My L.A. Odyssey Part 6: Generosity Is Never A Mistake

It’s Thursday and I’m scheduled to fly home.  I spend part of the morning standing in the small front yard, enjoying a final moment of flawless humidity-free California weather and watching life in this bustling little L.A. neighborhood take place.

Helen pulls up in her car and passes me with a quck, “Hello” like you say to a stranger.  She doesn’t recognize me because I’m wearing a ball cap and sunglasses to cut down on the glare.  And I shaved my beard off the night before.  I didn’t bring the clippers I use to trim it, thinking I would only be in L.A. six days.  It was looking a bit too Grizzly Adams and I might be put in the hospital in Oklahoma City.  I wouldn’t want to tend to it then, so I used the last of the stored power in my shaver to cut it off.

I realize that not only will I be different when I go home, I’ll look different too.  I look like I’m twelve when clean shaven, which is ironic because that’s how old I was the first time I became diabetic.

“Helen, it’s me,” I say.  We laugh, pack my things in the car and head toward LAX.

“Thanks for taking me to the airport.  That’s so nice of you,” I tell her. 

She talks about how doing kind things is part of being human.  It really is no big deal for her to do this for me, even though it takes an hour to get to the airport.  She talks about the importance of giving and tells me she’ll tip the airport employee who assists me from the check-in counter to the gate. 

“Oh, you don’t have to do that.”

“Generosity is never a mistake,” she says and backs it up with a story of a time when she gave a gernerous tip and it ended up making a big difference down the line because someone remembered it.  I turn her words over in my head.  “Generosity is never a mistake.”  Five simple words that mean so much when they stand together.  I hope I can carry that with me after I’m home, after I’ve dealt with gall stones and being diabetic again, after some semblance of order is back in my life.

We stop at a Taco Bell near the airport. 

“Now I can say I took a beautiful actress to lunch,” I joke.

Helen waits with me until a guy appears to assist me.  She presses some bills in his hand and I hug her good-bye.  L.A. certainly has been surreal but in a mostly positive way.  I’ve had guardian angels in the City of Angels.  Maybe those Spanish missionaries hundreds of years ago were on to something when they named the place.

Chatting with the guy assisting me, I find his wife has a survival story of her own.  It seems all I have to do is tell my story and I attract people of a like mind.  I give him my card and tell him to have her e-mail her story to me.  It feels good to be back in this mode, going from medical case back to Man With A Mission.

I get to sit on the first row of the plane next to a guy with an injured leg and on the other side of him is a woman holding a small dog that can sense the onset of a seizure.  They are amazed at my story.

“You’re a miracle,” she tells me.  I’ve heard this before but my recent health setback makes it harder to keep that in mind.  But, like in LAX, it feels good to be back in that mode I was in at the conference, even if only for a couple of hours.

I’ve been so busy talking, I’m caught off guard when the wheels make contact with the runway.  I’m back in the Ozarks.  Part of me is relieved to be home.  Part of me wants to stay in suspened animation because early in the morning my parents and I will head to Oklahoma City to find out what, if anything, can be done.  I’m back from L.A. but the odyssey isn’t over yet.

A Year Since I Met Cancer

Last night, a friend of mine said, “It’s almost winter again.  Seem like it was just last week.”

Most years I agree with that sentiment.  This one has been much different.  This time last year, I found out I had cancer.  At various times, time has slowed to a crawl and (most recently) sped to a dizzying pace.

It had stalked me for seven months.  But, like most stalkers, it wouldn’t be able to keep its identity a secret.  I never associated the on again off again pain in my back with the anything serious, let alone cancer

The chemotherapy loomed in front of me for nearly four weeks.  There were the combined emotions of dread and anxiety to get it over with.

Then I was in the thick of it, having to be hospitalized when my body had a worse than typical reaction to the toxic drugs that fought the grapefruit-sized tumor near my lower spine.  A few days later, my beard and most of the hair on my head fell out—just in time for one of the coldest winters on record.  The cancer provided the perfect excuse to stay inside.

The last chemo treatment was in late January.  February was a blur of mouth sores that kept me from eating or speaking and fatigue that kept me from walking more than a few feet.  I dropped 25 pounds and looked like a stick figure, but was reacquainted with my abs.

