Chicken Soup for the Cancer Survivor's Soul Read online

  Lab tests found no trace of malignant cells in the tumor tissue. No one would ever know for certain what eliminated them. The important thing was that Craig’s tumor was benign.

  A few weeks later, John Kluge came to the hospital to meet the Shergolds. When the businessman entered the room, Marion grasped his hand and thanked him. “You are our guardian angel,” she said.

  Kluge handed Craig a two-headed quarter. “This way,” he said, grinning, “you’ll never lose.”

  Then Craig presented a gift to Kluge: a mounted photograph of himself in a triumphant “Rocky” pose taken by his mother several months earlier. In it, Craig wore boxing trunks and gloves; an American flag hung in the background. The inscription read: “Thank you for helping me win the biggest fight of all.”

  John Pekkanen

  Hope

  As I ate breakfast one morning, I overheard two oncol–ogists conversing. One complained bitterly, “You know, Bob, I just don’t understand it. We used the same drugs, the same dosage, the same schedule and the same entry criteria. Yet I got a 22 percent response rate and you got a 74 percent. That’s unheard of for metastatic cancer. How do you do it?”

  His colleague replied, “We’re both using Etoposide, Platinum, Oncovin and Hydroxyurea. You call yours EPOH. I tell my patients I’m giving them HOPE. As dismal as the statistics are, I emphasize that we have a chance.”

  William M. Buchholz, M.D.

  Amy Graham

  Where there’s life, there’s hope.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  After flying all night from Washington, D.C., several years ago, I was tired as I arrived at the Mile High Church in Denver to conduct three services and hold a workshop on prosperity consciousness. As I entered the church, Dr. Fred Vogt asked me, “Do you know about the Make-a-Wish Foundation?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Well, Amy Graham has been diagnosed with terminal leukemia. They gave her three days. Her dying wish was to attend your services.”

  I was shocked. I felt a combination of elation, awe and doubt. I couldn’t believe it. I thought kids who were dying wanted to go see Disneyland, or meet Sylvester Stallone, Mr. “T” or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Surely they wouldn’t want to spend their final days listening to Mark Victor Hansen. Why would a kid with only a few days to live want to come hear a motivational speaker? My thoughts were interrupted....

  “Here’s Amy,” Vogt said, as he put her frail hand in mine. There stood a 17-year-old girl wearing a bright red and orange turban to cover her head, which was bald from all the chemotherapy treatments. Her bent body was frail and weak. She said, “My two goals were to graduate from high school and to attend your sermon. My doctors didn’t believe I could do either. They didn’t think I’d have enough energy. I got discharged into my parents’ care.... This is my mom and dad.”

  Tears welled in my eyes; I was choked up. My equilibrium was shaken. I was totally moved. I cleared my throat, smiled and said, “You and your folks are our guests. Thanks for wanting to come.” We hugged, dabbed our eyes and separated.

  I’ve attended many healing seminars in the United States, Canada, Malaysia, New Zealand and Australia. I’ve watched the best healers at work and I’ve studied, researched, listened, pondered and questioned what worked, how and why.

  That Sunday afternoon I held a seminar, which Amy and her parents attended. The audience was packed to overflowing with over a thousand attendees eager to learn, grow and become more fully human.

  I humbly asked the audience if they wanted to learn a healing process that might serve them for life. From the stage it appeared that everyone’s hand was raised high in the air. They unanimously wanted to learn.

  I taught the audience how to vigorously rub their hands together, separate them by two inches and feel the healing energy. Then I paired them off with a partner to feel the healing energy emanating from themselves to another. I said, “If you need a healing, accept one here and now.”

  The audience was in alignment and we shared an ecstatic feeling. I explained that everyone has healing energy and healing potential. Five percent of us have it so dramatically pouring forth from our hands that we could make it our profession. I said, “This morning I was introduced to Amy Graham, a 17-year-old, whose final wish was to be at this seminar. I want to bring her up here and let you all send healing life-force energy toward her. Perhaps we can help. She did not request it. I am just doing this spontaneously because it feels right.”

  The audience chanted, “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  Amy’s dad led her up onto the stage. She looked frail from all the chemotherapy, too much bed rest and an absolute lack of exercise. (The doctors hadn’t let her walk for the two weeks prior to this seminar.)

  The group warmed up their hands and sent her healing energy, after which they gave her a tearful standing ovation.

  Two weeks later, she called to say that her doctor had discharged her after a total remission. Two years later she called to say she was married.

  I have learned never to underestimate the healing power we all have. It is always there to use for the highest good. We just have to remember and use it.

  Mark Victor Hansen

  Wild Bill

  I always thought I’d live to be 83! Why that age, I don’t know, but now I’ll be grateful to make it to 58. When I am 58, Rachel will be 12—old enough to understand what is happening. Not that it is ever easy to lose a mom—even when “Mom” is really an aunt.

  Actually I am grateful for each day. Every morning when my alarm goes off, I lie in bed a few minutes. Whatever the weather, I am happy to be able to stretch my legs out, give my dog a pat, and thank God for another day. My favorite days are those when the sun streams in through my lace curtains, but I even like the sound of rain pattering on my window or the wind moving the trees against the side of the house. It is in the morning that I feel the best. It is morning that gives me hope.

