Bananas
by the Bunch: the testimony of a cancer survivor
Maybe it was an old joke but I had never heard it before.
I was sitting outdoors at a cafe in Miami Beach. The place was kind of a joke itself. It was a Chinese-Jewish-Cuban-Mexican-American restaurant. A tiny place with a huge multi-lingual menu.
As I perused the menu, two men sauntered toward me. One was an old man, probably well into his eighties yet erect and buoyant in his stride. He was attired in Florida rest home chic—black-and-white checked polyester slacks, a bright yellow golf shirt, and white vinyl slip-on shoes with matching belt.
The other man was in his forties. He wore gray flannel slacks, a white shirt with rolled up sleeves, a conservative maroon tie, and cordovan wingtips. In his left hand, he carried an expensive snakeskin briefcase. As he spoke, his right hand traced grand, sweeping gestures in the air.
When they strode past me, I noticed the emotional contrast between them. The older man appeared cheerful and relaxed while the younger man seemed dramatically over-earnest. He was perspiring profusely in the south Florida humidity.
I could hear the younger man say in a rather pompous yet pleading manner, “Sam, we really should discuss your long term investment goals.”
“Goals, shmoals,” replied the elderly man, interrupting himself with a moment of hearty laughter. “At my age,” he continued, “I don’t even buy bananas by the bunch!”
By the grace of God and through the love of those who surround me, I am once again buying.
Fourteen years ago, I was told that I had colon cancer. After surgery and the beginning of what would prove to be more than a year of chemotherapy I did not expect to live very long. At times, the effects of the chemo were so unpleasant I didn’t much care. And in the midst of my illness, I was forced to resign as pastor of the Little Brown Church under circumstances so painful my illness seemed pleasurable by comparison.
Yet by the grace of God I survived—colon cancer, chemotherapy, the loss of my job, diabetes and a second major cancer (kidney cancer, unrelated to the first malignancy). There are scars on my body (my bikini days are over!) and scars on my psyche. But I am more alive than I have ever been.
About the time I ended my chemotherapy, my wife and I attended an adult group potluck dinner at a Presbyterian Church. The speaker was a well-regarded seminary president and sometime Christian comedian and his topic was “The Healing Power of Humor.” As we entered the social hall, casserole in hand, I spotted Tom, a longtime acquaintance of ours. We had attended church in Foster City with his family for many years before my call to the Little Brown Church. We had not seen one another for five years.
Tom was engaged in conversation with another man. I stepped up beside him and tapped him on the shoulder. As he turned toward me, a look of confusion spread across his face. I thought he was having difficulty recognizing me. All at once, he blurted out, “Lowell! Didn’t you used to be dead—or something?”
I answered that I had been seriously ill but was now on the mend. I explained that I had just been declared medically recuperated.
I have often thought about his words, “Lowell! Didn’t you used to be dead—or something?” and freely admit just how appropriate and accurate they were. Indeed, I used to be dead.
During the summer of 1992, I began experiencing heavy rectal bleeding. After being passed from one physician to the next and subjected to ever more obtrusive and uncomfortable procedures, I was scheduled for a colonoscopy.
Since a colonoscopy is very painful it is usually performed under anesthesia. I went under quickly and woke up in what seemed like seconds to find a grim faced gastroenterologist standing over me. What I thought he said was, “It’s a tumor.” The anesthesia and/or my own optimism edited out the word, “malignant.”
I understood that this was serious business and asked what would be done. I felt neither panic nor self-pity. It was as if I had just been told that my automobile needed a new carburetor. My attitude toward the forthcoming surgery was exactly what it would have been toward my automobile mechanic: “OK. Let’s get it done. Let’s make the repairs so that I can be on my way again.”
In a few hours, the lab report on the biopsy of the tumor confirmed the doctor’s conclusion. I was schedule for surgery a few days later.
The surgery went well. A fist-sized tumor was removed. My bowel was resectioned. The lab report was not as encouraging as I could have wanted. Four lymph nodes had been removed with the tumor. The cancer was present in one. If it had spread there, the possibility existed it had spread elsewhere throughout my lymphatic system.
On November 22, I told me congregation that I had undergone major surgery for colon cancer. “A few days ago, I added, “I began an extended course of chemotherapy as the physicians and I attempted to destroy the remaining cancer cells in my body”
I was scheduled for “the standard treatment,” 52 intravenous doses of a powerful toxin called 5- Fluorouracil (“5FU” as in “FU cancer!”— my mantra when the awful stuff flowed into my veins) and oral doses every other week of a compound named Levamisol. Since Levamisol was first used on sheep, I would refer to the two drugs as rat poison and sheep dip, respectively.
The treatment began with huge IV doses daily of 5FU for 4 days. The jabbing after a good vein and the nausea and general flu like discomfort were unpleasant but not too bad at the time. Then the following week, I suffered the agonies of the damned. My entire system went into revolt. My mouth and throat filled with ugly and painful lesions. My skin burned and itched, strange wartlike growth and dots of pigment floated to the surface on my hands, arms, sides, chest, neck, and face. My blood seemed to boil - my temperature approached 110˚ for hours at a time and then returned to normal. The nausea and the other flulike symptoms intensified. I had never felt so sick in my life.
