Cass County

There's a map here, which has all of the different counties.

It doesn't look like there's many counties in Texas, but my county that I grew up in, uh, Cass County, Iowa is on the list and a lot of other rural, a lot.

Southeast

Colorado.

Well, today I'm in Messina, Iowa.

It's a city in Cass County.

Population of 359.

Messina's motto is the home of friendly people.

Messina's sister community is Cumberland, Iowa, and it is named after Messina, New York.

Oh.

It was platted by the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad on land purchased from A. Vredenburg in 1883 that included most of the Section 33 of Cass County.

And the first meeting of the city council was March 21st, 1887.

It was a matter of when and where the cancer was going to be Three times, Levon Schroeder was sent home to die.

Twenty-three years after cancer first upended her life, she was settled into one of the recliners at Cass County's only cancer center, a blue cap covering her head as yet another round of chemotherapy flowed in her veins.

I never imagined I'd be seventy-two, she said.

Schroeder has a stage four granulosa cell tumor, a rare ovarian cancer that has forced her through surgery after surgery, chemotherapy, sepsis, and cardiac arrest.

Whatever is going to happen in the next year, I'm at peace.

Tears welled up in every corner of the room as Schroeder spoke.

The steep toll cancer has taken on her life and family would be staggering almost anywhere, but in Cass County and across Iowa, stories like hers are becoming unnervingly familiar.

Living here, it has always felt like it was not a matter of if you were going to get cancer.

There is little doubt that we will overtake them and infamously become the number one cancer state per capita.

Cass County only recently overtook Palo Alto County for the highest cancer incidence rate in Iowa, according to data from the National Cancer Institute.

The two heavily agricultural counties, though, are hardly outliers.

Nearly half of Iowa's 99 counties now have cancer rates higher than Louisiana's Cancer Alley, a heavily industrialized stretch long infamous for its extraordinary cancer risk.