  Nearly two-and-a-half years ago, a tumor on my left adrenal gland ruptured in the middle of the night, leaving me near death from excessive blood loss. As I lay on the operating table, I thought of my three grown children, of my unfinished business, but mostly I thought of Rachel, whom I’d left crying hysterically in the living room of our home when the paramedics hauled me off. Somehow, I made it through the surgery, made a rather astounding recovery and returned to work in six weeks. Rachel and I resumed our lives.

  The tumor was strange. No one could clearly say what it was except that it was malignant. Five major medical centers couldn’t identify it. I began calling it “Wild Bill.”

  For a little more than two years, I did well except for a bowel obstruction that responded to non-surgical treatment. Every three months I visited an oncologist in Chicago who did tests that I passed with flying colors. After a while, I did not think much about “Wild Bill.”

  After New Year’s this year, I began feeling excessively tired, my back ached more than usual, and I was running a low-grade fever. I was admitted to the hospital for tests. Everything from active TB (I had been exposed at work) to an arthritic condition was considered. As part of the work–up, an MRI of my abdomen was ordered. The test was supposed to take 45 minutes to an hour but stretched into two hours and beyond. My mind and heart raced and tears flowed into my ears like a river. It was the first time I cried over my illness. I could not wipe my tears away and no one could hold my hand, but I knew what the MRI showed was not good. The next day a needle biopsy of part of the tumor confirmed that “Wild Bill” had returned. I felt lost and depressed. All I could think about was Rachel.

  A rather smug but well-qualified surgeon came to see me. “We’ll do an exploratory lap and see what’s what and remove what we can, but I give you no guarantees,” he said.

  When I woke up from the surgery, I listened to those five disappointing hopeless words: “We couldn’t get it all.” They’ve yet to explain exactly what they could and could not get. Depending on whom I talked with, I had at least four differen
t versions. Maddening.

  At first my recovery was fraught with a terrible sadness that I couldn’t shake. I got thinner and thinner and I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep either and hurt too much to toss and turn, so I would lie like a board all night. Even though my family, friends and coworkers all rallied around me, I could not feel any hope. I even wished I had died the night the original tumor ruptured.

  I can’t say I snapped out of it. It was more like a gradual slide. I started chemotherapy and even though I was fearful of that, it gave me hope. Reading books was very positive for me—I read of countless hopeless cases who recovered or lived way beyond expectations. Lived good lives, too. I began feeling better. With the help of a friend and a kind priest, I learned how to pray again. Now Rachel and I pray together every night. I stopped wishing I had died that terrible night in December of 1992.

  Over the last couple of years, so many good things have happened that I would have missed. My older son published his first book, my younger son’s acting career took off again and my daughter and her boyfriend built a beautiful home for their future together. Rachel learned to ride her bike and to read. I resumed an old friendship with a cherished friend. Things that I took for granted were important to me. My sister moved back from California and we can see each other so much more often. If I had died that night I would not have been here to say goodbye to my own dad, who died last fall. Rachel may have never recovered from the trauma and suddenness of it all.

  What I really know now is that we never really know. So now when I wake up, I am grateful for whatever time I have. I feed the birds and stray cats. I pick flowers and plant some. I call my sisters and friends. I help Rachel with her homework. I feel stronger each day. “Hope” is the word, I guess; that is so important now. If I have hope, I can do my best to do all I need to do to get well.

  Mary L. Rapp

  Kids with Cansur

  Children have a remarkable talent for not taking the adult world with the kind of respect we are so confident it ought to be given. To the irritation of authority figures of all sorts, children expend considerable energy in “clowning around.” They refuse to appreciate the gravity of our monumental concerns, while we forget that if we were to become more like children our concerns might not be so monumental.

  Conrad Hyers

  The setting remains vividly etched in my memory: My husband, Craig, and I are sitting in a brightly sunlit consultation room at the Mayo Clinic. A children’s cancer specialist opposite us delivers as compassionately as possible the devastating news that our six-year-old son has a particularly deadly form of advanced cancer. Craig and I look at each other in shock, then I ask tearfully, “Is Jason going to die?” The doctor offers a somber reply.

  Years have passed, yet I can still hear those words, the doctor’s grave tone, his hesitation before answering, “If I am to be honest, I have to tell you... probably yes.”

  I suppose it’s natural for parents to avoid thinking the unthinkable. Who imagines that their home will be invaded and their child abducted by this vicious intruder? Certainly I didn’t. Children’s cancer, I thought, happens only to those wonderful, strong women canonized in the Ladies’ Home Journal. At the time of Jason’s diagnosis, I had never known anyone, adult or child, with cancer. I was a housewife and mother of four, one an infant daughter; Craig, a hardworking husband and father. We were a typical, close-knit family from rural Worthington, Minnesota. Our son’s sickness crashed into our lives like a flaming meteor through the roof of our cozy home. To say we felt unprepared and overwhelmed is an understatement. Our son didn’t die. Two grueling years of intensive chemotherapy, radiation and surgery—not to mention our flooding heaven with prayers—saved his life. Today, Jason is a healthy, active teenager, a loyal Dan Marino and Larry Bird fan who rattles the walls of our home with rock music. He is also the author of My Book for Kids with Cansur. (The title’s misspelling was as close as he could come at the time.) Jason wrote it toward the end of his medical treatment, when he seemed well on the way to recovery.

