Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir (19 page)

O
NE IS NEVER PREPARED
when serious illness strikes a member of the family, especially when it’s sudden and the victim has always been strong and carefree. Uncle Mitch was his usual jaunty self when he told us, “Hodgkin’s disease, ever heard of it?” I hadn’t heard of it, but I could tell that Dad and the others had from their solemn demeanor. It was a mean form of cancer, and in the early 1960s it was usually a death sentence. Mitch proceeded with chemotherapy treatments the way he approached everything else—undaunted. Once, a few years earlier, when he was scheduled to have a minor surgical procedure, he said matter-of-factly, “Surgery doesn’t bother me any more than if they were cutting a piece of meat.” Even accounting for a certain amount of hyperbole, it was clear that he meant it. That contrasted with a view that I had heard Dad express: “Minor surgery is surgery that someone else is having.”

Soon it was obvious that Mitch was in serious trouble.
When I was in Lawrenceburg home from law school and would go to visit him, he was always deathly sick from the chemotherapy and hardly able to talk. He would throw up continually. This strong man began to waste away before our eyes. He spent his final days in the hospital. Dad was having a hard time going into his room. Once robust and over six feet tall, Mitch had become grotesquely emaciated. There was nothing more that could be done for him. I would go into his hospital room from time to time as the designated family member. I was in the room the night he finally died, fighting for every breath.

Mitch’s death vividly returned to me in the fall of 2004. I had married Jeri Kehn in 2002 and left the Senate in January of the next year. Jeri and I had a beautiful, healthy one-year-old daughter, Hayden. I had resumed my acting career. (Having been in law and politics, some might say, I’d never left it.)

In late 2001, after I had announced that I was not going to run for reelection to the Senate, I received a call from Dick Wolf, the creator and producer of
Law & Order
. At the time, the show was about to tie
Gunsmoke
as the longest-running dramatic TV series in the history of television. The show had made Dick Wolf a legend. Actually, I had never seen an episode of
Law & Order
, although Jeri was a big fan.

Dick said he wanted to talk to me about an idea he had—me playing the district attorney on
Law & Order
. It was totally out of the blue. I asked him if the show was set in New
York, and he confirmed that it was. I asked him if he thought that the audience might catch on that maybe I hadn’t exactly grown up in the Bronx. They had fixed that, he said—Southerner in big law firm moves to New York after September 11 and wants to do public service. Then I wondered if it was going to be another deal where the lone Southerner was going to be portrayed in a not very flattering light (usually with a phony accent). Dick assured me that he had something else in mind. My DA would actually get to articulate a conservative point of view on occasion without coming off as a Neanderthal—a TV rarity indeed. Although I had minor run-ins with a few of the writers from time to time, Dick’s assurances panned out.

So I was happy, fit, and looking to the future as always, even getting back to working out on a regular basis. For insurance purposes, the actors always had to get a physical examination before each season’s shoot. They didn’t want an actor keeling over in the middle of a workweek and costing them a lot of money. I always looked upon this perfunctory examination as a nuisance. It was filling out paperwork more than anything else. During the exam this time, the studio’s doctor felt a small lump in my neck. Calling on my own medical “expertise,” I thought it was probably just a swollen gland. He agreed that that could be the case but said that I ought to get it looked at more closely. Otherwise, I checked out fine. I walked out of his office proud of the fact that my blood pressure was, as always, perfect.

I checked on the lump from time to time when I was shaving, expecting it to disappear. When it didn’t, at Jeri’s urging, I had my regular doctor take a look at it. He said that in order to be on the safe side he was going to send me to a specialist who would aspirate the lump—that is, stick a needle in it and draw out enough tissue to put it under a microscope. In a few days the results came back—negative. It was just as I thought. Nothing to worry about. So I put it out of my mind.

However, over the next several weeks I kept noticing that the small lump still presented itself. A small dose of common sense kicked in. It finally dawned on me that it is not normal for a man to be walking around the rest of his life with a lump in his neck if there was no reason for it. Through another doctor friend of mine, I arranged for an examination with a specialist in Boston, who put me through a series of tests and basically told me that he could not make a conclusive diagnosis. This situation now really began to get my attention. I arranged to be seen by the doctors at Sloan-Kettering, which had nationally renowned cancer specialists. There they explained the possibilities in fuller detail, essentially from nothing to malignancy. I noted that the lump hadn’t gotten any larger. But that fact didn’t seem to impress them much. They said that the only way they could tell for sure was by doing a biopsy. I told them, “Let’s get it done.” I still assumed that the doctors were just being very careful in laying out the worst possibility, but it was time that I knew
exactly what was going on. Of course, this biopsy sounded like full-fledged surgery to me—the operating room and being put to sleep while they cut into my neck. I thought of Dad’s definition of minor surgery.

The day before the procedure, Jeri and I flew to New York. After we checked into the hotel, we walked out into crowded streets of Christmas shoppers. It was freezing cold, but it was a glorious day. To me, the air smelled sweet, the people were friendly, and every block was a new adventure. We lingered in a little store on a side street that sold nothing but beautiful miniature carousels and bought one for Hayden. I encouraged Jeri to try on some outrageously expensive coats on Fifth Avenue, which she thoughtfully declined to purchase. I tried on a Russian fur hat as a joke, and at Jeri’s insistence wound up buying it and wearing it the rest of the trip. What a day. I was the one who wound up with the fur.

