Chicken Soup for the Cancer Survivor's Soul (17 page)

That first chemo session was a doozy. I suffered intractable nausea and got so dehydrated that I had to be rushed back to the hospital for emergency treatment. But after a few days, Toni and I flew home. Coming home is always a relief to a professional athlete, the real reward at the end of the game. This time it was even more so.

Anyone who has seen me golf knows I am not a player who disguises his emotions. You don’t need the TV commentator to tell you if I am happy or upset with a shot. I’ll let you know. That’s me, not exactly Mr. Mellow. Yet the first few days home, I found myself spending hours in our backyard just looking at the flowers and the trees, or watching birds through binoculars. I was getting so mellow it was beginning to scare me! “Maybe the chemo went to my brain,” I told Toni, joking.

The phone rang regularly with well-wishers, including President Bush and even my PGA competitor Greg Norman. I found out that the Shark has a soft side.

Then one morning while I was getting ready for the day, something happened. I stood in my bedroom praying, wondering in the back of my mind what would happen if I didn’t get better. The sun was forcing its way through the blinds when suddenly, a powerful feeling swelled over me like a huge, gently rolling wave lifting my feet off the sand bottom of the sea. I stopped everything I was doing and experienced an incredible, peace-giving sensation. I knew that God was with me, and I felt absolutely assured that I would be okay. It wasn’t that God told me what would happen next or that the cancer would go away. I simply felt positive I was in his complete and loving care no matter what.

I am blessed to say that today, two years after my diagnosis, the cancer is gone. I’m back on the tour trying to shake the rust off my golf game. Dr. Jobe said it was probably a good thing I didn’t rush out to California right after the PGA title because at that time, the number of cancer cells in my body might not have been sufficient to show up on a biopsy. I guess in a way, my competitive drive saved me after all, but what keeps me going most these days is the chance to be an example for others who are struck by disease, to help them see that God is there for them no matter what. That’s all you need to know to get through anything in life. That is the real “major.”

Which is not to say, of course, that the next time I find myself in a playoff with the Shark you won’t be able to tell how I feel about a shot. I am the way God made me, and I don’t think the Lord is interested in tinkering with my golf game.

Paul Azinger

Say a Prayer

I was taking my usual morning walk when a garbage truck pulled up beside me. I thought the driver was going to ask for directions. Instead, he showed me a picture of a cute little five-year-old boy. “This is my grandson, Jeremiah,” he said. “He’s on a life-support system at a Phoenix hospital.” Thinking he would next ask for a contribution to his hospital bills, I reached for my wallet. But he wanted something more than money. He said, “I’m asking everybody I can to say a prayer for him. Would you say one for him, please?” I did. And my problems didn’t seem like much that day.

Bob Westenberg

On Faith

P
ray to God, but row for shore.

Russian proverb

Phyllis, a patient who had an extensive pancreatic cancer that was no longer responding to treatment, went home to die. Several months later she returned to the office. One of my partners examined her. He opened the door of the examining room and called me: “Hey, Bernie, you’re interested in this stuff.”

I came in and he said, “Her cancer’s gone.”

“Phyllis,” I said, “tell them what happened.”

She said, “Oh, you know what happened.”

“I know that I know,” I said, “but I’d like the others to know.”

Phyllis replied, “I decided to live to be a hundred and leave my troubles to God.”

Peace of mind can heal anything. I believe faith is the essence, a simple solution, yet too hard for most people to practice.

To verify this I went to God (surgeons have that prerogative) and asked why I couldn’t hang a sign in my waiting room saying, “Leave your troubles to God, you don’t need me.” God said, “I’ll show you why. I’ll meet you at the hospital at 10 A.M. Saturday.” (God likes to play doctor.)

On Saturday he said, “Take me to your sickest patient.” I told him about a woman with cancer whose husband had run off with another woman. He said, “Good case,” and we went up to her room.

I said, “Ma’am, God is going to come in and tell you how to get well. I always introduce him so patients are not overwhelmed.”

She responded, “Oh, wonderful.”

God entered the room and said, “All you have to do is love, accept, forgive and choose to be happy.”

She looked him in the eye and said, “Have you met my husband yet?”

Most of us want God to change the external aspects of our lives so that we don’t have to change internally. We want to be exempt from the responsibility for our own happiness. We often find it easier to resent and suffer in the role of victim than to love, forgive, accept and find inner peace. As W. H. Auden has written,

We would rather be ruined than changed;
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

Yet, when we choose to love, healing energy is released in our bodies. Energy itself is loving and intelligent and available to all of us.

Now I felt I had a dilemma: If God’s love could cure people, I wondered, why should I remain a surgeon? So I returned to him and said, “God, you know one of my patients got well leaving her troubles to you. Why should I remain a surgeon? Why not just teach people to love?”

And God in his beautiful sweet, melodious voice said to me, “Bernie, render unto the surgeon what is the surgeon’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” (I find that God does that a lot—speaks in parables and leaves you totally confused.) Since then I’ve come to understand that God and I both have a role in getting people well.

Let me illustrate what I mean with an old story I’ve adapted.

A man with cancer is told by his primary physician he’ll be dead in an hour. He runs to the window, looks up at the sky, and says, “God, save me.” Out of the blue comes that wonderful melodious voice saying, “Don’t worry, my son. I will save you.” The man climbs back into bed, feeling reassured.

His physician calls me and I walk in and say, “If I operate in an hour, I can save you.”

“No thanks,” says the man, “God will save me.”

Then the oncologist, a radiation therapist and a nutritional therapist all tell him, “We can save you.”

