The Farming Families of Lyon County (IA)—April 2021

Photo by Ashley DeJager, DJ Designs

SOMEHOW, THROUGH IT ALL, JAKE STILL SMILES

by Bob Fitch

Just like any other seven-year-old Iowa farm boy, Jake enjoys driving the fourwheeler and helping with the calves.

“He gets very excited to come to the farm,” said Jake’s dad, Mark Dieters. “He likes to help do chores. I’ve got him trained now to open the gates, so I don’t have to get out of the tractor. I got him a little trailer for the 4-wheeler and he knows how to back that up now. We’ll go to the farm and you give him a task and he perseveres until he gets it.”

Mark and Carrie recently bought a small 1816 skid loader. Can a seven-year-old really handle driving a skid steer? Jake’s response was: “Want to see the video? It’s pretty cool.” His dad said, “I let him drive it around the yard last week and he was just as proud as a peacock.”

Jake said he also likes to clean the cow trailer. He doesn’t care that it’s full of cow droppings – he likes his dad’s semi-trailer to be neat. “I would clean anything.”

But Jake doesn’t get to help with the farm and truck-cleaning chores very often, just like he doesn’t make it to school much. What gets in the way? “Dialysis, that’s for sure,” he said in a matter-of-fact way.

Photo by Ashley DeJager, DJ Designs

Jake had his left kidney removed in January, the day after his seventh birthday. His right kidney had been removed about three years ago. He also had a portion of his colon removed during the second kidney removal surgery. On the day of this interview, you wouldn’t have known it to look at him, but Wilms’ tumors have ravaged and will continue to ravage Jake’s body.

But not his spirit.

“Jake has had to understand and cope with more emotions at his age than most of us adults do in our whole lifetime. And somehow, through it all, he still smiles,” Carrie wrote in a post on CaringBridge.org.

According to The Mayo Clinic, Wilms' tumor is a rare kidney cancer that primarily affects children. Also known as nephroblastoma, it's the most common cancer of the kidneys in children. Only about 650 cases are diagnosed annually in the U.S. Typically, Wilms’ tumor is highly responsive to treatment with nine out of 10 children being cured. However, it appears Jake is the one in 10.

Carrie said the trouble started in the spring of 2018 with a stomach ache and a lingering fever. A CT scan found a tumor on Jake’s right kidney. Doctor’s removed the kidney and Jake went through treatment for about six months. Then he was in remission for about six months.

Even though a spot on his left kidney was shrunk by chemotherapy, doctors decided the spot had to be removed. More cancer treatment followed, leading to a year-long remission before his most recent diagnosis.

Farming is full of life lessons, but nothing in their respective upbringings on family farms prepared Carrie and Mark for the challenge of walking their child through multiple rounds of cancer treatment.

Mark grew up near Inwood where his dad raised pigs and farmed until the mid-1990s. “I worked for local farmers throughout high school and for 10 years after,” he said. “Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to farm. I didn’t even want to go to school because all I wanted to do was farm.”

But his company, Dieters Trucking, pays a lot of the bills at this point. “Trucking is kind of hereditary. My grandpa and my great uncle trucked from the 1940s until the ‘80s. It’s one of those deals that passes through the genetic lines. In 2016, I was working for a guy from Marion, S.D., driving truck back-and-forth from here to there. He needed to upgrade trucks and I talked him into letting me buy the next truck. The trucking business kind of took off from there.

“We haul a lot of manure and own a side-dump. We sell compost for DeJager Custom Manure out of Inwood. We dispatch all the trucking for that. Then, in the off-season, we haul livestock for HLH Farms of Carmel.”

However, Mark said, “For us, trucking is a means to an end to get us to the point we can be self-sufficient as farmers. It’s nice to have that extra source of income. The bankers want something steady every month.”

Farming is not really a job for him. “It’s more of a passion. For me, being able to be a family man and a Godly man – being a farmer is something that God has called many people to do. It allows me to be here more for my family; and enjoy the outdoors and enjoy life.” He started from scratch by running cow-calf pairs and now, in addition to the cows, he has been able to rent cropland and collaborate his farming with Cody Van De Stroet of Fairview, S.D.

Carrie grew up southeast of Hull where her family had a farrow-to-finish hog operation and finished out Holstein steers from dairies. “I have three other siblings. I was the youngest and there are six years between me and sister. So when they left, it was just me and Dad doing the farm. I think that was when I was in seventh grade when it just became my job to get up at 4:30 and help with the bottle calves and make sure things were fed,” she said.

