“People say that where there’s life, there’s hope, and I have no quarrel with that, but I also believe the reverse. There is hope, therefore I live.”
― Stephen King, Revival
“Do you know why you’re here?”
I was haggard, emaciated, barely able to move, every bit a specter, a shadow of my normal self. The lines of five IVs ran up to bags hanging from rolling stands, much like hat racks, their monitors blinking and occasionally beeping as one bag or another drained away. If I moved my arms, an alarm would sound and bring the duty nurse to check on me. An indwelling catheter ran to a urine bag hooked to the side of my hospital bed.
“Acute kidney failure,” I said.
“Haven’t they told you?”
I shook my head. “No, told me what?”
“You have Stage IV metastatic prostate cancer.”
“Oh,” I said. I stared into the middle distance.
He thought I had missed it. “Didn’t you hear what I said? You have terminal cancer.”
“I heard you, doctor.” I looked him straight in the eye. “I’m not afraid.”
He paused for a second, gave me a sideways glance and walked out.
***
I wasn't kidding. My father’s first cancer operation, on his upper lip, came when I was about 13 years old. His second, the Big One, came shortly after my 16th birthday, a full removal of all the lymph nodes on one side of his neck, as well as the ones in his shoulder on the same side, along with much of his musculature.
Over the years, he had cancer a few more times. Finally, in 2006, he was diagnosed with both Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It made for a rough summer and fall, and he didn’t make it to his birthday in December, but at the same time it was something we were all too familiar with.
Dad handled the end with great courage and stoicism, so when my time came, I was prepared. I didn’t know it at the time, and maybe had you asked me beforehand if I were afraid of cancer, I would have said I most certainly was. I knew what it could do to you and everyone around you.
But as it turned out, I was ready. I didn’t blink. I really wasn’t afraid. If anything, I was relieved to know what was wrong with me, why the body I had trusted and relied on for so much for so long was failing me, going haywire in ways I couldn’t understand and couldn’t overcome — as I had overcome so many ailments before — through sheer will.
Now, at least I knew what I was up against.
***
And it was a lot. Dialysis, radiation therapy, infusion chemotherapy, invasive abdominal surgery and neurosurgery were all on the table. The last one posed the greatest risk. The cancer had been spreading for a long time, perhaps stretching back to the time I was caring for my father (the irony wasn’t lost on me), or even before, and scans showed it had spread throughout my skeletal structure from head to toe. Literally. As it had crept up my spine to my skull, it had damaged the vertebrae and caused my right foot to become a drop foot, which I couldn’t walk on or control, leaving me without the ability to move effectively. I had lost the use of my left arm.
One particular area of concern was at the top of my spine, at the C9 vertebra, where my spinal cord passes through a small opening to my brain.1 The cancer had infiltrated the opening and was squeezing the spinal cord in what’s called a syringomyelia, or syrinx for short. (I preferred syrinx since it was easier to say; plus, it sounds like a great title for a Rush album.)
While the neurologists debated the best course of action, the immediate concern was getting my strength back up. When I was admitted, my numbers were off the charts. It took five blood transfusions to get my hemoglobin up to the level where I was out of imminent danger. Solid foods were out of the question, so my only source of nutrition was through an IV. I was also getting pumped full of medications, being awakened every four hours for a blood draw, around the clock, and bathed in bed.
I’ll tell some more stories of my treatment at another time; some of them are quite funny. For now, I just want to say how amazing my doctors and nurses were, and are — especially the nurses. I don’t think there are words to adequately describe how hardworking, dedicated and committed they were.
And I also want to point out another fact: they came from all around the world. I joke about how I could have my own United Nations, but it’s true. The doctor in direct supervision of my care was Ukrainian. His boss was Russian. The head of urology was from Poland, my nephrologist was (and is) Egyptian. My oncologist is from India. My primary care physician is from the Dominican Republic. My nurses, other than the locals, were from the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala, Dominica, Chile and Yemen. And those are just the ones I know about.
As Lin-Manual Miranda pointed out, immigrants: they get the job done.