In March, I was able to be on my own again, after several weeks of being cared for by my parents at their home over an hour away.  After being frailer than at any other time in my life, being on my own again scared the hell out of me, but I knew it was the only way I would fully regain my strength.

Appetite, weight, strength—they all came back gradually, in lock step with each other.  This was unlike an organ transplant, when the medications caused my appetite and weight to increase faster than any other time in my life.  Maybe that’s why this time all the weight came back lean.  By mid-July, I had regained all that I lost, but my pants have been loose since then.

I don’t recommend the cancer diet plan, so don’t envy me.  But it’s ironic that I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in.  After a couple or organ transplants and cancer.  At 47.  I have to laugh every time I think about it.

This was more brief but more intense than anything else I’ve had to face.  All that other stuff helped prepare me for this.  Just before I got out on my own again, my dad told me, “As determined as you are, I know it won’t be long before you get your strength back.  You’ll do what you have to do to make sure of that.”

It meant going to the gym again, something I’ve liked to do for 25 years.  It meant not being self-conscious about how thin and weak I was when I first went back.  It meant getting to watch the man in the mirror become less pitiful and more familiar.

This summer, I got to meet the latest version of myself.  He’s much more confident than the previous one.  The chemo left the hair thinner over his ears (of all the weird places for that to happen) so he wears a slightly shorter haircut to keep it from standing out.  He has to wear a belt more often.  He has a more intense side that he allows to come out and play (and write) once in a while.  Most things just seem easier for him now.  He’s much more driven to succeed.  And he looks older, too.  But, he’s quite comfortable in his skin, even if it has a few more wrinkles. 

Most important, he has a better sense of what he’s capable of.

In many ways, the cancer was a gift.  Even though I lost valuable time moving the writing career ball down the field, I just wouldn’t be the same man today without the experience.

This is my latest dance with “What doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger.”  I know it by heart, but I wish the band would learn a new song.

To celebrate this milestone, I’m flying to Philadelphia this weekend to visit my friend, Alan, a fellow cancer survivor.  It’s the first time I’ve flown alone in almost ten years—since before my vision worsened.  I remember an old Elton John song from the 70s, Philadelphia Freedom.  The lab numbers from a few weeks confirmed that I am free of cancer.  Flying doesn’t make me nervous.  Once I’m past airport security and high above the clouds, I might feel even freer than I do on the ground these days.

Hard to imagine, but possible.  After the past year, I don’t put limits on my imagination or the possibilities.

Surviving Youth

Today it’s been 10 years since my friend Joe was killed in a motorcycle accident.  It’s so hard to believe it’s been an entire decade.  In that time, 9/11, two wars, a severe recession, a devastating oil spill, and a bunch of other things—good, bad, and mediocre—have occurred.  I guess if there was a decade to miss out on, that would have been the one to pick.

But, of course, he didn’t get to pick.  No one does.  He was the image of health and had only been married less than a year.  He’d turned 30 a month before.  He had every reason to stick around.  A collision with a pickup truck on a rural highway killed him instantly.  I still remember that punched-in-the-gut feeling I had when I found out.  Of all the people I knew, Joe was the last one I would have predicted death at an early age.

He had a positive attitude.  We would work out together and at the start would say, “Tell me something good.”  Sometimes I had to think for a minute, but Joe could always name half a dozen right off the top of his head.  I learned a lot from him—about the right kind of attitude as well as how to lift weights to my best advantage.  A positive influence like that leaves a huge hole in your soul when it’s suddenly taken away.

In last ten years, I’ve had a kidney transplant and cancer.  There have been a few other non-life-threatening health issues mixed in with all that as well, including emergency surgery to save a badly-damaged eye.  But I’m still here.  The randomness of survival boggles my mind, even at my age.  I guess it always will.

A few years before Joe died, a buddy from high school was murdered at a fast food restaurant where he was a manager, closing up at the end of the day.  Someone cut his throat so deep it nearly severed his head.  But he survived a few more days and required dozens of units of blood. 

