CANCER, MY SPIRITUAL JOURNEY Pt. 1
I want to thank Shoshone News-Press for providing me a forum to discuss my successful fight with cancer. I would also like to acknowledge my wife Debi, Del, Dennis, Art, Maggie, Nancy, Sandy and countless others. I want to dedicate this paper to a little boy, Chad Berger, who thought he had too many angels watching over him and wanted to share some of them with the rest of us. He provided me with the eyes and mystery of a child. He would have been a young man now, but he still lives in me and a tree that grows in a park in Wallace.
•••
The winds that blow across the Montana prairies and over the Rocky Mountains dropping into the Bitterroots have come again.
Grasses that once bent underfoot have grown tall and rustle beside me. Light has lost its summer harshness and become amber. Autumn has come again.
It is a time I confront faults and wonder why I am a miracle.
•••
The problem with being a miracle is you have to figure out why. This is the story of cancer, my spiritual journey. It has been 14 years since I was diagnosed with terminal tongue cancer. I lost all those that fought along beside me. I was asked by Debbie, Joe, RoseMary, Sherry, Ron, Jamie and others to tell my story. I did not want to be seen as diminishing their struggle so I did not honor their request. But with the passage of time, I have decided to craft this paper as a series of essays discussing the approach I took to beat cancer. I hope it will help others in their fight.
Some may be skeptical as to whether or not I was a miracle. I offer this as proof. First, my cancer tumor had grown so large that the clinical odds were vastly against me. Secondly, the oral surgeon who put his finger down my throat and said, “It’s a tumor and it’s bad,” began to stammer a year later when I went to see him. He exclaimed, “I was certain you were a dead man!” Thirdly, two years later, my oncologist who told me to “use my time wisely to get my affairs in order”, ran out of the Cancer Center leaving his patients behind and flagged me down in the parking lot as I was driving away. He gave me a book by American philosopher, Wendell Berry, and signed it, “To a real warrior”.
My approach to surviving cancer can be distilled into what I call the Six Fs. These are faith, fitness, food, absence of fear, willingness to fight, and family and friends. The first essay deals with faith.
RULE ONE: When faith and hope are all you have, you better figure out what you believe and just how fervently you believe in it.
The question of belief requires a level of faith which is “the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) Therefore, faith is the language that God uses to speak to us. Faith is tricky because it also carries a level of naivety associated with it. We use simple faith every day when driving our cars because we believe that the other driver passing us loves himself as much as we love ourselves and is not going to end our lives by slamming tons of steel into us. Even though the sanity of humanity is dubious, we are not dissuaded by our commute and operate by faith.
In addition, nothing is as you perceive it to be. If asked how fast you are traveling you would think, “I am just sitting here.” But you are moving through space at over 650,000 miles an hour. The earth spins, the solar system spins, our galaxy spins and we think that the universe spins but we cannot yet measure that rotation. So while from your vantage point you might perceive you are stationary, it is not true. Moreover, you might think things are truly solid and that, too, is not true. Everything you survey is made of infinitely smaller parts consisting of molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons. Those might be made up of energy strings. Your body is made up of electrical impulses, chemical reactions, cells and DNA . When it gets tired of dividing, you die. Nothing exists as you see it. Thus, if things outside our vision and human knowledge exist and if we have faith in other trivial areas of life, then why discount God’s existence?
Most of my life I have followed the faith of many of our nation’s founders and those of the age of enlightenment as a deist. I believed that God was not active, but from time to time He reaches down to humankind and guides us. Thomas Jefferson who based his life philosophy on that notion created his own bible, the Jefferson Bible, by cutting out all the miracles. I was really comfortable with his construct. Then, I found I needed a miracle.
HERE IT COMES
I had been suffering from a bad earache and my voice had been changing for over a year. During that time I had been to six doctors, dentists and specialists and every one of them misdiagnosed me. During the summer of my diagnoses I was an adjunct professor teaching summer session at North Idaho College. Toward the end of the session students had noticed a big difference in my speech patterns and quietly questioned me about the change. Then my wife, Debi, begged me to go see another oral surgeon. Her request gave rise to a heated debate with her telling me, “I know something is wrong all the way to my marrow.”
