Seals Under The Log

Well, no, they weren't Seals, exactly.

This story starts over 20 years ago. I might have seen something and sent an email asking for a sample issue, but I am unsure. All I know is that I was surprised when I went to the mailbox and found a large manilla envelope addressed to me. Curious. It was postmarked from London, England. Very curious. I carried it inside and opened the envelope.

It contained a single issue of a magazine published by a church in London. The one that C. H. Spurgeon preached at over a century ago. I didn't have time to read it so I put it on the hearth beside my fireplace. And there it sat. For years.

Then it got moved to the basement where all the magazines that pile up get put into bigger piles. To maybe get read someday. But we all know someday never comes and the magazines get tossed out unread. And there it sat. For more years.

Is it a miracle that the magazine did not get discarded unread? No. Miracles don't work that way.

The timing of the next part is fuzzy, because I don't quite remember the sequence of events. But these things happened. I got cancer and I taught Sunday School.

I think teaching came first. And the topic of one of the Sunday School lessons was, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" I'm also fuzzy about how it came to be that I flipped through the pages of the magazine. Was it just random browsing? I think maybe it was.

This magazine had a picture that caught my attention. I don't think I would have read the article had I not seen the photo. A bunch of strapping lads were carrying a honking huge log. They seemed to be having a very bad time of it.

I looked into the article to find out what was up with the picture. Turned out the lads were volunteers undergoing the rigorous training for the British SAS. Those dudes are ninjas. Think of them as tea-swilling Navy Seals with a posh accent.

Most of the bad things that happen in my life are the results of me doing something evil, stupid, or both. It's not rocket surgery to figure out that someone who is in prison for Armed Robbery got there because he did something bad. Other bad circumstances, like divorce, follow prior bad acts like sleeping with your spouse's best friend. We're lucky when we can identify a causal link between a bad action and a bad outcome.

I'm too stupid most of the time to see I'm suffering now because of something bad that I did that led up to it. When a train goes off the rails, there's a lot of twisted wreckage strewn about. My moral derailments cause a lot of grief in my life.

Was God punishing me with Cancer for some prior bad act?

Reading the magazine I learned the log carrying was part of SAS training. All the punishment these lads were experiencing was not because they were bad. It was because they were good. These are the cream of the British military and they suffered because they were the best of the best.

I'm not the best of the best. I'm just a guy who does what he can and trusts in the imputed righteousness of Christ. I hope you'll see it inhere within my life. My Cancer wasn't a judgment, but a kind of preparation. I did not volunteer for it, but I got through it. People said I was brave. I shrug. I got through it.

If someone you know has cancer and you think it is not fair that such a good person should be so afflicted, it might just be God is training some kind of ninja.

Ten Years After

I've blogged about cancer before here. I'll try not to repeat myself and the careful reader should go back there and see whether I have repeated myself then yell at me about it.

Except for this:

When you have cancer you cannot control what they'll cut out of you. You cannot control what poisons they'll pump into you. Or when. Or how long. You cannot control the course of the disease, but you can control your attitude. I chose to appear to be optimistic despite knowing better. I had everyone fooled.

I said it again because I figure that's important enough for you to not miss. If anything I can write will save a life, this is it.

Here's something else to think about the disease: The victim isn't the victim. If you look back a decade, you'll see that my kids' grades went down. Nobody had a tearful meltdown. It was just a burden: dad is sick. Anybody who's suffering from cancer or any slow coast down the exit ramp has people around who are going to be hurting.

If you feel inclined to pray for the sick, pray for those close to the sick. Cancer isn't contagious, but sadness and grief are a burden to those closest to it. Don't overlook them.

When I went in for cancer surgery, I let everyone know. I encouraged prayer on my behalf. I was quite ecumenical in that regard. I have always been actively involved in various online communities and two local writers groups. As a result I have several non-Baptist friends: My name was mentioned in the local Synagogue. An Atheist thought positive thoughts. A New Age Pagan threw a stick in the ocean on my behalf. My surgeon said a Hail Mary for me. And others in other non-Christian and Christian traditions offered intercessory expressions on my behalf.

We might argue about the nature of deity being addressed.
We might doubt the existence of anything beyond the empirical.

I cannot doubt that all those folks cared.

The Baptist in me admits that maybe God didn't hear prayers addressed to someone else, but He overheard them. And He answered. When I was coming out of surgery it felt as if anything I asked for God would deliver. Because he was very direct and immediate about answering everything I prayed for. I joke that I should have asked for a winning Lotto ticket.

The thought occurred, along with an unbidden, "Don't abuse this."

There's a scene in the movie Shadowlands where the snarky Atheist taunts C. S. Lewis about prayer: You won't tell an omniscient being something he doesn't already know. You won't change the mind of an immutable (unchanging) being. And Lewis replied, "That's not the point. Prayer changes me."