The full story of my three-week hospital adventure would take a book (I’m planning one, which I’ll write once I’ve regained my chops) and it’s been over a year since I’ve been able to work, so my energy hasn’t fully returned. I only recently regained my ability to concentrate and, quite frankly, I’m just plain rusty. 2
So, forgive me in advance if I’m not quite up to my usual crisp, snappy prose, at least not yet. But I’m getting stronger all the time. It won’t be long before I’ll be able to share some of the miraculous twists and turns of my experience. And I still have to contact everyone who gave me so much love and support along the way in order to get their permission to name check them in a public post, so I can’t quite get into that yet, either.
What I can talk about is one of the insights I gained while lying there, immobilized. As anyone who has lived through an extended hospital stay can tell you, there isn’t much of an opportunity for sleep. In my case, I was awakened every four hours for vitals and a blood draw. So, I had a lot of time to think.
And given my diagnosis, inevitably the thing I thought most about was death.
***
In October 1980, not long into my freshman year at a local college, I woke up in my dorm room and turned on the radio, as my roommate and I always did. No sooner had I turned the power knob when the morning DJ, reading the news, announced the death of one of my two best friends from high school in a car accident the night before. We had been, in a very real sense, the Three Musketeers, spending countless hours playing hoops and carousing at night. Not a day had gone by for three years when we weren’t together at some point.
It was quite a blow. But it wasn’t my first experience with death, or life in the vicinity of death. My grandfather had died on Christmas Eve the year before, and my father had endured his second cancer operation — we called it The Big One — the year before that. His prognosis wasn’t good; one of his doctors told him, “Well, we’ve bought you another four years.”
So, death had been lurking around when I was barely into my teens.
It was still a shock, though. As much as I already understood death, and knew it was inevitable, it was always something personally distant, a thing I would have to worry about someday, a long time from now, like Grandpa. Even my Dad seemed old to me then. Death was supposed to be far away. Instead, here it was, right in the middle of my life.
Yet, as we all know, the young are durable. My buddies and I went to see the van where our friend died as a way to process our grief. It was sitting in the lot of a local garage, almost intact except for the shattered passenger seat in the front, the corner where he had been riding crushed and torn and unrecognizable, destroyed by the tree he and the driver had hit when they failed to negotiate a curve.
It was just like that: at night, young, going too fast, and in a millisecond the guy I had been drinking beer out of a keg with at a dorm party the weekend before was gone from this life forever.
And then life went on. Until suddenly it was my turn.
***
I thought about all of it as I lay in the hospital, on the edge of death myself; all of my life up to that point, all the suffering of my parents as I cared for them in their golden years, all the friends and family who had departed before me, all my own suffering and mistakes and failures, and all the joys and triumphs too. I had always known my own demise was inevitable, of course. No one, no matter how durable, lives forever. But somehow, the reality of death never intruded too much on my daily consciousness, even during my own long spiral downward. Part of me knew I was dying during the long descent; I just didn’t believe it would happen.
As it turned out, it didn’t, at least not yet. Great medical care, the boundless love and support of friends and family, my own reservoir of courage and determination — I was surprised at their depth myself — all of them pulled me through. It was a heck of a battle, too. I could have given in at any time. I was so very tired. Even after my discharge from the hospital, it was a fight to get out of bed, and stay out of bed, for months afterward. It would have been easy to just let go and slip away. I knew I could, if I wanted to, simply sit on the couch and lean back and close my eyes, and I would be gone.
I also knew I wouldn’t. You see, even though I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, I had been here before. When I was in the first grade, my dad took me into the city to see Ice Station Zebra at the big Loews Theatre on 34th Street. It was “just for the boys,” as he told Mom (she wasn’t terribly thrilled about being left out of a trip to Manhattan), a night out, just the two of us, to celebrate my birthday. After the movie, we stopped at Nathan’s in Coney Island, a four-star destination for a blue-collar kid in Brooklyn. For the rest of our lives, we called it The Best Night Ever.
In the alley next to Nathan’s was a pushcart selling steamed Long Island sweet corn on the cob. The vendor was a little old guy in a hat and coat. He’d take the cob out of the steamer with a pair of tongs and dip it in a vat of melted sweet butter and plop it on some wax paper. Shake a little salt on it and you were in heaven.
