Remission Journey

When I started writing this blog, I had been in remission from cancer for 42 years, 5 months, and 26 days. I attribute my long life and health to a collection of loving family and friends, a terrific doctor, and a neighbor kid who moved a trash can.

I was diagnosed with a soft-tissue sarcoma the summer of 1965. A 10-year-old boy at the time, I was getting into biking, and swimming, and with a new pair of glasses, playing softball. I lived on a farm in Texas where we 10-year-olds and everybody else in the family had just been liberated from the task of picking cotton by the introduction of arsenates to kill the green leaves that once were a problem in white cotton. And we were liberated from the task of weeding cotton by the introduction of herbicides (which we were told were non-toxic, by the way).

The summer was going great until one day at the community pool I decided to show off my newly found ability to dive. I took a bold run off the low board, only to slip backwards and land 10 feet from the edge of the pool butt down in a trash can, arms and legs hanging over the sides in four directions.

The other kids thought it was hilarious. I, of course, didn’t, but I shrugged it off and went back to the tasks of being a 10-year-old boy in the summer on a farm.

Three days later I was out riding my bike and I was seized with a terrific pain. I got back home and cried and screamed for hours, prompting a visit to the doctor. X-rays showed nothing in the hip on which I had hit the rim of the trashcan, so I was sent back home.

The pain wouldn’t quit.

Another three days and I was back at the doctor’s and the X-ray showed a different story. I had a clearly identifiable mass about the size of an egg filling up a joint. Fortunately for the family, this was also the first year we had health insurance, so I was sent to the nearest hospital that could do cancer treatment, about an hour away.

I was enormously fortunate to be treated by a Dr. Bob Murray, a wizened orthopedic surgeon who had earned his medical degree just before World War I.

It was, of course, possible to give me chemotherapy and whole-body radiation, chemotherapy being several orders of magnitude more toxic then than it even is now. And all the earlier doctors had suggested amputating my leg at the hip.

But Dr. Murray had a different idea. He’d excise the tumor, and then it would be my job to drink my milk and eat my spinach.

He excised the tumor. I drank my milk and ate my spinach. Never once after surgery did I have pain, never once has any sign of the cancer returned. And health insurance paid the entire $4,565 cost for my labs, surgery, physical therapy, and six weeks in the hospital.

That isn’t to say I was untouched by the experience.

In 1965, a diagnosis of cancer just wasn’t something you told anyone else about. People with cancer were treated as if they were contagious. The authorities at my elementary school insisted that I be home schooled until they could be sure I wouldn’t give cancer to the other children.

Also, in 1965, a prognosis for cancer was about as good as looking in a crystal ball. That gave doctors even more power than they have now over patients and the people who care for them.

When I got out of the hospital, the town doctor convinced my parents that soft-tissue sarcomas tended to recur in the throat and rectum. He suggested that I would need weekly examination of those areas to make sure the cancer would not return. My parents, however, did not allow that to happen but once when they observed an unprofessional enthusiasm for the procedure, and the doctor was sent to prison.

So the dynamics of the doctor-patient relationship has changed from the potential of a literal getting screwed over by the doctor to the enormous complexity of making the right decision from an abundance of information and an abundance of treatment options all of which are matters of life and death.

Medical science has an enormous armory of weapons against cancer. Tumors and cancer cells can be defeated. But remission, I believe, still depends on something on the lines of eating your spinach.

I would not be here if I had not had been treated by a seasoned, wise, and skillful physician who knew just how much of the technology of his time would be helpful. But I would not have lived the last 42 years without good nutrition, meaningful social support, and an ongoing purpose in life. Part of my purpose is to share what I have learned in the last 42 years with you. But to get to basics, one of the most important things I’ve learned in the last 42 years is that life is its own purpose!

It seems the better part of wisdom to me to learn about every approach to cancer you can to optimize your treatment and to energize your life. You almost always need a doctor’s help to overcome disease, but survivors can help you find your path back to wellness.