A Lucky Life Interrupted (3 page)

“When I was a resident,” Dr. Hannafin told me, “if someone came in with compression fractures in their bones it was likely an African American male in their sixties. Now it is often a male or female up and down the age scale.”

She was diagnosed about four months earlier than I and elected to have a stem cell transplant when drugs alone didn't get her numbers back to normal. It was not
easy. She was in the hospital seventeen days and confined to her home for weeks, battling fatigue and weight gain, a new experience for this world-class athlete.

Now she's back to her old regimen, bicycling 162 miles in two days for an MM research benefit. “Finishing that was quite emotional,” she said, adding, “I only think about myeloma when I can't do what I used to take for granted.” I am silently determined to match her bike ride at the same stage in my recovery.

As a physician, Hannafin thinks she's a better communicator now that she's had both experiences, those of healer and patient. “I write down a lot more for patients than I did in the past.”

Dr. Hannafin's experience as a patient and as a physician is not unusual for cancer victims. Cancer of whatever flavor triggers a reflective gene: Just let me live and I will learn to be a better person. In the past when I'd be at an event for cancer research and cancer survivors were asked to stand I'd be surprised by how many were in the room, but there my curiosity would end. Now when I meet a cancer survivor I want to know, “What kind? Where were you treated? How has your life changed?”

It is a club, a bond built on survival and the common anxiety of having your body turn on you in such a vicious way.

This was all new to me that humid Minnesota Thursday night in August. I wasn't in denial, but neither was I fully comprehending the radical change about to descend on me.

I decided the JFK script would be the best distraction and so I skipped the regular Thursday night board dinner and went to the computer, dividing my attention between “What do we know about Kennedy now that we didn't know then?” and “Does this mean radiation or chemo? Rochester, or can I be treated in New York?”

I needed to know more about this alien invasion of bone marrow. Google “multiple myeloma” and there it is: Plasma cells that help you fight infections become cancerous and multiply at dangerous rates, affecting bone strength, kidney function, energy. In short, in multiple myeloma good blood cells become bad cells and no one yet knows why.

The median age for onset is sixty-five. Men are more susceptible than women and African Americans are twice as likely as whites to get the disease.

It represents a small part of the cancer universe, affecting only about 1 percent of the people who get the disease.

That's as much as I wanted to know that night. I needed to get some sleep, and the more I knew about my new condition, the smaller the chance I would rest easy.

I wouldn't find a cure or even much more relief in the Google universe. There will be more questions, many more, tomorrow and beyond.

The phone rang. A fellow trustee and friend so close we might as well be brothers called to ask, “Where are you? Is something up?”

Ron Olson, the uberlawyer for Warren Buffett and various major corporate interests, intuitively knew that my absence from the trustees' dinner meant something was amiss.

I said, “Meet downstairs for a martini.” Actually, we had one and a half as I explained what I knew. Since we share lifestyles, family values, physical activities, and, most of all, life stories, I could tell he was computing what this surprising, even shocking, news meant.

We both grew up in small midwestern towns, married very gifted local women, caught the brass ring in our professions, and never quite got over all the good fortune that came our way. I asked Ron to keep it to himself until I knew more. I did not want to become a photo on the Internet: Tom Brokaw, cancer victim. That was the beginning of a dual ordeal: how to find out more about the progress of the disease and settle on a treatment while keeping the news confined to family and a very few who would need to know.

I made it through the evening and the next morning's
board meeting, but I cannot say I was single-minded. As everyone left for the airport, I stayed behind for the mixed news from Dr. Gertz. He was right about the overall diagnosis, but his worries about the upper spine being involved were misplaced. It is multiple myeloma, he said, adding, “Eight years.” I didn't blink but quickly asked, “Eight years and out?”

“Yes,” he said, “but that's the current estimate for your condition. There's been great progress in treating this. We've learned fifty percent more than we knew before. People are living with this well beyond the estimates.

“We need a more complete look,” he explained. “Do you have time for an MRI?” He wanted me to undergo the magnetic resonance imaging that requires full-body immersion in a high-tech cylinder.

