Chicken Soup for the Cancer Survivor's Soul

by Jack Canfield

  Michelle

  * You can contact The Wellness Community by writing 2716 Ocean Park Blvd., Suite 1040, Santa Monica, CA 90405, or calling (310) 314-2555. Also, we recommend you read The Wellness Community: Guide to Fighting for Recovery from Cancer by Harold H. Banjamin, Ph.D. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995.

  “You Are Going to Need a Surgeon”

  “You are going to need a surgeon.”

  With those words, I began a four-year roller coaster ride, both plunging into fear and soaring with hope. The diagnosis was colon cancer; the statistics, 55 percent death rate. But at least I finally knew why I was so tired that even lifting a jigsaw puzzle piece took more energy than I could muster.

  Yet one of the hardest tasks in winning my battle came right at the beginning. Somewhat in shock, I left my diagnostician, met with the surgeon he recommended, agreed to enter the hospital in four days, and went home. That was the easy part. The difficult part was finding a way to tell my family... and, especially, to tell my husband, Norm, who was 3,000 miles away on a three-month contract. Even as a child, I had always been the healthy one in the family. Besides that, it was two weeks before Christmas. How, then, to tell them that not only was I not well (a quaint euphemism), but that there was a very strong possibility I could die?

  I never did find the words. Instead, my later-to-be–psychologist daughter, Nicole, finally commented that I looked odd; then, remembering I had been to the doctor, guessed that he gave me bad news. She also took on the job I was totally incapable of, that of telling her father.

  Norm is one of those type-A-in-super-bold people. By the time I entered the hospital four days later, he had wound up his contract, packed for his move back home, arranged for my mother to come, discovered three alternate treatments and had people in two churches praying for my recovery...not bad for one weekend’s work.

  In the meantime, my almost-grown kids, Noral, Kal and Nicole, put on brave faces and exuded extra energy attempting to pretend that we were decorating our two-story Christmas tree (an engineering feat in its own right), just like we did every year. None of us knew quite what to expect or what to do about it.

  But after my surgery, my children, along with their father, our Jaycee Senator friends and about 500 members of our professional association, the National Speakers Association (NSA), soon figured it out...I was a little slower.

  My family first descended on the hospital with most of the Christmas decorations from our oversized home. These soon festooned every available wall, every bed rail and even my catheter hose. I had chosen to go into a public ward in order to have company. I had company. Every nurse, doctor, candy striper and housekeeper, along with a string of patients, came by to see this splash of color and frivolity in the serious atmosphere of the surgery wing.

  Christmas morning, the traffic to my window was constant, when sons Kal, my early-bird designer, and Noral, always calm in a crisis, braved the pre-dawn cold of an Ottawa December to erect in the snow of the hospital yard a 12-foot sign, on which the family had painted “Merry Christmas, Mom.”

  My operation had been a few days before, on December 21, and the news was mixed: the tumor was out, but it had been large. While I was, thankfully, not given chemotherapy or radiation, my surgeon, Dr. Doubek, promised me no more than two years to live.

  The news moved quickly. The amount and the depth of just sheer caring that poured from across the continent was a wonderful shock. You see, one of the horrible things about cancer is the enormous loss of your self-worth. I truly believe that unless a person who has the disease regains the feeling that he or she really matters, the person will die.

  When all the cards and calls arrived, along with messages that people were having their church congregations pray for me, I reached a stage where I would honestly have felt I was letting people down if I died... especially Big E. Larry Moles from Lima, Ohio, who took two trips to the border to get a teddy bear as large as himself (now known as Larr Bear) through Canadian customs. We later decided customs people figured he was using the bear as a camouflage for drugs or other contraband. Officials seem suspicious of just plain friendship.

  “Friendship” is one item I place on my “must have” list as part of my own growth out of cancer. My first step was to simplify my life by determining what was truly important to me...and shedding what was not. It is amazing how short one’s “must have” list really is! Try your own list one day when you are feeling overwhelmed—it may change your future.

  There is a lot of discussion about the role of positive thinking in curing disease. For me, there is no question. It works.

  It works, that is, if you work at it. Positive thinking to cure yourself of physical illness, or of life’s negative strokes, goes well beyond thinking positive thoughts. My struggle with cancer took four years and several operations... but I am but I am now, 10 years later, officially a cancer survivor. Now, each time I hit a bad patch, I tap into the same two elements that pulled me up during the crisis: love from family and friends, and a consistent use of my mind to heal my body—cell by cell, through concentration and visualization.

  I continue to stretch my mind for health and to “keep on track” with my life. Each of us can do this for ourselves. Yet, as my husband often quotes, “No man (person, in today’s vernacular) is an island.” Equally significant to our health and well-being are the Pat Balls of the world who wrote to me that she was concerned about intruding, but just felt she had to let me know she cared. Caring we cannot do just for ourselves, it grows when it’s shared with others...and it can save lives.

  Delva Seavy-Rebin

  I Believe in Miracles

  In order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.

