Chicken Soup for the Cancer Survivor's Soul (24 page)
Read Chicken Soup for the Cancer Survivor's Soul Online
Authors: Jack Canfield
An odd look crossed the woman’s face, and I added, “Oh! I live in 4R. I moved in recently.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve seen you through the window.” Then, after an almost imperceptible hesitation, “Of course, I’ll give you a lift. Let me get my car key.”
“Your car key?” I repeated. “Isn’t that it in your hand?”
She looked down. “No, no, I was just going to get my mail. I’ll be right back.” And she disappeared upstairs, ignoring my “Ma’am! Please! I don’t mean to put you out!” I was terribly embarrassed. But when she came back, she spoke so warmly as we plodded our way to a garage across the street that I stopped feeling uncomfortable.
“You know the way better than I,” she said. “Why don’t you drive?”
“I can’t,” I said.
Now I felt inept again.
She just laughed and patted me on the hand, saying, “It’s not so important,” and then I laughed, too.
“You remind me of my grandmother,” I said.
At that, a slight smile crossed her lips. “Just call me Grandma Alice. My grandchildren do. And you are...?” As she maneuvered her car—one of those big cars, like a tank—down the slushy streets, I introduced myself.
When she dropped me off, I thanked her profusely and stood there waving as she drove away. My final exam was a breeze compared with the ordeal I’d gone through to get to it, and asking Grandma Alice for help had loosened me so that after class I was able to ask easily, “Is anyone going my way?” It turned out that while I’d been waiting for a bus every night, three fellow students passed my apartment house. “Why didn’t you say something before?” they chorused.
Back home as I walked up the stairs, I passed Grandma Alice leaving her neighbor’s apartment. “Good night, Mrs. Green. See you tomorrow,” the neighbor was saying.
I nodded to them and was four steps up the staircase before the name registered in my brain. Mrs. Green. The woman with cancer. “Grandma Alice” was Mrs. Green.
I stood on the stairs, my hand covering my mouth, as the... grotesqueness was the only word I could think of ...of what I had done hit me: I had asked a person struggling with cancer to go out in a snowstorm to give me a lift to school. “Oh, Mrs. Green,” I stammered, “I didn’t realize who you were. Please forgive me.”
I forced my legs to move me up the stairs. In my apartment, I stood still, not taking my coat off. How could I have been so insensitive? In a few seconds, someone tapped on my door. Mrs. Green stood there.
“May I tell you something?” she asked. I nodded slowly, motioning her toward a chair, sinking down onto my couch. “I used to be so strong,” she said. She was crying, dabbing at her eyes with a white linen handkerchief. “I used to be able to do for other people. Now everybody keeps doing for me, giving me things, cooking my meals and taking me places. It’s not that I don’t appreciate it because I do. But tonight before I went out to get my mail, I prayed to God to let me feel like part of the human race again. Then you came along...”
Linda Neukrug
Though my wife, Harriet, is fine today, in 1972 she had both breasts removed to stop the spread of cancer. Harriet’s illness showed me how uniquely destructive cancer is psychologically as well as physically. I also discovered that the emotional distress that accompanies cancer can be almost as debilitating as the illness itself. Because of that realization—and while continuing to practice law in Beverly Hills—I began to study the effect that emotions have on the onset and course of the disease. One of the most important facts I learned is: The belief that everyone with cancer dies of that illness is a dreadful myth. The truth is that there are over 8,000,000 people in the United States today to whom cancer is a memory. This information brings joy and hope to the heart of any person who has ever dreaded the onset of cancer.
My study continued until 1982, when—armed with the information I had gleaned over that 10-year period—I conceived of the Patient Active Concept. The power of the Patient Active Concept awed me. I retired from the practice of law to found The Wellness Community* based on it. I based the Wellness Community Patient Active Concept on the premise that cancer patients don’t have to be hopeless, helpless and passive in the face of the illness. There are many actions they can take as partners with their physicians that are likely to improve the quality of their lives, and that may increase the possibility of recovery. Isn’t that liberating and empowering? The Wellness Community Patient Active Concept sets forth a series of methods cancer patients can use to join their physician in the fight for recovery: using guided imagery, making plans for the future, controlling stress, avoiding pain, and many others that may have a positive effect on the course of the illness.
The purpose of The Wellness Community was and is to help cancer patients learn what they need to know to fight for their recovery as partners with their physicians. The Wellness Center does this without charging the patient in any way—it is free. Since its founding, over 30,000 participants have used The Wellness Community and over 1,000 physicians have referred their patients to us.
I believe the interaction these people have with each other at The Wellness Community also makes them aware of how much control they have over their lives. They become aware that all of life is a series of choices we must make—whether we want to or not—and that control is not a single act but is a culmination of the decisions we make. It starts with decisions such as, “Taking into account my need for the salary and the insurance my job provides, I will decide whether to remain in this job.” If someone has cancer, it may be important to exert control with the following types of decisions: “I will choose what arm the injection will be given into”; “I will choose just how much I will participate in my fight for recovery”; and if the illness becomes desperate, “I will choose how that information will affect me and how I will react to that situation.” All of this culminates in the ultimate control: “I know that whatever choice I make will be the correct choice for me.”
Harold H. Benjamin, Ph.D.
* Harold H. Benjamin, Ph.D., is founder and president of The Wellness Community, Santa Monica, California, and is the author of
The Wellness Community Guide to Fighting for Recovery from Cancer.
For more information call 310-314-2555.
Keyboarding for help on the information superhighway took a new turn this year when a cancer patient posted his SOS on a computer bulletin board and tapped into the Corporate Angel Network (CAN)*, the not-for–profit organization that arranges for cancer patients to use empty seats on company aircraft for transportation to treatment centers across the United States.