Of course, what was happening had more to do with what was going on inside me than it did with the reality around me. Even the outside possibility of bad news had heightened a dormant sensitivity to what I otherwise would have considered to be mundane. Suddenly, everything in life had become precious.

The operation went off without a hitch, and several days later the results of the biopsy were in. Jeri, Hayden, and I were in the final stages of packing to leave for Nashville for the Christmas holidays with Mom and the rest of the family when I received the call. No malignancy. Home free. Jeri
and I had kept everything about my health issue secret, and a few days later at a family gathering we told them about the scare and the good news we had received. It was a great Christmas, to say the least. I didn’t realize that the story was not over.

About ten days later, after we returned from the Christmas holiday, I was driving across the Roosevelt Bridge to our home in Virginia when my cell phone rang. It was the doctor from Sloan-Kettering. They had done some further testing. As I understood it, it was a more sophisticated level of genetic and molecular testing. These further tests revealed that their original opinion had been wrong. The biopsy indicated malignancy after all.

A few days later, I was sitting in the doctor’s office in New York listening to the details. I had what they called non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and indeed it was a form of cancer. However, there are different types of this disease. Mine was the slow-growing indolent kind, which of course is good, although incurable in that you cannot eradicate it forever. But, through treatment, you can hope to keep it in remission for long periods, maybe even indefinitely. When and if it reoccurs, you can treat it again and buy another chunk of time. These are statistical generalities, of course, partly dependent on one’s response to the treatment. Hodgkin’s disease, which Mitch had died from, is a type of lymphoma. To
add to the irony, nowadays Hodgkin’s is considered to be curable. My former colleague, Arlen Specter, the senator from Pennsylvania, had Hodgkin’s disease in 2007 and, after treatment, is going strong at the age of seventy-nine. Strong enough, in fact, to switch parties and run for another six-year term as a Democrat. (Maybe it was the treatment that did that to him.)

No matter how much “good news” is connected with it, once you hear the C word, you are never quite the same. You know from that day forward that there is a stranger outside your door and you simply have to do everything you can to keep him from coming in. I went through all the range of emotions that one might expect. Considering my age, I kept calculating how many years it would be before Hayden finished high school, college, got married, and so on. I can honestly say that there was little self-pity. Objectively, I knew that in many ways I had already lived several lives, and I had daily reminders of the young people losing their lives in Iraq before ever even knowing their children. Then again, nobody is really objective at a time like this.

I suppose I like to think that I am very much a Thompson in a way that served me well during this period of time. When I was growing up, the tougher things got, the better Dad got. I think this was true with regard to a lot of things in his life, but, naturally, I noticed it the most when it pertained to me. My earliest memory is when, as a child, I was being wheeled into the operating room to have my tonsils
removed, scared to death. I remember Dad’s calm as he assured me that he was going to perform the operation, the one idea that he knew would calm me down. When I accidentally pushed the end of a crochet hook deep into my finger, he kept me from panicking while he worked it out. When I broke my arm in the second grade, they had to remove the cast while I was still in the doctor’s office and put the bones back in place again. When, while horsing around, I broke the window at a local restaurant. When I had to tell him and Mom that I was going to get married, having just turned seventeen. When misfortune hit, whether by accident or my own actions, he was a pillar of strength and understanding. It was the way he dealt with me, and it was the way that he dealt with other people. He was simply a fellow who could be relied upon. When I became an adult, I realized that now it was my turn to exhibit those same traits. It was something that he gave to me that neither college degrees nor wealth could buy. I felt it every time things got a little tough. The key is not always to live up to the standards that are set for you but that you always try. It’s like what someone said about a conscience: It doesn’t keep you from engaging in bad behavior, it just makes it so you can’t enjoy it nearly as much. And I didn’t enjoy it very much when I did not live up to Dad’s standards. My uncle Mitch, with a lot more swagger, fit the same mold.

The more I was learning about my condition, the better I felt about it. There was a drug, Rituxan, that had become
available just five years earlier that was approved for my condition. I soon began my treatment at the Lombardi Cancer Center at the Georgetown Hospital in Washington, under the care of Dr. Bruce Cheson. The medicine was administered intravenously for a couple of hours at a time. Although I was told that the side effects were nothing like chemotherapy’s, I was prepared for the worst. But, surprisingly, there were no aftereffects at all. None. I would receive a treatment, get unhooked, and go on about my business as if nothing had happened. After a few intermittent CT scans and MRIs, I was pronounced to be in total remission. My last treatment was in 2005, and I now go in for a checkup every six months or so. From the very beginning I have not had one sick day. I have every reason to believe, with just what is available in today’s medicine, that I can live a normal life span—in large part due to a drug that was not available until a few years ago.

The disease from which Mitch had died a young and agonizing death was not exactly what I had, but it was pretty doggone close, and today people with exactly what Mitch had are living happy lives in remission. Countless numbers of people, including children, have died over the centuries from diseases that are treatable or manageable today. This is in large part due to the miracle of modern medicine. I recall the many times I sat on the Senate floor and listened to colleagues who would rail against the “big drug companies” and their profits, disregarding the billions of dollars spent
and the years that pass before a new drug can be brought to the market. Not only did I have reason to appreciate modern medicine for my condition, but it is also probably keeping my mother alive. What kind of price tag should we put on that? One hopes the answer will continue to be provided by America’s free market and not a government that fixes prices and rations health care in order to contain costs. If that happens, the research and development simply won’t be there. We should help those who can’t afford modern medicine, but we should never slow down its development.