“I don’t need you, God will save me,” is his reply to all of them.

In an hour the man dies. When he gets to heaven, he walks up to God and says, “What happened? You said you’d save me, and here I am dead.”

“You dumbbell. I did try to save you. I sent you a surgeon, an oncologist, a radiation therapist and a nutritional therapist.”

Bernie S. Siegel, M.D.

The Holy Water

Lola was a humor therapist at the time of her diagnosis, so she said her immediate reaction was to find the humor where possible and encourage her friends to do the same. One instance stayed with her.

“I’m Catholic, but go to church anonymously because I don’t want to get involved. I just like to go. Someone gave me some holy water from Lourdes back before the cancer, and I was in the habit of blessing my husband before he left for work. For fun, you know—‘Wait, you haven’t been blessed.’ Well, I ran out of water and wanted some and didn’t want to ask the priest. So I took my little bottle and filled it from the font after everyone left the church. I told my friend I felt bad about stealing holy water. Anyway, after my biopsy she said it was because I got hold of some bad holy water, and when I woke up after surgery there was a big poinsettia from her and a juice jug of holy water. I still have some in my closet. It’s got algae growing on the bottom, but I can’t bear to get rid of it.”

Kathy LaTour

Great Expectations

F
aith is to believe what we do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.

Saint Augustine

May 1st was supposed to be a day of happy excitement, the day I would bring my husband home to our little town in Arkansas from the big city hospital in Memphis. Instead, the doctor had unexpectedly scheduled Byzie for his fourth surgery in six months. Byzie came through it all right. But the uncertainty of his situation—an unfinished battle with cancer—kept me from feeling any relief. Now I sat in the intensive care waiting room. In two hours, I could spend 15 minutes with him.

My thoughts turned to our children many miles away, making do at home while I stayed with Byzie. I found myself remembering a bleak conversation with the two oldest girls after they’d heard the news of their father’s latest surgery.

“When one member of a family has cancer, it’s as if the whole family has it,” 16-year-old Kathey had said forlornly.

Karen, our 17-year-old, nodded sadly. “Now Dad won’t make it home in time for my graduation, will he?”

Karen was right. It was unlikely that Byzie would be home by May 10. And Kathey was right about the contagious effect of Byzie’s illness. Our four children, taking their cue from me, became more despondent each day. Kristen, six, clinged too tightly, cried too easily. Alan, nine, had nightmares.

I fumbled for a tissue and forced myself to look about the waiting room. A surgeon in green operating room coveralls strode in and began talking in muted tones to the string of family members that quickly knotted around him. One of them was obviously the mother: tall, finely chiseled, with silver hair. She swayed against one of the two young men on either side of her, then straightened and began walking unassisted toward an empty cluster of chairs near me. Her family followed.

I grabbed an outdated magazine and shrank back into my chair. I would not intrude on their sorrow; I did not want them to trespass on mine.

Hidden behind my magazine, I let the painful memories come back. First Byzie had tests; then came the diagnosis, and one of the ugliest words in Webster’s entered our lives.

Through the early stages, faith and assurance were strong. The major word in our household was
when: when
Dad would go fishing with Alan,
when
Dad would fix Kristen’s bike. I tried remembering the exact moment that
when
had become
if.
Summer... autumn and icy winter had disappeared. Now pink and white dogwood blossoms trembled on their branches. A neighbor had fixed Kristen’s bike; friends took Alan fishing.
If
was changing to
never
in my mind.

My magazine slipped to the floor and I buried my face in my hands, forgetting the family next to me.
Father,
I prayed silently,
I don’t want to be like Job’s wife, but everything seems so hopeless. Please help me.

A clean linen handkerchief was pressed into my hand. “Here, honey, some cries take more than a tissue.”

Startled, then embarrassed, I couldn’t stop sobbing. The handkerchief was as wilted as I was when I finally looked up into a sea of black faces and concerned brown-velvet eyes. Six young adults—three women and three men—and their mother had positioned their chairs in a semicircle around me. One of the men handed me a steaming cup of coffee. Introductions were made. They were the Turner family.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I lost control for a moment. I’ll be all right.”

“I know you will.” Mrs. Turner smiled sympathetically. “Sounds like you’re to the point of having to get by on evidence now.”

I must have looked confused.

“She doesn’t know what you mean, Mama,” one of the daughters said, “Not many people know Papa’s way of believing.”

A ripple of laughter ran through their midst. As they explained, I was drawn into their family circle.

John, the Turners’ father, had been reared on a dusty cotton plantation in Mississippi. He wanted to leave and go to the city, but it all seemed hopeless until the night he attended a “shouting and singing brush-arbor revival meeting.” The sweating evangelist had heated the ancient definition of faith to a red-hot pitch—“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1)—and those words seared his heart and mind.

After John loped home that summer evening, he rummaged around and found an empty fruit jar. He placed it by his bed. This would be the “evidence” of his faith. Little by little he would place money in that jar. God would help him fill it as many times as it took to start his journey to a new opportunity. And so, dozens of odd jobs and acres of farm work later, the jar was filled enough times for him to move to the city, to find a job with the railroad, to meet and marry the woman who was talking to me now.

“He bought a picture frame with a cardboard backing and hung it on our apartment wall, over the crack in the plaster. He said the deed for our home would hang in it someday.” Mrs. Turner’s voice broke. A daughter picked up the story.

“And after each of us was born, he hung up two empty frames—one for our high school and one for our college diploma.” She chuckled. “We’re probably the only family in the world that decorated our walls with empty frames. We had 13 of them as ‘evidence of things not seen.’”