  David Ben-Gurion

  “Chris is dying. I’m going to sell his car.” Easter, 1989. My ex-husband was on the phone talking about our 25-year–old son. I was more than stunned, but also very angry!

  I knew that Chris hadn’t been feeling well—“a stomach virus” is the way he described it. But since it kept getting worse, he went to the hospital, where the prognosis was far from positive. In the doctor’s words, “The bad news is that your son has lymphoma—the fastest growing cancer. The good news is that it is a cancer that responds well to chemotherapy—once we stabilize his condition, that is.”

  For six weeks, that is exactly what the Cleveland Clinic attempted to do, as Chris remained in the intensive care unit on a respirator. His condition deteriorated to the point that the first day I visited him, I walked right past his bed. I didn’t even recognize my own son!

  It wasn’t time for him to die. He had too much living still to do. I decided to put to work all of the visualization techniques I had learned, to call up my power of positive thinking and to maintain my natural optimism. I told my ex-husband—who was already receiving sympathy cards from his group of negative friends—that I believe in miracles. Chris would pull through. He mustn’t sell Chris’ car.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced the intensive care unit in a hospital. It isn’t a pleasant place to visit. There are all sorts of bells and whistles. Nurses and doctors are rushing to answer alarms. The patients are swollen and possess a deathly pallor. Negativity is in the air. I even had a doctor say to me, “Don’t you realize how sick your son is? How can you be so positive?” I had him taken off the case.

  We were only allowed 15 minutes twice a day. I went every morning. And every morning I took Chris’ hand and told him to visualize summer, with the warm weather, the sun and the flowers (all of which he loved). I noticed that every time I visited, a certain light came on and a beep sounded. The nurses told me that it indicated that while I was there, Chris breathed on his own so the respirator reacted. I knew we were making progress.

  Chris recovered enough to come home for the summer, still on chemotherapy, with short stays back at the clinic. Together, we listened to tapes, we talked about the future, we concentrated on the beauty of every moment. By December, he was in total re
mission. They called it a miracle.

  In April of 1990, he elected to undergo a bone marrow transplant as a preventive measure. This spring, we celebrated his fifth anniversary of remission. Yes, I do believe in miracles!

  Chris King

  6

  ON SUPPORT

  The most important medicine is tender love and care.

  Mother Teresa

  “Pete, You Have Cancer!”

  In the fall of 1992, I was driving back to my office from an important lunch in downtown Vancouver when the phone rang in the car. I’ve had a phone in the car for quite a while, but it still amazes me that you can actually be called and make calls from a car!

  It was my doctor.

  “Pete,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re doing right now, but you need to come to my office immediately.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  On a car phone!

  I pulled off to the side of the road and cried. Rolling tears. And between the tears, my life, every important moment I had ever lived, rolled too, like a great screen before me. Cancer! The terrifying words I just heard triggered all kinds of levers and emotions that most of the time were inactively just there. Now, like circuit breakers snapping into life at a hydro substation, they were part of terrifying real time.

  Without a doubt, I was going to die. Done. Finished. And with approaching death, my value system, my roots, my life’s foundations were about to be tested as never before. My proclaimed faith was on the line.

  But we humans come around. The survival instinct cuts in. Severely beaten, but already feeling hints of reserve strength, I immediately wondered if I could perhaps overcome whatever it was I now had. Could I be as positive as I tell people in speeches and seminars around the world that I am? Could I impact my own life as I’ve been told I impact the lives of others?

  When I called my doctor back, he told me to pick up my wife and come to his office. Kay was home from her studies and the two of us went hand in hand to see my doctor.

  “A simple operation,” he said in his best airline pilot voice. “Six to eight stitches and about 20 minutes. We’re going to take a piece from your butt and use it to patch your face.” Interesting. My backside suddenly felt exposed!

  They took me into the hospital, laid me down and covered my face. It wasn’t that simple. It took them 18 needles just to freeze the area of my face where the restoration was to happen. I had no idea what was going on except that so far nothing was happening to my rear end. There had obviously been a change in plan. The cancer would be removed in some other way.

  An hour-and-a-half and 125 stitches later—with a huge, heart-shaped, puffy, still-bleeding scar on my face—I said to Eric, the plastic surgeon who performed this neat piece of work: “So what have you done?”

  “It’s a new procedure that I learned a couple of weeks ago in Paris,” he said. “I thought I’d try it out on you.”

  “Thanks heaps,” I said.

  Eric told me that despite the initial blood and gore, the scar would heal. In a few months I would be very happy, and in a year or so, the scar would be all but invisible. The V-flap operation, he said, would be much better in the long run than affixing the skin from my rear, which because of its unique pigmentation would remain forever “butt white.”

  Round One appeared to be a success, but a bigger test was yet to come. The medical team was not 100 percent sure that they had removed all of the cancer. I had to go to the Vancouver Cancer Clinic for further examination by a 10-doctor team, a conference to determine whether or not a second operation was required. The thought of it was terrifying.

