surviving

This is a short excerpt of some of my life’s notes. It is difficult for anyone to share the experience of cancer with others. We all approach things from different vantage points and of course, no two cancers run the same. However, I am now on my second cancer and I feel I have some insight. I remember the day I held my daughter in my arms and I said to myself, “Oh my, so this is how much my father loved me.”

Being there makes a difference.

Having said that, here is a view from my life. Not my emotions, but the facts which guide me.

In 1984 I had my first cancer, colon cancer to be exact. When it first hit, I went from 170lbs to 130lbs in weeks and I was slammed into total disarray. To say I was devastated would be an understatement. At the time it first hit, I was a young man with everything a young man could want. I had a successful business, great house, every year the Cadillac dealer would bring over the most expensive Cadillac they made and I would take it no questions asked. I was blessed with female companions and lots of friends. Life was as good as it gets, or was it? It was the life everyone said you had to have to be happy. I was surely going through the motions of having a great life. I can tell you everyone always told me how lucky I was. Luck, I was working day and night and very goal oriented, but that is another story.

Overnight my perfect life was crushed. I was devastated. Lucky for me I had the support of a great family and a wonderful woman, (who I married). To this day I think she was nuts, but it has been great for me and she still feels she did ok. For the first year of my disease I wasted a lot of time feeling sorry for myself. To tell the truth, maybe it was 2 years. I continued to work a little, but I was just going through the motions. Then I became very involved in my health. I researched my situation and started to feel better. I found a great doctor in the Lahey Clinic (Dr. Crosier). He directed me to Dr. Coller (a great surgeon and friend) also at the clinic. He gave me a second chance at life through surgery. However, when I went home to recoup and recover, I was still lost. I was no longer who I was. I wasn’t capable of making anything positive happen and I was no longer ready to go at the drop of a hat. I was a fraction of the man I was.

I sulked for a while and then I started to reflect on my life. I remembered when I was a very young man just 19, I was selling real-estate. In the morning I would go from door to door and try and get listings. I said the same thing at every house,” Hi, sorry to bother you. I was wondering if you could help me. I have client who is looking to move into this lovely neighborhood. He told me to go see the house that was for sale by owner on this block. However, I cannot find a sign on any of the houses. Do you know by chance which house had a for sale sign on it last week?” The hope was they would say you know we are thinking of selling. Every morning I tried to knock on 100 doors.

Anyway, one morning I walked up to this house that was hanging off a cliff looking at the New York skyline. A beautiful woman answered the door and I gave my pitch. While I was talking, I looked over her shoulder and the house was filled with lovely young women. Just then a man in a wheel chair virtually zoomed up to the door and said, “What do you want?” I told him and he said, “Come in and sit down.” I sat on the couch and he directed this one to do this and that one to do that. I stayed as long as I could and from time to time he zoomed over and talked to me. His business (a modeling agency) was run from his house. I should mention the back of the house was all glass with breathtaking views, and that beautiful woman that answered the door was his wife. Finally I left. Really they had to pry me off the couch. I just loved being in the middle of all those lovely women. When I walked outside there was a white handicapped van and it had a painted drawing of a man in a wheel chair with speed lines coming off the chair. And it said something like Billy the wheels Shu—.

Later I learned he had MS. Now faced with my own situation I thought, what can I do that he did? Here was a man who could not walk and was destined to suffer and die before his time and yet he had and was enjoying everything life had to offer to the fullest. Actually, he was doing better than anyone I knew at the time.