We got our corn on the cob and then went inside and grabbed some hot dogs and some of the legendary waffle fries the size of your thumb and sat at the counter under the windows. One of the windows was propped open to let a little heat into the alley for the little old guy. It was the middle of winter and a little windy, and I caught a slight chill, but we thought nothing of it and went home.
A few days later, I was sick in bed. Really sick. So sick, in fact, it was too dangerous to move me, so Dr. Baronberger, the neighborhood family physician, would come by a few times a day to check on me and shoot me full of the miracle drug, penicillin. It was a last-ditch effort (I seem to have a habit of those). My diagnosis was a grim one: scarlet fever, with a case of strep throat to boot. My fever shot past 104 and I became semi-comatose. My parents took turns staying up with me to stick their fingers down my throat and clear it when I began to choke on my own mucus.
Somehow, I survived. I don’t remember how much school I missed. It was at least a few weeks. And once I recovered enough to go back, I was still tired all the time and very weak. In fact, I didn’t really begin to recover completely until the summer, which we spent in Florida with close family friends.
(Bonus: I was on Merritt Island for the launch of Apollo 11, a story I’ll save for another time.)
Now, over a half a century later, with my energy at such a low ebb I could barely sit at my desk, I thought back to those days. Kids are very intact, of course; the young are resilient. The close call I had experienced certainly scared my parents a lot more than it had scared me. And as all of us on my block had learned as we crashed our bikes all over the streets of Gerritsen Beach, kids bounce pretty well.
But a close call it had been. And then, as now, I had felt utterly exhausted. One night in particular, I had fallen into a kind of fever dream, a swirling montage of images past, present and future, all racing past the inside of my eyes as life began to fade. Death hovered behind me like a shadow, waiting for me to surrender and leave the light, to give in to the exhaustion and give up and let go.
Somehow, I had dug in. I fought to live. And once the crisis had passed, and some others after it, I fought to get stronger. And I did. Maybe that’s why I’m still alive today. When the prospect of death returned many years later, I was ready, although I didn’t think of it in those terms, and didn’t think of my childhood brush with it until after I was home from the hospital. I was too focused on putting one foot in front of the other — literally, since at first I couldn’t walk — to look back at the ground I’d already covered.
Now, as I write these words, I still have terminal cancer. There’s no realistic hope of remission, let alone a cure. It’s on my bones from head to toe. I’m going to die. One of the things likely to kill me is the cancer spreading to my internal organs and tissues. Another is for my damaged neck and spine to fail in just the right way at just the wrong time, and then it’s lights out.
Or maybe I’ll live to a ripe old age and die of something else.
And that’s the thing about death: it will come. In my faith, it’s not the end, and the greatest sin is to lose hope. But leaving faith aside for the moment, hope is the great ingredient of life. It is by no means a license for delusion; things do not go well simply because one hopes they will. Positive thinking alone is not an answer to anything, let alone everything. It’s just a tool.
The real answer is grace, in all its forms. As Ernest Hemingway once said, “Courage is grace under pressure.” In my illness, I found grace. And in my discovery of grace, I found, much to my surprise, how brave I truly am. I’ve become a much better person than I’ve ever been. In a very real and very mystifying, not to mention mysterious, way, cancer has been the greatest gift I’ve ever received.
Better even than a hot dog with Dad at Nathan’s.
Kevin J. Rogers is a freelance journalist and the executive director of the Modern Whig Institute.
Apologies to any medical professionals for any errors in describing my condition. I’m writing from memory and may not be completely accurate in my presentation.
Now that I’m able to work again, I’ll be writing constantly. Most of the content in these pages will be on history, politics and culture (including sports and business). My life is a boring subject. But from time to time I’ll mix some personal stories in, mostly just for fun.
I read this three times, and I think I’ll go back for fourths. Truly beautiful, and brilliant.
Oh, Mr. Rah. Words are escaping me; please feel the love being sent to you.
Don't ever stop writing... ( if you can help it). This was written with some grace. You are the strongest Man I've ever known. I'm honored to be with you every step of the way.
Lots of love to you ❤️