Chemotherapy has an effect on your nervous system. On the second round of themo the poison gave me a peculiar reaction to the cold. One time when I got out of the car, some freezing rain hit the side of my face and it was instantly numb. Another time I didn't think and put my hand under running cold water, it felt like an electrical shock. I found this fascinating. I figured eating ice cream would be a Very Bad Idea.

Chemo also caused neuropathy in my extremities and that has taken years to heal. So long that I no longer find it amusing.

Chemo had an effect on my taste buds. Things didn't taste the same. I love spicy-hot food, but under chemo it was intolerably painful. I couldn't even use black pepper. This was a direct assault on my identity.

If you ever undergo chemotherapy, avoid all your favorite foods. You don't want unpleasant associations. I quit eating steak. I started eating a lot of black cherries and drinking a lot of sour cherry juice. Everything tasted like shit. You don't want to finish chemo and afterwards remember the awful way your favorite foods tasted like when your taste buds were poisoned.

Ten years ago today I had my last chemotherapy treatment. I made it and I'm grateful. If you're doing chemo, I hope you found this useful.

The Sorta-Annual Party

The first sign was the flatulence. Really rank.

That's untrue. It was the 2nd sign. The first sign was angina pectoris. The medicos use Latin to sound like they know more than they do. The first sign was chest hurts. But I work in a sedentary profession and most of my avocations are pursued in a seated position. Thus being a bit winded and pained with exertion can be explained by insufficient exercise. So I did nothing.

Or it can be explained by a heart condition. I shared this with my doctor and he scheduled a Stress Test. I flunked this Stress Test, because I got an incomplete. A preliminary blood test indicated that I had iron-poor blood. So, I took iron pills for the anemia and I felt great! But why did I have anemia?

I think the 4-billionth reason why I'll never be a gay porn star is a reticence toward putting stuff up my butt and taking pictures of it. I failed the colonoscopy, too. They found a blockage about half-way up my colon. Took a biopsy and it was cancer.

The cancer was so high in the colon that it had reabsorbed the lost blood so there wasn't any in my stool. A couple weeks later I went under the knife, and they removed a grapefruit sized tumor and found cancer in three lymph nodes. This explained the bowel obstruction and the flatulence and the cramps I had been ignoring.

Denial is more than a river in Egypt. I knew I had a heart problem because my grandfather Poling died at a young age from a sudden-death heart attack. The idea never occurred that my mom had died of cancer and that my father had just 4 years before fought off the disease. I came out of surgery, recovered and started six months of chemotherapy. Mom went through about a year and a half of chemotherapy hell only to die at the end of it. Chemo hit Dad hard, too. It felt like I had the flu with an acute case of diarrhea for six months. I never appreciated scatological humor before or since.

But I got through it, the chemo nurses gave me a little ribbon and I was relieved to have chemo behind me. It messed up my summer, so I decided to have an after-chemo party. I had three. One for friends at church. One my boss threw for me at work. And one for my friends at two local Writers groups. That was the first After-Chemo party.

A few weeks later, I learned that Dad's cancer was back. This time he was a lot weaker and the chemo was a lot more toxic. He spent the next few months on a long, slow coast down the exit ramp. We buried him right around Thanksgiving. Two days later my mother-in-law died of a stroke.

The next January I felt wrong, consulted with my oncologist, got cat-scanned and had a lymph node biopsied. The cancer was back. Time for another round of chemo.

This time everything was different. The nurses were loving and lovely, but I could sense well-hidden fatalism. The first time around I could think, Dad survived this, so can I. This time my thinking was reversed. I started giving away my books. I stopped because this terrified my friends. Instead of two chemo poisons, they gave me three. They fitted my chest with a port for directly infusing poison into me. I got a pump that pushed poison into me every 2.5 minutes.

I also had the elders of my church anoint and pray over me. Baptists don't have "last rites" but we used the same Bible passage the Catholics use for it.

Chemo was much worse the second time. No diarrhea, but my hair thinned out and turned white. I looked like a cancer patient. I was clumsy and slow. Dropping everything made me more patient.

When you have cancer you cannot control what they'll cut out of you. You cannot control what poisons they'll pump into you. Or when. Or how long. You cannot control the course of the disease, but you can control your attitude. I chose to appear to be optimistic despite knowing better. I had everyone fooled.

Chemo ended for the second time about a month later than it did the first time. I wasn't feeling as spry, so I only had one party for my writer friends, and I called it (with mordant humor) the Second-Annual After-Chemo party. I half expected the rest of my summers to be lost to chemo.

Then I didn't die. A year went by and everyone asked about the party I didn't have.

Another year went by and I had my "Sorta-Annual After-Chemo Party." And so it has gone ever since. Except two years ago when I was in England every first-Thursday of August I have a celebration of writing and of surviving another year.

This year I'm combining it with the release of my anthology Finding Time. If you're reading this, and you're a writer, and you can find my house, drop by at 7:00pm. I'll have burgers and chicken patties on the grill for you.

p.s. This is not a Whig Party. That's something else.