Beloved high school football coach, 60, dies due to chemo drug shortage
A beloved high school football coach died aged 60 due to a widespread shortage of a chemotherapy drug needed for his cancer treatment.
Jeff Bolle was a force on the sports field as a varsity football and baseball coach for students at Marquette University High School in Milwaukee and also worked as a guidance counsellor.
But his life was suddenly turned upside down when he was diagnosed with stage four bile duct cancer in October 2022.
Bolle started chemotherapy in 2023, but his treatments abruptly stopped when he could no longer access the drug cisplatin, amid a widespread, drastic shortage of chemotherapy drugs across the country.
In December, seven months after losing access to the drugs, he died. Bolle was just 60 years old.
His wife Connie Bolle has now spoken out about her belief that her husband may still be alive if it weren’t for the shortages of the critical medication.
“I just keep wondering, ‘What if we had gotten the cisplatin? Could it have slowed his cancer down?” Connie Bolle told TODAY.
“Would he have been able to coach even more? Would he have been stronger? Would he have felt better? … It’s always a second guess.”
Ms Bolle told TODAY that, when Bolle was first diagnosed with cancer, doctors hoped they could prolong his life through surgery and chemotherapy as he was in good health at the time.
While he knew he would never fully recover, he wanted to undergo chemotherapy to “hold it off” and extend his life as long as possible.
He initially underwent surgery and four rounds of chemotherapy.
Bolle was just two rounds short of his chemotherapy treatment when he was told in May 2023 that the drug he was using was no longer available.
“He was never able to get on cisplatin (again),” Ms Bolle said. “His cancer was just continuing to grow, and his bile ducts were getting compromised because the cancer was pushing on them even more. He was really getting so very sick. It was horrible.”
Ms Bolle said that her husband’s condition quickly deteriorated and doctors told him in September that there was nothing else they could do to save him.
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