A yearly wellness visit with your doctor is one of the ways you can stay on top of your health. You and your provider can cover any concerns you might have or catch up on any screenings. This important exam might even help you detect trouble early. One man shares how a trip to the doctor made a difference in his life.
You can often find Mike Muntefering at Dimock Cheese enjoying some of the South Dakota made products or talking with employees. He’s one of the owners.
“Three partners and I bought it and took it over, built this building out here and it was a great addition, we have great staff, and actually makes it fun to come here and visit with people,” said Muntefering.
To be able to continue in this business venture, he knows he needs to keep his health in check.
That includes making time for a yearly wellness visit.
“A lot of it is just talking through your overall health, so there can be components as far as routine screenings, different cancer screenings, testing, periodic surveillance of labs looking at your cholesterol, your blood sugar, things along those lines,” said family medicine physician at Avera St. Benedict Health Center in Parkston, SD, Paul Berndt, MD. “Mike came to visit me back in August of 2023, he was just in for his routine wellness visit, really was doing well, didn’t have any concerns or complaints at the time, as part of his visit we had done some routine lab work.”
“Everything went normal until he asked me if I had been sick and I had been a couple weeks earlier, and he said ‘your white blood cell count is high,’” said Muntefering.
What started out as a routine trip to the doctor, turned into a cancer diagnosis.
“That led to further discussion and conversation that ultimately got him plugged in with the cancer team with Avera and his diagnosis of mantle cell lymphoma, which thankfully by doing his wellness visit ended up getting him expedited to get the care that he needed for it,” said Dr. Berndt.
As part of his treatment he traveled to Sioux Falls to the Avera Cancer Institute.
“Mantle cell lymphoma is a sub type of b cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It’s a rare b cell lymphoma, it occurs in 1 in 200,000 people,” said Avera hematologist and cellular therapy specialist, Waqas Jehangir, MD. “His treatment option was chemo plus monoclonal antibody, and later on including stem cell transplant as well as maintenance therapy.”
He was even able to do some treatments in Parkston, which is closer to his home.
“The things that Mike has been able to do in our facility, he’s been able to do here. There are certainly treatments and different testing that he needs to go to Sioux Falls for, but trying to keep as much close to home so that the patient doesn’t have as much burden of travel, cost, things like that,” said Dr. Berndt.
Now Mike is continuing with maintenance therapy. He’s just thankful his diagnosis was caught early and he can continue spending time with family and at his business.
“I say just have it checked out, just in case, it’s easier to catch it earlier than later,” said Muntefering.
Which is why you want to make sure to schedule your appointment each year.
“It’s not typical to find cancer at these appointments, it’s not something that we are searching specifically for, but a lot of times just by doing a general surveillance of your wellness visits we can catch cancer early if it is there and hopefully getting to your treatment sooner,” said Dr. Berndt.