It was time to get up and deserve what could be mine. If Billy could have all he had, I could at least improve my situation 10 fold. I started by applying what I had learned about business and success. You see earlier in my life I spent months and years looking for the answers to success. I read everything I could at the library about wealthy people and put a plan together to be one of them. It did help make me successful, the question now, could it save my life? After years of searching for the answer to success I reduced it to two rules. I do not want to get lost here because this is my favorite subject. So, short and sweet. Rule #1. As long as you are doing what you feel like doing, you can never have what you want to have. Certainly, Billy sitting in that wheelchair had to force himself to do all he was doing. I am sure his body felt like lying down. So for me, clearly it was time to stand up and start eating better and exercising and stop counting my misfortunes, but focus on my good fortune. I started doing what I did not feel like doing. First I set up an exercise plan and an eating plan. I even hired a macrobiotic chief to come teach me how to cook (that is another story). Rule #2. You become what you think about all day long. It was time to start seeing myself in my mind’s eye as the person I wanted to be. That picture was a man standing upright and in perfect health.

On my new path it was up and down. I did not rocket into a positive life style, but every day I moved forward and every day I got a little bit better.

While I was trying to go forward I worried about the baggage of cancer and what was to happen in the future to me. Then one day I was reading and I came across writings by Mark Twain. He said, “I am an old man, I have had many tragedies in my life, most of which have never happened to me.” (I probably murdered it, but that is how I remember it). There it was. From that moment on I was not sick. I sat for days and thought. The cancer did not happen to me, for I am the subtotal of all I have learned, the people I love and care for, the people who love me. I am what I have made myself, etc. I am not my body. My body is a vessel I occupy. I started taking better care of this vessel and strengthening me at the same time.

Life got better fast.

I started looking at my friends’ lives and the life I had before my illness. I looked at my coworkers, acquaintances and every person I have had the privilege to get to know. I watched people go through life from day to day in mediocrity. They had no real tragedies and yet they rode the rollercoaster of unsubstantiated highs and lows. They let daily influences blow their emotions from one hill to the next valley. During this tumultuous trip they missed life and all it has to offer. Then there are the gifted, those who have everything including great health. However, when I looked a little closer I could see the shadows of the rollercoaster going by.

So who if anyone has the perfect life? Well I have come to realize there is no such thing. However, maybe there is a close second.

To be healthy is truly the greatest gift one can possess at any given time, I guess. Certainly we cannot enjoy life without good health. But good health in itself does not guarantee you of any life style, good or chaotic. In fact, we all take the good health days for granted and let them go by unappreciated.

For me, today is my perfect life. My first cancer has allowed me to appreciate everything in life. I watch other mothers and fathers enjoy their children and I can tell you most are missing the greatest time in life. Today I walk into my little girl’s room when she is asleep and sit on the edge of her bed and hold her hand while she sleeps. A hand that I know I would not be holding or at least not feeling, had my body not had cancer. Every night (and I mean every night) when my daughter was just a baby she woke us up crying. My wife and I would wake up and smile. We both felt the same thing; what a gift to have a little person in the other room in need of us. Without cancer I would have seen it differently and missed many special moments of life. I love to think back on yesterday or last week and experience again her smile, her accomplishments and her love. Thank you God for my awakening.

My relationship with my wife is so much deeper than that of a healthy me. We have shared so much and fought so hard together. We are best friends, confidants and the cheering squad of each other and lovers. As for my day, I welcome the sun and the opportunity to go out and enrich others. With every foot step I take, I remember, a rich man only becomes rich because he has first enriched others.

Years after my first cancer I said to my wife one day, “My greatest gift in life was not meeting you. It was my cancer. Without it I would have never kept you.” You see there was a dark side to my life before I was sick. I was heading in the wrong direction with the wrong friends. I have to tell you there were some interesting times back then, best left untold for now.

I did not know it, but I needed some help. For those of you who are spiritual you will understand this. I believe with all my heart that my cancer was a gift from my mother. You see she died of colon cancer when I was 4. I was raised along with my sister by a very special man, my father, who gave up his life for us. He is my hero (91 and still plays golf in the 80s), that is another story. It was my mother who reached down when I was 29 and gave me her disease to save my life. Coming off the street, losing my friends and finding and keeping the perfect woman was a result of my cancer, the same disease that took my Mom’s life.