When I began to tell my friends about the cancer that had taken up residence in my colon, I was as little prepared for their reactions as I was for my own.
The first friend I told came to my office and suggested that I should immediately resign as pastor of this church. In her view, my job had made me sick. Leaders of my congregation had a slightly different verdict: The church was sick of me and I should resign.
Other friends, to whom I had been close, simply disappeared from my life. Others were caring and solicitous but, I have subsequently learned, many had written me off in their hearts as terminal.
The family circle closed tight around me. My wife, mother-in-law, and others were there for me every step of the way.
Many of the church folk were wonderful. Betty, who is my parents’ age, drove me about on errands. Several ladies brought casseroles (once three arrived at the same time!). Expression of sympathy, well wishing, and prayers flooded in—as did demands from my moderator that I meet with him and other leaders of the church to explore the church’s problem (me, of course) in the hope I would give in to the inevitable and resign. These frequent meetings were usually deliberately scheduled on my chemotherapy and sermon preparation days.
Perhaps my job was making me sick. I wondered if I could survive the cancer. I was less sure I could survive the moderator. Sometimes I thought my friend was right. Perhaps my job had made me sick.
However, in my moments of silent reflection, I was busy blaming someone else—Lowell. If only I hadn’t been so reactive, so overly concerned, so easily upset, I would never have caused my insides to start eating themselves.
And I often asked myself, “Why did I get sick?” The emphasis is on the word “sick” not “I. “ After all, for twenty years, I had followed a regimen designed to keep me from getting the very cancer I now had. I had eaten a diet rich in fiber. Only Peter Rabbit got more roughage in his diet. For two years, I had lived on Jenny Craig’s low fat, low sugar, low salt regime. I had worked out for an hour five days a week at a local athletic club. I had lost nearly fifty pounds. I had never been so healthy in my life. And then I got sick. Why?
Let me give you the simple explanation. First, I have a genetic predisposition to cancer. Cancer runs in my family.
Second, I am a very intense person. If I had been delivering newspapers instead of sermons, I probably would have overfunctioned, overdone, overworried, etc. That kind of stress can kill and I had better learn to cope with it. We all had better learn to cope with it.
Third, we live in a cancer-prone world. “We live in the midst of a carcinogenic epidemic.” Our polluted air, water, and food are many times more cancer-causing today than they were a generation ago.
Beyond these simple explanations, I cannot go. God sends rain to fall on the just and the unjust. If you’re afraid of getting wet, carry an umbrella. If you don’t want to get rained on at all, move to a desert. If you want a guaranteed cancer-free existence, don’t live at all. Life is risky. Life offers no security. And life is carcinogenic. That’s all there is to it.
And so I fought with all the resources available to me.
The Big Five
Twelve years ago as I struggled with two unrelated forms of cancer, I was told that I had two years to live. Once I had made a decision that I wanted to live, I then asked myself, “What 5 things would I like to do during the next two years—even if those years would prove to be my last?”
Item 1: I had always wanted to visit the Sistine Chapel to see Michelangelo’s ceiling paintings. So just after my fifty-fourth birthday, my wife and I flew to Rome, spent a few days with friends who had been posted there by IBM, and got in the long, long line wending its way through the Vatican Museum (the world’s largest garage sale of objects d’art), and made our way to the chapel and its almost completely restored ceilings. I had wanted to do this ever since my dad had brought home a copy of Life magazine with a photo feature on the paintings when I was about ten-years-old.
Item 2: I had never been to the Holy Land. So right after Rome, we flew to Tel Aviv and began a twelve-day bus tour with a small group of fellow pilgrims.
Item 3: I love to sing but recognize that I do not sing well. So I found a voice coach and began training. I am still a “not ready for prime time” voice but I loved my lessons and love singing my heart out.
Item 4: When I was a teenager, I had been a radio actor in Chicago. I regret that I did not pursue this interest. So I signed up as a student at a professional acting school. I also enrolled in courses in improvisation and on-stage movement at two other San Francisco schools.
Item 5: I have always wished I could speak a language other than English. Before leaving for Israel, I spent several hours relearning conversational Hebrew. However, in Israel my efforts to converse were thwarted by Israelis who responded to me in English with “Oh, you’re practicing your conversational Hebrew!” So I tried German next, this time with a tutor, becoming just fluent enough to be able to converse with any four-year-old child in Germany or Austria.
And there was a sixth item as well. I wanted to get back to my first love—writing. However, the effects of the chemo and the lingering anxiety made it impossible for me to concentrate for a long, long time. So I started collecting my favorite jokes and anecdotes from books, magazines, and my own memory. After a few years, my accumulation had grown to a quarter of a million items and I was able to arrange them into theme-based collections, the basis for several humor books that I compiled over the next few years including my bestseller, Encyclopedia of Humor.
I know there were other items on my want list but I got so involved in the first six I have forgotten them! And that was the point. I had successfully displaced the pain—psychic as well as physical, learned many lessons from each of my new pursuits, and gotten on with my life. The days of hearing and feeling that I “used to be dead or something” are long behind.
I don’t just buy bananas by the bunch. I buy them by the crate!
copyright 2006 Lowell D. Streiker. May be freely copied and distributed
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