  I remember the two of us curled up on a sofa one afternoon, flipping through a children’s book about cancer, written by a young patient. As in several others we’d read together on the subject, at story’s end the little boy died. “What a terrible book!” Jason fumed. “Why do they always write books and make movies and stuff about kids who die? Didn’t they ever hear about somebody like me, who had cancer and grew up and lived? Why don’t they write a book about that?”

  Stuck for an answer, I suggested, “Maybe you ought to write your own book, Jason,” never dreaming that he actually would.

  “Well,” he said with a huff, “maybe I ought to.”

  Several months later, I was washing dishes when Jason bounded into the kitchen. “Here it is,” he said as he casually handed me his “book,” scrawled in a yellow spiral notebook. I admit, I’d expected some cutesy, silly little thing; nothing too profound. But as I turned the pages, tears streamed down my face. “If you get cansur, don’t be scared,” my son advised, “cause lots of people get over having cansur and grow up without dying.” I found it remarkable that a child could possess such insight about a disease many adults struggle to understand.

  That night I gave it to my husband to read. Closing the cover, Craig wondered aloud, “Wouldn’t it be something if we could get this into the hands of other mothers and fathers who are just starting down the path we’re finishing up?” If our son’s surviving cancer had taught us any lesson, it was that nothing is impossible.

  You’d be amazed at your resiliency when your child’s welfare is at stake. I love it when people say to me now, “Gee, Geralyn, you’re such a strong person. I could never survive something like that.” Of course they could. As parents, you do whatever you have to for your ailing child. You don’t have a choice! Our family’s story is by no means one of heroism, just of human beings’ remarkable ability to adapt and survive.

  If there was one mistake my husband and I made, it was not realizing how a child’s cancer impacts every family member, and that each has his or her own capacity to cope. Relatives, friends, teachers and co-workers all feel the profound effects of a youngster’s catastrophic illness.

  Cancer researchers have made enormous and rapid progress, especially in the field of childhood cancers. Had Jason been stricken 20 years earlier, he almost certainly would have died within a matter of weeks. In the mid–1960s, only one in five kids survived cancer, as opposed to one in three by the mid-1980s. Like most parents of children with cancer two decades before, we would have been gently advised to prepare for our son’s imminent death. Today’s cure rate has reached an all-time high of more than two in three, with recent medical advances further supporting hopes for a child’s recovery.

  Reprinted with permission from Harley Schwadron.

  It takes love and faith to emerge from such an experience intact, and it’s not easy. I must tell you that when this happened to Jason and our family, I thought our lives would always center around his disease and could never, ever be pieced back together again. But as time passed, that proved not to be the case. Our lives have evolved and we realized we were not alone. People do withstand this crisis. There can be life after children’s cancer. We are proof of that.

  Geralyn Gaes

  Cancer Has Been a Blessing

  You gain strength, courage, and confidence by each experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.”

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  “I want you to know right now, don’t try to save my breast and put my life in danger, I can live without a breast.” I said those words to my oncologist when diagnosed with breast cancer.

  I received this diagnosis of inflammatory breast cancer when I was 38 years old. This is a rare and very aggressive type of breast cancer. It accounts for only 1 to 6 percent of all breast cancers and it has a very high rate of recurrence.
I was told the doctors could treat me with chemotherapy and put me in remission for probably three to five years. Most likely after the remission, I would have a recurrence, and at this time they know of nothing that can eradicate the cancer. I told the oncologist I wanted the best treatment for my disease that he knew of. I was willing to do anything. Three to five years’ remission was not acceptable to me. My doctor told me of this aggressive protocol that was being used at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston that he would recommend for this type of breast cancer.

  The protocol required that I have strong chemotherapy for three days a week, every other week for four cycles. Then I would be admitted to Dana Farber for very high doses of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. I would then need to have a modified radical mastectomy followed by six weeks of radiation. Needless to say, I was in shock. I knew this was going to be bad, but I never expected it to be this bad. When he said I needed a bone marrow transplant, I knew my cancer was more serious than I had thought.

  After I was diagnosed by the surgeon and before I consulted with an oncologist, I took my then five-month-old granddaughter for many walks in her carriage. We walked and I talked to her. When I was outside with her, I could think more clearly, and I made many decisions while with her. She may have only been a baby, but she was a great listener and I decided then that I could not keep on crying, asking God, “Why me? Why now?” It would have been very easy to feel sorry for myself, but I realized all those thoughts were not productive. I realized that I had to face this head on and fight for the chance to be a part of my granddaughter’s life for many years to come. I told her that I was not going to go anywhere and that her “Grammy” was going to be here for her. She is one of the major reasons that I was prepared to fight and willing to do all that I could to beat this cancer. When the doctor asked me if I would be willing to go through this very difficult protocol, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.