feeling so chipper in the days before spring break. However, he was up for a game of pickup football with his brothers-in-law following the funeral March 9.

But just before midnight that day he experienced such severe stomach pain that he went to Rapid City Regional Hospital, which took blood tests.
Medical tests were the only exams Hockhausen would be taking for a while. The diagnosis came back as acute lymphocytic leukemia and the hospital wasn’t able to treat it.

Life had suddenly and violently changed course for these motivated, successful college students. Hockhausen, age 20 with a son not yet 2 and a daughter 3 ½ months old, found himself strapped to a gurney in the Life Flight helicopter headed to the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota.
Kirstin flew along. Neither knew if medicine or a miracle would arrive fast enough.

At Mayo, the doctor was frank.

“Here’s the deal. There’s a 30 percent chance you don’t make it out of the first month or two.” No medical stupor could keep those words from sinking in. The doctor also said that survival rates then improve, meaning that the high-dose chemotherapy treatments would have been effective, Hockhausen shared.

“The first two months were very intense. It’s called induction. Then for six months I received injections once to twice a week,” he said.

‘Hello, Dr. Pedersen’

When the first blur of activity at Mayo subsided, Hockhausen called biology professor Scott Pedersen, for whom Hockhausen interned in the anatomy lab. “I said, ‘I don’t know what to do. I’m not coming back.’ He got the ball rolling. He got all my classes taken care of. Within a week, I was withdrawn from all my classes; got my tuition refunded.”

Hockhausen’s career plan had been to become a medical doctor and provide for his family. Leukemia was wiping those plans away.

“When I could no longer do that, she (Kirstin) said, ‘If you’re not going to be the doctor in the family, I will.’ So she goes to medical school,” said Hockhausen, who was in the hospital for a month solid and then had daily doctor appointments in Rochester. They were able to live in a house in Rochester purchased for them by Kirstin’s father.

Commuting to Rochester

The new normal for the Hockhausens found Kirstin commuting weekly between Rochester and Brookings to finish her junior year.

“Friday she would drive to Rochester, spend Saturday and Sunday with me and Monday drive the five hours back to Brookings with the kids. She would go to school Tuesday-Thursday. She studied for the MCAT on my hospital bed,” said Hockhausen, who also was joined by his mother while in Rochester.

The couple also received help from Hanna Distel, who met Kirstin on the first day of class as freshmen and had become best friends.

Distel said, “Mondays and Fridays I would videotape classes I had that she wasn’t able to attend and text her any information she would need to know when she got there to make sure she wasn’t falling behind in class. If she had an early morning class that I didn’t have, I would come over to stay with the kids.

“Since Adam had already withdrawn from classes, we wanted to make sure she would stay up and be able to go to medical school.”

Then she joined the crew that helped the Hockhausens clean out their Brookings house and move to Rochester. She also loaded up her own bags.

“I told my mom ‘She really needs a nanny.’ My mom said, ‘You should go out there.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I should.’ My mom texted something to Kirstin.

Kirstin came to class and said, ‘Oh my God. Are you going to come live with us this summer? I’m so excited.’”

Distel said she was always willing but was concerned about imposing. “I wasn’t sure if that would be weird or awkward. But then when she was so glad to have the help, I was like sure,” Distel said.

For Kirstin’s senior year, she took all of her classes online, maintaining a spot on the dean’s list and graduating in May 2013 with a biology major and a Spanish minor.

Her MCAT exam also went well and she was accepted into medical school at the University of South Dakota. With doctors’ approval, the Hockhausens moved to Vermillion in time for classes in fall 2013. Hockhausen resumed his undergraduate studies even though he still needed to take monthly trips to Rochester and take chemo pills daily.

He dropped the premed track.

“I had had enough of doctors,” he explained. “To this day, just being in the hospital, I can’t do it; just a bad feeling. Even though they saved my life, I just can’t do it.

“I decided to become a teacher. I enjoy talking. I have a unique perspective on life, maybe I can share it.”

Back to Rapid

By December 2014, the couple were packing up again. This time the move would be to Rapid City, where Kirstin would be doing clinicals.

Hockhausen was a semester short of graduating. USD didn’t have the online courses he needed. So he enrolled at Black Hills State in nearby Spearfish, but that plan didn’t come to fruition either. On Christmas Eve, he came down with a severe case of influenza that landed him in the hospital for a week.

“I decided I couldn’t be driving to Spearfish every day,” said Hockhausen, who a week into spring semester classes, emailed his original SDSU adviser, Greg Heiberger.

Heiberger had kept in touch with the Hockhausens and offered to have his wife, a part-time photographer, take their family photo for Kirstin’s graduation present.

Hockhausen’s email explained his academic situation and asked for help. “I’d love to graduate a Jackrabbit and walk in Frost Arena,” he added.

Heiberger came through with an online schedule that allowed him to do just that. “It was an amazing thing he did. I could never repay him for what he did,” Hockhausen said.

Internet makes degree possible

He had equal praise for online education.

“SD State Online gave me an opportunity to graduate when I wanted (May 2015), to graduate a Jackrabbit and walk in Frost Arena, which I did. I got to see all the professors again,” said Hockhausen, particularly citing anatomy professor Pedersen and Tim and Laurie Nichols. Tim Nichols directed LeadState, a sophomore leadership program in which both Hockhausens were enrolled.

Classmates sent him a package of cards and mementos to cheer him up while he was a patient in Rochester, Hockhausen recalled.

For graduation, Heiberger helped out Hockhausen again. Chemotherapy had deteriorated his hips to the point he could hardly walk. “If I would have had to sit (with the graduation class) for the whole thing, I would never have been able to walk up the platform. Greg arranged it so I could be at the back of the arena so I could stretch my legs,” he said.

Hockhausen was able to walk onstage and receive his hard-earned degree in biology.

One chapter closes, another begins

In fall 2015, he enrolled in an accelerated master’s degree program in secondary education at Black Hills State. In December, he was back in the hospital, this time for replacement of both hips, allowing him to walk normally again.

Another piece of good news: In early March, Kirstin told her husband a couple magical words—“I’m pregnant,” an opportunity they didn’t know would be possible given all the chemo Hockhausen had received.

The prospect of a fifth Hockhausen in the household is causing Adam to reset the clock.

“I’m going to be a stay-at-home dad for the new baby and for our two older kids. I want an opportunity to give them some sanity. We’ve always kept them on the move.  Now I’m going to give that time back to them.  I’ll get in the teaching game when they are older,” he said, noting Kirstin will be going into her final year of medical school this fall.

After four years that have been anything but normal, Hockhausen looks forward to a time when the only reason to go to the hospital will be for his child’s birth.

He looks back on what has transpired since March 2012 and is thankful for those who have helped him through it—wife, parents, father-in-law, Heiberger and others at SDSU, medical staff and good friends like Distel.

And, of course, his children Joseph and Ariana. “Without my kids, I don’t know how I would have done it. Not only were they my motivation, but they were also my stress reliever.”

After spending so many days and nights with the Hockhausens, seeing them on their good days and their bad, seeing them stressed by crying kids and pending papers, and seeing them laughing at video games and one another, Distel has no doubts that her friends “value each other above everything else.

“They really love each other. I know that young people tend to get divorced more. They’re the giant exception to that rule. Instead of letting all their hardships break them, it put them together more.

“And they’re very driven people. You don’t get into medical school with having two little kids, a cancer-stricken husband and a mother who just died without having some drive. Kirstin is an amazing person and Adam is a wonderful person.”

Dave Graves