Jay Weinberg, CAN Vice President, said an anxious cancer patient posted his inquiry on the nationwide Internet computer network about where to get transportation assistance and was referred to CAN by another Internet subscriber.
And with that one simple listing, one more person joined the ranks of CAN’s family of 8,000 cancer patients who have hitched rides aboard corporate jets.
Weinberg partnered with friend Pat Blum 14 years ago to create CAN. Both are recovered cancer patients, Blum from breast cancer 25 years ago and Weinberg from melanoma 20 years ago. Oddly, both lived within 45 miles of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and neither endured much of a commute from their homes.
But even though they did not have a difficult commute, they empathize today with what they call “the psychological and emotional journey” cancer patients must take on the road to recovery.
Blum hatched the idea that corporate jets might be able to help shuttle cancer patients when she found herself sitting on a plane waiting on the runway at Westchester County Airport in White Plains, New York, for a number of corporate jets to take off. She noticed that many of them had empty seats.
She phoned Weinberg and they toasted their enterprise over a cup of coffee. That was 14 years ago and in that time, the 8,000-plus CAN cancer patients have been shuttled by 550 participating company aircraft.
Of those, 12 corporations have flown more than 100 patients each. This year, AT&T’s 100th flight was nine–year-old Alexis Farrell, who needed a ride from her home in Washington, D.C., to New York, where she was being treated for an autoimmune deficiency.
CAN’s youngest rider to date was a 15-day-old infant, Faith Miller, whose journey from hometown Pittsburgh to New York City has also been taken by both her sister and brother, who share her genetic problem.
The oldest cancer patient on CAN so far was Emma Hughes, 93. Despite her age, she drives herself from Phoenix to Scottsdale airport, where she catches the corporate flight to her cancer treatment center in Denver.
As much work that goes into seeing that cancer patients are well taken care of in the air is done on the ground. In CAN’s offices at the Westchester County Airport, a full-time staff of three employees is assisted by a battalion of 60 volunteers who help 12 at a time during the five-day-a-week, year-long campaigns to ensure cancer patients get to their treatments.
This year, Blum and Weinberg developed a brochure to inform prospective patients about the service.
Once operated on colored index cards filed in a shoe box, CAN’s extensive network of cancer patients and participating corporate aviation departments has been computerized with the help of Weinberg’s wife, Marian, who recently updated CAN with a new software program. It is designed to keep track of the data and the flights for life that keep the organization perpetually ready.
The Corporate Angel Network
* You can contact The Corporate Angel Network by writing CAN, Inc., Building One, Westchester Airport, White Plains, NY 10604.
Perhaps it was angels. Perhaps it was fate. Perhaps it was just a stroke of luck that led little David to the home of Bob and Doris. Determining how it all happened is just not quite as important as why David’s life became so entwined with the couple. In the end the three of them, together, scaled a mountain.
But before David ever came along, before the two teachers ever married, before their love made them increasingly strong, Bob was given six months to live.
Six months. That was it. That’s all the time doctors believed he had, once they discovered bone cancer was rotting his arm, a tumor the size of a grapefruit cradled in his left shoulder. The avid surfer, however, didn’t believe his destiny was tied to such an early death, and neither did his students. Nearly 100 letters from students, teachers and parents poured in each week while Bob was going through radiation, poked at, x-rayed and given gigantic doses of chemotherapy to shrink his nasty tumor. Despite the pain, despite the surgeries, despite living in a body cast that covered half his body, Bob promised his eighth-grade students at the middle school that he would show up for their graduation at the end of the year. He opted for experimental efforts at UCLA. Rather than having his left arm amputated, they cut out the tumor and hooked in a cadaver’s bone up through his shoulder to hold it in place.
This wasn’t the first time Bob faced death. He faced it twice before. When he was 16, he was in a terrible car accident that tore away one-third of his face. He was in intensive care for two weeks and had 150 stitches to help rebuild his face. Then he served in Vietnam as an officer and was taking his men off for a mission in a tank, when his supervisor waved him back and told him he was needed. The supervisor traded places with Bob. Leaving without him, the tank was later attacked and exploded, killing all the men inside. And now, he was told he had six months. He just wasn’t going to let that happen. “I chose only to live,” Bob later said. “It’s not about putting your life in order for death. It’s not just that. It’s doing what you would normally do. Today, I’m going to go to the store. Today, I’m going to go to the theater. Today, I am alive.”
Once he had the surgery, Doris and several teachers went to see him, wondering if he could move his arm or ever use it again. He immediately showed them all how useful his arm was. He flipped them off!
He went to the beach every day, and walked in his huge body cast. He learned the art of imaging from The Wellness Community and saw himself only as well. He did as he promised and showed up, body cast and all, at his students’ graduation. They dedicated the ceremony to him and he knew he was going to make it—he was a survivor.
In 1983, Doris and Bob’s friendship blossomed into love. They married, both at the age of 38, and wanted to have children. They took two paths. Doris tried to get pregnant even though they knew she had endometriosis. And Doris knew they were both capable of adoption. For her, blood lines were secondary in the case of motherhood. She had already raised a young girl from Mexico who was abandoned by her mother. The girl’s father had showed up in Doris’ English-as-a-Second-Language class with his two children, Olga, 10, and Sotero, 13, in tow. Doris learned their mother had tricked the children into going to the United States to see their father and promised they would come home. But they never did. They moved in with their father and about 20 other people in a small apartment.
Doris couldn’t stand it. The more she learned about the family, the more she wanted to help. Olga came into the classes every night crying, longing for her mother. She was afraid. She was in a new country. She didn’t know the language. Doris took Olga and Sotero to Disneyland and to the movies. They started coming for dinner and overnight. And finally, Doris suggested to the family that they allow one of the children to move in with her.
