By Jerry
Durgan
I am a survivor
of that killer disease, cancer. Though not
nearly as much a "survivor" as many others
who’ve been ravaged by such a heart-rendering,
destroying beast.
Fifty years ago,
while I was working on my bachelor’s degree at a
small Texas college in the Big Bend of Texas
(Sul Ross State College), my wife (at the time),
Lucy, also a student, had a bad case of the flu
(t’weren’t no flu shots back then). So we were
visiting the college’s infirmary. The college’s
doctor (so many years ago I just can’t recall
his name) casually noticed a dime-sized lump on
my left wrist where I normally wore my wrist
watch.
"Doc" looked at
it, rubbing it gently with his thumb and said,
"When you bring Lucy back next week I want to
look at it again."
Thinking little
of it, I dropped Lucy off at our little college
apartment and back to the college to run a
printing press as one of my part-time jobs to
supplement my GI Bill income.
Next week I took
Lucy back to the infirmary. The lump on my wrist
had grown to the size of a quarter. "I want to
do a biopsy,’ Doc said. I had no idea what he
was talking about, asking my new wife, "What’s a
biopsy?" as we headed for classes. At 26 I’d
never had a need for a doctor (other than
childhood mumps) and knew virtually nothing
about cancer or any other ailment that "old
folks get."
A week later, the
lump had grown to almost the size of a
half-dollar. By the time Doc had sliced out a
piece of the lump using a local anesthetic (I
watched with fascination as he removed a small
piece of the lump, grayish matter and a lot of
blood, but felt nothing but
giddy).
I wish I could
remember the Doc’s name. I can see his face,
even today, mindful of some Normal Rockwell
painting of a family doctor. I only remember
that he did needlework to keep his fingers
nimble, and had framed needlework all over his
office.
A few days later,
at around 5 a.m., Doc’s wife was pounding on our
apartment door urging us to "get up, get
dressed, and go see Doc."
Bleary-eyed and
confused, we dressed, jumped into our car and
found Doc at the infirmary. "The biopsy came
back," he said. "The report is that you have a
cancer called fibro-sarcoma, We need to get you
to a cancer hospital as quickly as possible.
There are two," he said, "the Mayo Clinic in
Rochester and MD Anderson, in Houston. I’ll call
and make all of the arrangements. Which one do
you want to go to?"
Alpine, Texas,
where the college is located, is a long-mile
from nowhere, so I chose MD Anderson, in
Houston, thinking that at the very least, it’ll
still be in Texas. "Good! Go home. Pack. And hit
the road," he said. This was on a Thursday. I’ll
schedule you for intake Monday
morning."
Driving from
Alpine to Menard (my home town and the residence
of my parents and nearby, Lucy’s parents) is 300
miles. From Menard to Houston is 350 miles, so
we had a 650 mile trip to make in four days. As
students, we barely had enough money for gas to
reach Menard. I called my parents and they
agreed to loan me $1,000 ("just in case").
From Menard to
Houston we made it Sunday evening after a couple
of stops for watermelon … Lucy was pregnant with
our first child and she craved watermelon… to my
sister’s home in Houston. She was a stay-at-home
mom with a young child. Jay, her husband, was a
Coast Guardsman.
Monday morning we
gathered what I thought I’d need "for a couple
of days at the hospital" … little did we know
how long it was actually going to
be.
By the end of the
week I’d been through two surgeries - one to
remove the cancer, and another, a "prefusion" of
mustard and nitrogen gas on my left arm. The
process, I think, is still being used today, but
it was "new stuff" back then. The process,
basically, was to isolate my arm from the rest
of my body with a heart-lung machine and pumping
the mustard-nitrogen mixture through my blood
vessels to "kill" any malignant tumor possibly
still in my arm.
It was an amazing
experience for me. I had an anesthesiologist
from England, a Japanese doctor, a doctor from
Tennessee, nurses from Mexico, Texas, Colorado,
and New York.