I am told many patients are claustrophobically uncomfortable with MRIs. I usually like the isolation and the opportunity to nod off. Not this time. By late Friday afternoon the clinic is mostly deserted after a hectic five-day schedule, so I was alone with two pleasant technicians, encased for an hour with the eerie electronic sounds of the MRI tube, rehearsing what I would say to Meredith when I returned to Montana later that night.

Who else needs to know? Family, especially Jennifer, our physician daughter; NBC's senior management, my
bosses. By the end of the hour my normal “bring it on” self-confidence was weakened a bit, not helped by the lonely, utterly clinical setting in which I found myself.

An MRI is a cacophony of weird electronic sounds echoing through a narrow steel tube as you slide back and forth slightly for a series of scans. Click. Buzz. What is it seeing? Are those rogue blood cells like the old Pac-Man monsters, eating up the good cells?

After an hour I had second thoughts about my ease with the procedure. It did give me time to think about my new life and how I might deal with it. As a journalist I immediately thought of keeping a journal, which led to this book, and the occasional reporter's notebook shorthand of MM for multiple myeloma.

Before the MRI I had scrambled to find a plane back to Montana. A usually reliable charter operator signed up and then fumbled the scheduling, so I would be getting home late and in a slower, uncomfortable prop aircraft. It was a long ride through the dark of a prairie night as we crossed out of Minnesota and into North Dakota before Montana was below. Big Sky country up on the northern latitudes, a muscular tapestry of geography still not completely tamed two hundred years after Lewis and Clark pushed through its mountains and rivers, the grasslands and forests, in search of a passage to the Pacific.

A midnight arrival at the small, deserted Livingston, Montana, airport was the beginning of the next difficult passage: when exactly to tell Meredith, who was waiting with another member of the family, our Labrador retriever, Red. A darkened car on a dangerous road was not a good place to break the news that would change her life as well. On the long eighteen-mile drive on a twisting gravel road to the ranch I kept up a steady stream of gossip from the Mayo board meeting and asked about some ranch issues.

In the small upstairs bedroom of our modest ranch house I made a drink—Scotch on the rocks—showered, sat on the edge of the bed, and said, “There's something I didn't tell you.” I took her through the persistent back pain, the orthopedic optimism, and then the unexpected visit from Doctors Majka and Gertz.

“I have cancer. It's called multiple myeloma and it's a bone marrow disease. It is not curable but it is treatable, and they assure me great progress is being made.”

I had rehearsed what I was going to say because I wanted to be precise but also because I was struggling to deal with that strange tug-of-war between a new reality and a way of life I couldn't quite believe was slipping away.

I said nothing about dying from it, because I don't expect to, but I said, “This will change our lives.”

Meredith, always the cool and stoic family presence in times of stress, stared hard at this unexpected news. We hugged and I think I said, “I'm going to be okay. I've got you and the family but this won't be easy.” Or if I didn't say that, I should have.

Still trying to process what she was hearing, Meredith asked about what to expect in treatment and a few questions about the exact nature of the disease, but we were both in a wilderness of uncertainty, caught between what little I had been told and a vast tract of the unknowable.

We've been together a half century and the relationship is deeply emotional, with a hardwired circuitry of midwestern steadiness to maintain the balance.

We fell asleep in each other's arms.

Oddly, the next morning my back pain had subsided considerably, so I drove two hundred miles to central Montana to join friends on a long-planned fishing trip, packing my lower back in ice. It was a special trip with Bernard “Lefty” Kreh, one of the world's great fly fishermen even at age eighty-eight.

The trip made no sense, coming as it did just forty-eight hours after my diagnosis and the ominous signs that the backache was more than an overexercised spine. While I had no inclination to tuck into a fetal position, paralyzed by fear of the unknown, packing my fly rods,
waders, and assorted gear for a weekend as if nothing were amiss was equally foolish. By the second day I was a pretzel of pain, curled up on a friend's cabin porch, unable to gain my feet without a sharp passage of piercing, white-hot bolts through my nervous system. While keeping the full diagnosis from my companions, I decided I had to get home. Besides, Lefty was eager to meet my family and fish the Boulder River drainage.