To prove how wrong she was, I decided to go one last time to another doctor. As I sat in the oral surgeon’s chair, I could see the look in his eyes and it was not reassuring. He told me, “It’s a tumor and it’s bad.” He made an appointment for me to go back to the same ear, nose and throat (ENT) doctor that I had been to the year before. The ENT told us it was a bad cancerous tumor and asked me to get treatment immediately. I asked him why he did not catch the tumor earlier and he told me, “I probably should have.” Later on I found out he had early onset of Alzheimer’s. He performed a terrible biopsy which caused my tongue to turn sideways in my mouth. After the consultation I could hardly stand. I dove into the nearby bathroom, threw myself against the wall and slid to the floor. Then I went out of my mind.
THE REVELATION
I grew up in the Plymouth Brethren Church and later my family shifted to the Friends (Quaker) congregation. I ultimately left organized religion because it teaches all you need to do is mumble a few words asking for forgiveness as an insurance policy to get into heaven. I rejected this on several points contending the concentration of one’s life should not be on preservation of self in an afterlife. Instead, the emphasis ought to be being a truly good person and letting your light shine. Sadly, many Christians see themselves as superior to others and I am embarrassed to be associated with them and their hatred. I now attend a thoughtful Episcopal church. Even so, I prefer to identify myself as a follower of Christ and not a Christian.
COME, SWEET SPIRIT
One morning as I tried to beat depression, I jumped into the shower to freshen up when I heard an audible voice saying, “You need to kill yourself. Skip the pain, after all you have never made anything of yourself. You even live on Cypress Street. People hate you!” I was completely startled by the voice and its attack on my weakness and I screamed out, “No, no! I and the Christ are going to see this through!” Immediately, I was showered from head to toe with what I can only describe as pixie dust. I began to glow from the inside out and just stood there in awe of everything that was happening to me.
A few days later the exact same situation occurred when I was in the shower and the same nefarious voice beckoned me to kill myself. I gave the same response followed by the same pixie dust and glowing. I remember softly crying, “Is this the Divine? This is wild!”
At the time I was diagnosed with cancer, my building partner, Del Sanborn and I were remodeling a house. The trim and cabinets needed to be installed. I thought, “If I am going to die, I don’t want to leave this house a mess.” At the same time, I was taking chemo and throwing up every hour and suffering very badly. One day I was working in a closed bedroom with no doors or windows open when all of a sudden a wind came into the room. It was not just a normal wind but still it was a wind, and it blew in and through me. I gasped and looked around. Then I realized the trembling and the fear had left.
After a few months passed, I was propped upright at night trying not to suffocate from all the fluids in my mouth. I was doing my best to read. I began to pray, “Lord, don’t make my wife into a widow. She is my light in all this and does not deserve this pain.” Immediately, I was sprinkled from head to toe by the same pixie dust that had come to me in the shower. This time the force hit me so hard that if I had been standing I would have certainly been driven to the ground. At that point I knew that I was going to live and all I had to do was endure. I never again prayed for myself but offered prayers of thanks.
I want to point out that just because you receive a miracle you don’t get off without consequences. Maybe I survived for some other purpose other than my own.
The radiation to my tongue cost me my teeth when my jaw snapped in half and lifted 1/4 inch. Doctors in Seattle pulled out my entire decomposing bottom jaw and reconstructed it with the small bone out of my leg. I had to learn to walk and talk again. I exist today by drinking smoothies for every meal and I doubt I will ever eat solid food again.
TREATMENTS
Other than Alzheimer’s, cancer has to be the most scary way to die because it involves your body eating itself up with all the pain and disorientation that goes with it. Tongue cancer is not common for people who do not use tobacco products. At the time I was diagnosed, oncologists could not figure out why healthy men were getting tongue cancer which originates from the inside of their tongues rather than from the outside like the cancer tobacco users get. We now know that this cancer comes from the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV). This virus becomes head and neck cancers in men and cervical cancer in women. This virus is transmitted sexually. Before I met Debi, I was rather cheap with my body and it came back to me with a vengeance. Some people get the virus and others don’t. Fortunately for my marriage, my wife and I lucked out and I did not spread the virus to her. But the same cannot be said for other women who die every day because of the disease.
Currently, they are vaccinating young girls against the virus and it is now advisable for young boys to be vaccinated. I know that some evangelicals feel that vaccinating children to protect them from unmarried sex is wrong, but I hope, after reading this essay, they change their minds and persuade others that have held back from the inoculation to move along with the treatments.
End of part one. See the Wednesday, April 12 edition of the Shoshone News-Press for part two.