“When you look back at it now, you see how much you learn and build a work ethic. It’s helped me today – it’s helped me be a go-getter. It’s not a choice when you are on a farm, you’ve got to get up and do it whether you want to or not,” she said.

Mark and Carrie met in 2012. He said, “I was living in western South Dakota where my older brother managed a ranch. I moved out there to help him for a year. Out there, we were 40 miles from town and our driveway was seven miles long. With places stretched so far apart, it made going anywhere tougher. Carrie and I met on the internet and talked for a couple months through FarmersOnly.com before I moved back to Inwood – gospel truth.”

They married in 2013 and Jake was born in 2014. Two daughters followed: Carlee, 4, and Brooke, 1½.

Mark said, “Jake gets a lot of joy out of being a big brother, especially with his baby sister. He really loves the little one.” When he came home from the hospital in January, Jake was a little scared of his sisters hurting him because he has dialysis lines coming out of his chest, a pic line and a stoma. “But he’s gotten more relaxed. He’s gotten back to his usual bossing around Carlee,” said Carrie. “Big brother duties,” Mark said.

Carrie said their son’s perseverance through the cancer battle is helped when he gets the chance to talk to friends and classmates. “Just trying to be a kid and seeing his friends gives him a lot better outlook on life. You can tell those weeks when all we do is go back-and-forth from the hospital are a drag on him. But if he gets to go to school for a Valentine’s party or something like that, he pops right up and is happy. The kids have a soft spot for him. When he went to school for his birthday, his desk was just piled high with cards and presents. One of the girls in his class made him a very beautiful and soft tractor blanket.”

She said, “For me as a parent going through this, that helps me because it is very hard to see him just sleep or get sick or be bored – when he so much wants to be a kid and just run and be an ordinary child growing up. If I can see him smile, or sit in class or giggle or something, it helps me forget a little bit of what’s going on and keeps me moving.”

Carrie said life has been an emotional roller coaster of anger, sadness and a few happy times. “Every time he would go through remission and every three months when he had a scan, we just dreaded going in for that next scan. When we found out the third time, I was really angry at everything, especially angry at God – ‘Why again?’

“This disease takes a toll on everything and everyone that is around it. It's hard to watch your child endure the sickness and its effects,” Carrie wrote on CaringBridge.org.

Her anger and sadness has been helped by talking about it and through prayer. Discussion and prayer with Mark, their friends, family and their pastor (Rob Horstman of First Reformed Church in Inwood) has helped her reach the point of “His Will will be done.” Mark said, “His plan is different than ours and we’ll never understand it until we’re on the side of the Lord and he can explain it to us.”

Mark said Jake has a very, very strong faith for being a seven year old. Carrie added, “We’ve been really trying to work with Jake, telling him: ‘If you’re scared, if you’re mad, talk to us and pray about it.’ He’s really good about praying on his own, too.”

There has been an outpouring of support for the Dieters from the Inwood and West Lyon communities and beyond. As a new person in town, Carrie didn’t know anyone in Inwood. “But since Jake was diagnosed in 2018, they’ve been amazing. People were just coming out of the woodwork: ‘Hey, can we bring a meal? Hey, my cousin went through this, if you need any help, let me know.’ And it’s just gotten stronger and stronger every year with people making sure Jake is ok, making sure we have our bills paid, asking if we needed help getting Carlee to school or Jake to his appointments. It’s overwhelming – but overwhelming in a good way,” Carrie said.

The community delivered joy to the Dieter family in a belated January birthday celebration for Jake. “It was pretty cool on my birthday,” Jake said. “I think there were about 10 fire trucks, and there were two police cars and three ambulances. One truck came over and gave me a present and a balloon and let me honk the horn.”

For a few minutes, Jake is distracted from his challenges since he has the undivided attention of a magazine writer who is getting down on the floor to eagerly see the boy’s trucks, tractors and feedlot at his farm in the basement. Then the boy’s attention jumped back to the real farm. “The cows did have three babies. One of them belonged to our neighbor Ethan.”

Mark said, “He’s spent a lot of his life around adults, being in and out of the hospital so much. There’s a lot of time when he’s very grown up about things. Other times he’s still a seven-year-old little boy.”

Tomorrow includes the adult world of pain with a dialysis treatment. Today, with a big smile, Jake chooses to be a sevenyear-old carpet farmer as he rolls out his new equipment.

Editor's note: Jake passed away on Sept. 12, 2021, about five months after this article was originally published.