If you need a distraction from unexpected and unpleasant realities on a long car ride, Lefty Kreh is matchless company. A veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, he returned to the United States after World War II to make his living as a master angler, trick sharpshooter, and columnist covering the outdoors. Along the way he became Ted Williams's favorite fishing companion, and for my generation, the word “legend” is completely inadequate.

On the drive we talked about his fishing trips with Fidel Castro and assorted other characters, and the sport we love. Lefty is famous for his aphorisms, having once said that one arrogant member of the fly-fishing fraternity had “as many friends as an alarm clock.”

He never stops trying to improve on whatever is before him, from managing forty feet of fly line on a windy day to tying his shoes. But it is with a heavy, nine-foot saltwater fly rod in his eighty-eight-year-old hands that he becomes a maestro. The combination of rod, fly line,
translucent leader, and imitation scuttling crab becomes a ballet under his light and unerring touch.

Lefty would stay at our place. I had arranged for him to fish with some local friends with whom I share a vintage dude ranch we've converted into a boys' fishing club. It wasn't difficult. Asking “Do you want to fish with Lefty Kreh?” is the angling equivalent of “Do you want Derek Jeter to help your son with his baseball skills?”

My back was not improving, so I was spending much of my time prone on our large upstairs bed, trying to anticipate which twitch would light up the pain meter. By nightfall I was all but immobilized, so getting out of bed was a roll onto the floor and a crawl to the bathroom. By the second day, Meredith called the Mayo team, and they began prescribing ever more powerful pain relievers. Nothing worked.

Our youngest daughter, Sarah, brought grandson Archer to my side for a quick kiss, and as I raised my head to receive it, my body exploded with pain. My knees involuntarily went to my chin and my arms flailed about.

Meredith said, “That's it; we're getting you on a plane to Rochester.” By then I was in a haze of pain, agreeable to any suggestion that would relieve this cruel condition.

Months later Sarah quietly confessed that this was a terrifying passage for her, the first time she fully realized I would not be around forever, just as she was beginning this exciting new phase of her life as a mother.

Two highly efficient emergency medical technicians arrived with an ambulance from Livingston and a supply of Demerol. As one EMT injected me, the other unfolded the carrying chair that would get me down the narrow stairs and into the ambulance for the ride to Bozeman, sixty miles away.

There is a shorter route, but it is a back-beater in the best of times.

My new friends the EMTs were at once cowboytough and sensitive to my pain, confusion, and occasional hallucination. One EMT was my GPS system. “Okay, Tom, a rough stretch right ahead coming out of Big Timber.” Or, “We're halfway home, heading up the grade west of Livingston.” “Steady—railroad tracks ahead.”

Prone on a stretcher, I was squeezed into a small jet with Meredith and two attendants from the charter company for the three-hour flight to Rochester. I was in and out of consciousness, so delusional that when we arrived in Minnesota I thought we were back in New York.

When I awoke the next morning in a hospital bed at Saint Marys, part of the Mayo complex, I was pumped through with painkillers and for the first time in forty-eight hours I had some relief. A new life was beginning to take shape, for better and for worse. There wouldn't be many easy days, but I was in a world-class hospital
with my wife and had constant attention from the medical team. I was not in a helicopter in Iraq or Afghanistan, missing a leg or more, being rushed to a surgery station and an uncertain fate.

Having spent time at Walter Reed and many VA facilities, watching young men and women trying to put their lives and bodies back together, offers a perspective that came back to me again and again in the weeks ahead. Some of those visits had unexpectedly laughable conclusions. A few years ago former U.S. senator Bob Kerrey and I made a joint appearance at a Nebraska-wide benefit in Omaha, where we both had a connection. After a successful evening the grateful sponsor offered to fly us to South Dakota, where I had arranged a weekend of pheasant hunting.