The Cancer Stories: Dr. Shannon Owens

Thanks to community members who have graciously shared their personal and poignant stories, St. John’s Health is honored to share the real-life experiences of local cancer patients and their challenging and often complex journey to healing. It’s a road that St. John’s Health is working to make shorter by bringing comprehensive cancer care — including radiation therapy — closer to home.
 

When you get a cancer diagnosis, it can feel like your world stops.

Even harder than that moment? Realizing that your world is, in fact, still moving. Work. Family. Responsibilities. The demands and pressures of your life are still there, and now you need to find a way to fit in treatment and healing around them.

For Dr. Shannon Owens, orthodontist and Jackson local, that would prove a tall order. In the fall of 2025, Owens was feeling on top of his game. As the weather cooled, he was looking forward to enjoying his favorite activities: hunting, skiing as well as volunteering as a board member and a part time graduate school instructor. In addition to travelling to see their two college-aged children.

It was during one of his volunteer teaching stints when Owens first started to feel “off.” At the time, he shrugged it away. But by Thanksgiving, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very wrong.

After a consultation with St. John’s Health (SJH) gastroenterologist Dr. Edmund Chung, a colonoscopy was scheduled with Dr. Eric Wieman from St. John’s Health Surgical Specialists. They’d discussed a common reason for his symptom, but when he saw his physician’s face post-procedure, Owens says he “knew it wasn’t good news.”

Owens had colorectal cancer.

“It was incredible how quickly the diagnostic testing and typing happened,” Owens recalls. His sense is that it couldn’t have happened faster anywhere else. Following his diagnosis, Dr. Wieman walked across the hospital campus to speak to St. John’s Health oncologist Melissa Cohen, MD to begin scheduling next steps that very same day. Just 25 days after his colonoscopy, Owens was starting treatment.

Despite that speed, “this phase felt like an eternity,” he says. “Once you hear you have a tumor, you are unable to think about much other than what type it is, whether it’s spread, and how it will impact you.”

Overnight, Owens’ days became a complex balancing act. He would need to travel to Salt Lake City to see more specialists and to Idaho Falls for radiation treatment, requiring logistical planning and hours on the road. His patients needed to be rescheduled, and adjustments needed to be made to his wife’s work schedule. “I was traveling two hours each way to Idaho Falls and overnighting there two days a week for daily thirty minute appointments” Owens says. The appointments were five days a week for five weeks. “The physical and emotional toll was exhausting.”

It’s unfamiliar, challenging territory for Owens. “Medical travel robs someone of their dignity,” he says, noting that while traveling for care there were times he needed to ask Melissa or his other trusted drivers to quickly pull to the roadside to accommodate his newly temperamental digestive tract.

Balancing his responsibilities as patient, orthodontist, and community leader intensified the stress, a weight Owens felt deeply.

“I had rarely moved a patient appointment before,” he says. “I had never missed a day of school or work since I was 17. I take my responsibilities, including my volunteer work with boards, very seriously.”

Owens says he’s grateful that his children aren’t youngsters and that he has insurance —but emphasizes that the toll is immense for anyone needing to travel for radiation, “regardless of your profession.” Not only is it challenging for the patient, but it also creates a “ripple effect of people who are impacted beyond the immediate family and friends, like my patients and employees.”

Having access to radiation treatment at SJH would have significantly reduced the burdens for him. “If a local option was available it would enable people to have a better quality of life during treatment, letting them focus on their family, health and work obligations instead of the weather, driving conditions and finding a place to stay.” This meaningful impact is one of the reasons St. John’s Health is working to ease the road to healing for patients in our community by bringing vital cancer therapies and treatments to Jackson.

“I have so much compassion for everyone who has walked this road,” Owens says. “You don’t realize how tough it is mentally, physically and emotionally until you do it on the daily.”

Thanks to our generous community, the road to healing is about to get shorter. To learn more about our plans for a comprehensive new cancer center, visit www.stjohns.health/cancercenter.

Those interested in supporting the Foundation campaign are invited to contact Foundation President Anna Olson at 307-690-7669.