My first experience with death of a friend near my age was in 1985.  My friend, Terrance, was killed in a car accident.  He was riding with one of his fraternity brothers after a party.  They were drunk.  It was his 24^th birthday.  And it happened only two weeks after my grandfather died, so for me, it was an extra layer of death.  But, my grandfather was 70 and had fought cancer for six months.  It was expected.  Someone told me Terrance had been killed over the weekend while some of us stood in the hall at the U of A before class started.  I just walked away and wandered around campus for a while, not able to think.

It’s hard to imagine Terrance at nearly 50 years old.  I’ve known others who died at a younger age than I am now.  They’re in suspended animation.  One will always be 36, another 39. 

Yet here I am, in spite of the odds.  I’ve been told more than once, “You’ve already dealt with more than most people do in a lifetime.”  I think they mean an average lifetime lasting 75 years or so.

What is it that causes males to check out early?  At conception, more than half of all fetuses are male.  From then on, males die at a higher rate than females.  Maybe testosterone makes us crave danger and leads us into all kinds of risky behaviors.  Being male means dodging bullets—literally and metaphorically—while watching our buddies run out of luck.

My luck has held out longer than I thought it would.  I wish I could have shared that luck with all of my friends.  Here I sit, in middle age with surgery scars I wear like medals of battles won.  Those friends I mentioned will always be young in my mind, because youth wasn’t something they survived. 

Funny thing about youth is we rush through it, sometimes so recklessly some of us don’t survive it.  Then it wears off and we’re wiser and more cautious.  We wish for the chance to be young again, knowing that if we experienced it a second time, we might not live to see the end of it.

Happy Birthday to Me--And All the Other Survivors

I rarely call much attention to my own birthday, especially since I passed 40 so long ago it’s almost disappeared from my rearview mirror.  If you count the two transplant surgeries, I get to celebrate three birthdays a year.  Unlike the original one, I can remember those two. 

But, this year is different. 

Last year, my birthday landed on Memorial Day.  It’s something that happens every few years.  It’s a bit surreal having a birthday that occasionally lines up with a roaming holiday like Memorial Day, Labor Day, or Thanksgiving.  At the end of May, cold and flu season is long over.  You don’t have to worry about being sick on your special day.  But, last year, there was some kind of bug going around and I coughed and sneezed all weekend.  I wondered if it was some kind of omen about the year to come.

It turns out that it was.

In the late fall, I was diagnosed with cancer.  It was a highly curable form of it, but it was cancer just the same.  That meant chemotherapy and all the nasty side effects that go with it.  By the time I had been at it for nine weeks, I was cured.  The word that keeps coming to my mind is ‘intense.’  It was a relatively brief encounter with The Big C, but it left me reeling for a few months afterward.

Last winter, I spent a lot of time watching TV.  Beside sleeping and checking e-mail once in a while, it was the only thing I felt like doing.  I saw a commercial in which a woman sang “Happy Birthday” and said it was for everyone who had survived cancer to celebrate another birthday.  First of all, it was nice to see a commercial where no one was trying to sell me anything.  It was a relief to see one that wasn’t so weird and vague that I was left wondering just what the message was.  And it was really special to be honored in such a way.

That commercial was months early for me, but I had faith that I would live to mark another year.  I’ve always loved having a birthday this time of year.  It was always during those first, sweet days of summer vacation from school.  It put the period (sometimes the exclamation mark) at the end of the school year.  Move on to the next grade, then turn a year older.

I share a birthday (May 31^st) with celebrities Clint Eastwood, Joe Namath, Brooke Shields, and writer Walt Whitman.  Now, there’s a mixed bag!

This year, I share the celebration with everyone who has beat cancer and those living with it that made it through another year.  After cancer, life just doesn’t look the same.  We’re part of the same tribe now.  We have a bond.

You know what they say about getting older—it beats the alternative.

I belong to a few other tribes who know this fact better than most people do.  There are the others who had a kidney/pancreas transplant.  There are those who had another type of transplant.  There are the diabetics—that includes the current and former ones (like me).

This birthday will be especially sweet.  The cancer was timed well in my case.  I get to look and feel like myself again on that day.  I’m a year older, but thanks to the cancer, I’m “new and improved” in many ways.  Once you’ve dealt with cancer, everything else seems pretty easy.

And so, to all of us who have survived something intense, whether it was health-related, a natural disaster, or something caused by the malice or carelessness of another—Happy Birthday.  Not matter what day it is.