Valley couple faces daunting medical issues

MAT-SU — Sitting in their living room, it’s hard not to enjoy a conversation with Steve and Talyne Belka.

They finish each other’s sentences, laugh at each others’ jokes. They’re a typical Alaskan couple. He’s been here since he was less than a year old, she has since she was 9. It’s pretty obvious they love each other. They heat their small home off Knik River Road with wood and Steve drives about the most stereotypical Alaska beater pickup still in running order.

But ask them sometime about how the last decade or so of their 37 years together have gone and quickly you start to realize they’re far from typical.

“We’re proof that anything can happen to anyone at any time,” Steve says.

“And over and over again,” Talyne adds.

At this point in their lives, Steve is battling late-stage cancer and Talyne needs a kidney transplant. It’s not how they imagined their life in their late 50s. To help, their friend and Valley music legend LuLu Small has organized a fundraiser for them beginning at 3 p.m., Oct. 6 at Del Rois Bar in the Butte.

“It’s hard to take help,” Steve said, “but then it’s really gratifying to know that we have such amazing close friends.”

Twelve years ago, Steve said, his wife’s liver failed. They moved to Arizona for a transplant. Turns out that just to get the transplant accomplished they had to stay for seven years.

Then someone stole $10,000 from their business.

“We were recouping from that when Steve got diagnosed with stage-four cancer,” Talyne said.

While he was in the hospital, she broke her leg going down a flight of stairs.

Steve said the cancer is all through his body, in his back and his stomach and his lymph nodes. It’s a slow-growing type of cancer.

“Chemo doesn’t touch this type of cancer, or radiation or anything,” he said.

Which, in a way, is something of a blessing because it means he won’t need to gamble on treatments that, while often effective, also often make the patient’s last months of a life miserable.

After the transplant they moved back to Alaska, built the home they live in now and made a bunch of friends in the area. Their daughter was grown and gone in Arizona.

But then in September, the drugs Taylne takes to keep her body from rejecting her liver finally killed off her kidneys.

“They said sooner or later they would wreak havoc on her kidneys,” Steve said.

For the whole month of September they were either staying in the hospital in Anchorage or making thrice-weekly trips there for dialysis. Eventually they got set up with a home dialysis machine, which Taylne likes much more.

More and more, though, it seems like the best bet is for them to leave Alaska. Steve says he always figured he’d stay here until he died. But his back seizes up in the winter. Talyne’s mother is there and could use some help taking care of herself. Also, that’s where the granddaughter is.

But to do that they’ll need to sell the house, and nobody seems to want it as a studio-style home with the living room doubling as a bedroom. When the kidney failure problem struck he was in the middle of putting in a bedroom.

“I’ve got to finish the addition and put the house back on the market,” Steve said.

The whole saga has taken a toll. It’s eaten through his union pension and left them with mounting debt.

“It’s more than just your medical bills. It’s your inability to continue to work to pay your other bills,” Steve said.

Between this stretch of medical treatments, her previous one and a past life as a social worker for elderly people, Talyne said she’s something of an expert at battering through bureaucracy to get what she needs.

Sometimes it takes the better part of a week on the phone, but she’s learned to stick with it, to never send the government a letter that isn’t certified, and to keep copies of everything.

Steve and Taylne agree that it can be difficult seeking help. A person wants to stay independent, they said. But so far they’ve been nothing but amazed at how far their Alaska friends would go to help them.

A nearby lodge brought them three weeks worth of food. Friends rallied to make sure they had enough firewood to keep the stove going — Steve can’t haul and stack it like he used to.

Having organized a few fundraisers in her day, she knows that people who give to their neighbors get something out of it.

“You get to feel important because you did something important. Everybody needs that,” she said.

And the night of fun and music and auctions and raffles at Del Rois will certainly be something people will enjoy.

“Everybody gets to win in a situation like this,” she said.