My first cancer took a kid and made him a responsible man enjoying every minute he has with his loved ones and the ones he will care for tomorrow. It educated the guy who graduated second from the bottom of his class who could hardly read (and there were hundreds in the graduating class). Being laid up, I read every day. I learned how to read and comprehend how to do my own real-estate legal work, how to control my mind through meditation. The list goes on and on. It gave me the education I have today. It was truly the gift of all gifts for me.

Today my body faces another cancer. Head and neck cancer. For those of you who have gone through the treatments, I feel for you. Without a doubt I would rather have been fishing. It has been about 9 months since it all started, 6 months from the treatments and kiddingly I have been saying “soon I will find the gift in this cancer”. Well maybe it is starting to raise its head. My first gift was realized in the Lahey Clinic. I had been treated by a great surgeon and good guy, Dr. Dolan. Then my radiation was done by a very caring, top of his field, good friend and confidant, Dr. Garren. And of course, lucky for me, Dr. Coller is still at the Clinic 25 years after removing my first cancer. Dr. Coller stayed with me through it all. I have only counted on him for 25 years and he has never let me down. He is dedicated to his patients and every doctor I ever met at the clinic has always said the same thing, “he is a brilliant man and the go to man in the field”. For me he is all that and a dear friend. Anyway, I was admitted after the radiation due to complications. One night like many I was throwing up (about 10 times a night) and very weak. My wife was there by my side as she has been through it all (you know something is starting to bother me as I write this, but I will remain silent) and I said to her, what a gift. She looked at me. You have to know after almost 30 years together she knew something off the wall was coming. As I made my way back to bed I said to her how fortunate I was to have the opportunity to be treated by some of the best in the world. Here I am laying in bed in one of the best hospitals in the world being treated by the best. Most people in the world would have been dead years ago. I lay down and said, “it may not get any better than this.” She just laughed.

Without a doubt I see this cancer as a wakeup call. I wish there was a better way to get in touch with life, but for me there is not. Again, I am touching every moment of my life with my presence and life is touching me. I refuse to let it roll by. I do not know what is in store for my body. I will feed it the best nutrition and exercise it, but what happens may not be in my control. However, what happens to me is in my control. The days are mine to enjoy or waste.

It is probably here that I should tell you something about who I am (sometimes at least). When I was a young man and working in my body shop, I had a major problem with the shop and another business I owned. There was an older man that hung at the shop from time to time. He knew all I was facing and said you are going to lose the business. I said oh no, I will work it out. As the days went by he kept questioning me about the situation. I just kept working and said I will work it out. He stopped me from working and said, “Kid, if I threw you off a 100 story building and someone stuck their head out at the 50th floor window when you went by and asked how you were doing, you would say, so far so good” . I am not nuts; I’m just looking for the good side of life.

Anyway, that perfect life we all strive for may just be one not thought to be guaranteed. One to have been worked for not granted. One to be seen as tentative and fleeting. We seem to value that which we are about to lose. It is this that has given me the richest life of all my acquaintances. I would not have wanted to travel my journey any other way.

Please do not think for a moment that I have not shared your fears, your doubts and I too have been scared to death and cried at times. When I am at my worst, I try and keep my mouth shut. I like to think that sometimes it is better to say nothing about my situation. Talking about what I cannot alter, gives it more presence. Maybe tomorrow or the next day will be better.

I am not standing in your shoes and I am not passing judgment on anyone’s approach to their situation. What I do know is there is a gift in your plight. Finding it is your burden, letting it become part of your life will be your salvation.

Before I go I may have realized something. A few paragraphs ago I said something was bothering me and I would remain silent about it. Well here goes. When I had my first cancer my wife was by my side. When I developed A vascular necrosis (that is another story) she was right by my side, when I had adhesions and was passing out from the pain and banging into anything on the floor, she was there when I woke up. When I had my surgery for adhesions she was there. When I developed cancer this time, she was there. I have to tell you, I am beginning to think she is bad luck. Well, I have some deep thinking to do. And just for the heck of it, I am going to keep one eye open when I sleep from now on.

I wish you the best life has to offer.