  I should tell you right now that despite a constant, not-too-enthusiastic fight against flab, I have really enjoyed a healthy life. No hospitals, except to visit others; no operations, no anesthetics. Another operation, I quickly concluded, would introduce me to everything all at once. I might never be the same again. Worse than that, I would probably die. Again, my mind skidded me straight to the morgue!

  Whoa there, Pete! How about the skills of the doctors? The technology? We all have special talents, don’t we? Could it be that whatever they have in store for you has been done quite successfully hundreds of times to others? The surgical fight against cancers of all kinds has seen many incredible victories. Where’s your faith and positive attitude? How about the love that’s pouring out for you from your family and friends?

  The doctors decided that the second operation was indeed required, and they set the date for seven-and-a–half hours of surgery at Vancouver General Hospital.

  Charlie Trimbell, who is president of Oppenheimer Bros.—one of Western Canada’s leading food brokers— and is a good friend, told me, “Pete, you have pretty good people skills. When you get into the hospital, put them into overdrive. Use your skills to get on the good side of everyone who comes into your room. Regardless of what they do, learn their names and try to find out what they do. It will be the beginning of greater understanding at an incredibly important time. The care you receive from doctors, nurses and orderlies will be gentler because you will give each of them something of yourself.” I told him I would do my best.

  I took in two boxes of my first book, How to Soar with the Eagles, and gave them away at every opportunity. No matter who came into my room, they got a signed copy of my book. Was I covering my aforementioned backside? You never know, do you?

  As well as making all these literary presentations, I talked at length to all of the people involved in my immediate hospital world, and to all those who would play a role in my surgery the following day.

  I paid special attention to the anesthetist. Len was a warm, friendly, efficient and sensitive man from England. When he came to see me on the eve of my operation, I spent more time questioning him than all of the doctors and nurses together. I told Len that in the morning, just before he put me under, I wanted to gather all of the nurses and doctors around my bed and offer them a five-minute Legge motivational speech. Some last-minute insurance.

  “Really?” said Len. “And what are you going to say?”

  “What will I say? I will say: You doctors and nurses do this operation almost every day of every week. You are considered the best in Western Canada. You probably view this as just another neck dissection on just another body, but I’d like to tell you that for me, this is the first and only time I’m going to have this operation. Today, you will be better in all of your functions than you have ever been before. Your skills will be superb. No side effects whatsoever. No mistakes. Just a smooth, well-performed, 100 percent successful operation, the best you can possibly perform.” I used every adjectival rouser in the book, my own and everyone else’s!

  “Great,” said Len. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  The next morning at five, my nurse awakened me, and, not surprisingly, gave me pills to make me sleep. Then it was onto the trolley and off to the O.R. In there, all kinds of people scurried around, checking equipment, doing whatever it is that these green-gowned creatures do. Sharpening knives? Recovering from the night before?

  I looked at the clock. It was 8:10 A.M. Time for the motivational. “Okay,” said Len. “Just one minor adjustment before you begin...“and as he spoke, a world of nothingness closed around me.

  I looked at the clock again. It was 8:15. Five minutes later. Nope. It was twelve hours and five minutes later. I was no longer surrounded by the twilight of morning. There was pain, and a great city hospital went about its business in the darkness of a winter evening. The deed had been done. Things would be different, but I was very much alive.

  Alive, but not necessarily the happiest of campers. Christmas was coming, and I knew that in this season of traditional celebration, when families invariably came closer together, I would stand out as a substantially scarred face in the family crowd. My cheek was swathed in dressings, but I knew that beneath it all was a different-looking husband, a different-looking dad, a different-looking guy who would appear at future bookings on the podiums of
the world. Different looking and substantially broken inside.

  Would there even be future bookings? I asked myself. Maybe I’d lost it. I tested my voice and it was little more than a croak. I moved in the darkness and several I.V.’s followed me around, tugging painfully at my flesh. Could I ever swing a golf club again? I doubted it.

  A lot of people have trouble visiting the sick in hospitals, especially those who come out looking different than when they went in. Visitors have to steel themselves for these visits: attempt to disregard the smells, the foreign images. They have to say to themselves: “I’m going in here to make this person feel better, and no matter what I’m about to see in that bed, I won’t flinch.”

  My family came early to see me, and Kay and my three daughters all flinched. They caught themselves quickly, but they flinched. I’d never hold that against them. It’s just one of those things that happens when you’re shocked by an image you weren’t expecting. I suspect that I looked pretty awful.

  My eldest daughter, Samantha, dived in for the kill—and I’ll always be grateful that she did. I can’t remember her exact words, but whatever they were, she got them right.

  “For years, Dad, you’ve talked about people who end up in situations like this, people who have been bruised and beaten, who, for whatever reason, are hurt physically or mentally in life. And what you have said to them is that they must live for today and have hope for tomorrow....“

  Both of us had tears in our eyes.

  “Yes,” I said.