I had many room
mates during the three months stay at MD
Anderson. An older woman (at least she was "old"
to me at the time, probably about 50), with lung
cancer who smoked constantly when she wasn’t in
her bed (there were smoking areas at the
hospital back then), and a young man, a truck
driver, with a lump the size of a football on
his leg, and his young wife. He’d been treated
at the Hoxsey Clinic in Dallas (an alternative
medicine clinic that treated cancer patients
with herbs and such). The young couple has spent
all they had on Hoxsey treatments, they’d lost
their house, his truck, and now was losing his
life.
After the
surgeries, I read, played checkers, and had
numerous visits from my wife, Lucy, my sister
and brother-in-law, and roamed the halls of the
hospital bored to tears wearing a plaster cast
from my chest to my left shoulder and down to my
finger tips. My left arm was plaster cast-frozen
in a perpetual semi-salute, but above my head.
But, as hard as I’ve tried to remember, I don’t
remember any pain, just
boredom.
After about thee
months, I was given out-patient status, having
to stay with my sister’s family and returning to
the hospital once a day for observation and
consultation. That was miserable for me, for
Lucy, and for my sister’s family. There was only
one bed available for the two of us in her home,
a single-wide bed on which both Lucy and I would
sleep at night.
For the first few
nights I’d roll over and conk Lucy with my hard
plaster cast, but we finally worked out a system
so she didn’t get beaten to death. And because
it was so difficult for me to dress myself in
regular clothes, Lucy bought me a brand new red
swim suit I could wear around the house. And
that was a total disaster! Without thinking,
Joanna, my sister, washed the bright red swim
trunks in with her husband’s snow white Coast
Guard uniforms. They came out pink! Imagine a
Coast Guardsman in a pink
uniform.
After about a
month of that the cast was removed and I was
free to go home!
When we first
arrived back at Sul Ross I was amazed at the
number of faculty (and some students) who’d
heard of my cancer. There was virtually mass
hysteria as they went to get checkups for
possible "cancer" afflictions. Thankfully, none
showed up "diseased."
Also, thankfully,
the college gave me a reprieve from my courses’
finals, except for my public speaking class.
I’ve always been deadly afraid of speaking in
public, so with a squeaky, chattering voice my
final was a speech about my "cancer." I passed.
I know not how, but I
passed.
After graduation
I took a job teaching at a high school in
Winters, Texas, and for the next five years
traveled to Houston twice a year for a check up,
then for another five years once a year. From
Winters to Houston is a long 380 miles. And at a
teacher’s salary of only a little over $3,000 a
year, the trips were costly. I made twenty
12-hour trips to Houston by bus, reading and
sleeping.
On my first bus
trip to MD Anderson, I didn’t have enough money
for a hotel room nor money for a taxi so I had
to take a bus that put me in Houston at about 3
a.m., walking the ten miles from the bus station
to the hospital and walking back to catch a bus
back to Winters. That was the last time I’d ever
try that. From that day forward I swore to save
enough money without having to walk that ten
miles at each visit.
I read a lot on
those trips. The two I most remember were The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William
Shirer - a 600 page tome, and The Story of
Philosophy by Will
Durant.
Finally, after
ten years of poking and prodding, I was declared
"90% cured," and sent home for good.
The cost to the
hospital for those years of care? A few pints of
blood thankfully donated by friends of my
sister. And that was it.
Not another
reoccurrence. At least not on my wrist. I was
again diagnosed with a small cancer on the left
side of my right eye about five years ago (maybe
that was the final 10%). It was removed in
Columbia and I’ve had no occurrences since.
Perhaps the
strange part about all of this is that not once
was I frightened by the cancer nor concerned
that I wouldn’t be "okay". It just seemed to be
an "is" and a "was."
Doctors and
hospitals come and go, I guess, but memories
remain. MD Anderson and its wonderful nurses and
doctors and all of the other staff will,
forever, be a part of me.
But I was one of
the lucky ones.
