by Erma Bombeck
Even though I haven't bathed,
In more than a week.
- Sandy,
Madera, California
RUMOR MILL:
Frankie and Annette seem to be making a comeback. Could this be the hottest romance since Romeo and Juliet?
Going to camp was an adventure for me. It's the first time I ever saw a tent close up. In fact, it was also the farthest away from a shopping center I'd ever been in my life."
Beverly,
Camp Sunshine,
Atlanta, Georgia
Food at camp,
Was fit for a tramp,
With green eggs and ham,
I'd rather have Spam,
I didn't want to eat,
but I knew I should,
For the food that morning turned out to be good.
- John, age fourteen,
Bend, Oregon
"If You Think You Saw a Mouse... You Did!"
Camper's Law No. 1
Dr. Ritchey is a great Frisbee player. Why do you think he wants to be a doctor?
Donnie,
Camp Winaca,
Morgantown, West Virginia
Two camp counselors were making tents rainproof one night and had an "interesting" conversation on love. To their horror they saw a foot sticking out of one of the tents. They were saved mortification when they discovered they were "overheard" only by a prosthesis.
Name of camp on request
CAMP JOKE:
Q: What does a mother ghost say to her child when they get into the car?
A: Fasten your sheet belt!
"Clothes That Have Name Tags Sewed in Them Are Never Lost."
Camper's Law No. 28
Dear Lupe:
Can you PLEASE tell Mom in Spanish that I really am having fun. I take a bath every day and try not to eat a lot. Tell her she better not forget that I am leaving on Wednesday. Be sure you DON'T FORGET. Well, good-bye. I hope you all DON'T FORGET. PLEASE!!!"
Claudia,
San Antonio, Texas
Toilet paper is held in the highest regard above all my worldly possessions at camp... over my clay, my toothbrush, my last week's Sports Illustrated. I vow never to waste toilet paper again. Future generations will not have to endure the hardships that I once had.
Keith, counselor
Camp Sunrise, Arizona
"It Is Generally Easier to Ask Forgiveness Than Permission."
Camper's Law No. 1092
Camp is the only place I don't worry about cancer. I worry about mosquitoes.
Camper,
Path, Rhode Island
CAMP JOKE:
Joe: Yesterday, I came face to face with a lion.
Moe: Weren't you scared?
Joe: Nah, I just turned and walked past his cage.
CAMP DOCTOR: Susan, how do you feel?
SUSAN: With my hands.
Dear Mom and Dad:
Did you miss us? Send a Yes or a No card.
Derek, age six,
Camp Hobe, Utah
Frankie attended Camp Can-Do and upon his return home I took his film to be developed. I was quite surprised to see him wearing someone else's clothes in all the pictures. It seems he never found the second compartment in his suitcase.
Camper's mother
Marlton, New Jersey
"What did you bring to camp that you didn't use?"
"Tap shoes and a new pair of earrings."
Sue
"Mrs. Anderson? Robin broke a leg on the trail. Could you please send up another one on a plane?"
Call to mother from camp counselor
13
When Is a Good Time to Get Cancer?
"I can't die yet... I'm booked!"
George Burns
You're in the soufflé of your life and someone slams a door!
You shout "Why me?" and then you whisper "Why anybody else?"
It will come as a shock to no one that cancer isn't something you put on your "LIST OF THINGS TO DO TODAY." But the reaction is always the same: "Not now! This is a lousy time of my life to get cancer."
Timing.
Five days before Christmas, the Mould family had just finished decorating their Christmas tree in North Vancouver, British Columbia. An hour after the two brothers were in bed, Tommy came to the stairs for help. He couldn't breathe. By Christmas Eve, Tommy was in Ward 3B, diagnosed with non Hodgkin's lymphoblastic lymphoma.
"I was active in ballet, tap, and jazz and in excellent condition. One afternoon I was riding my stationary bike and felt a lump in my right leg. It was rhabdomyosarcoma."
"1983 was an important year for me. I was beginning the fourth grade, living in a new home, going to a new school, and trying to get off to a good start with my teachers. Then I fell and hit my head on a school desk. I got headaches and threw up. I thought I had flu."
Pat of Manchester, Vermont, had major plans when cancer horned in on his life. He and his brother, Brendan, were going to Lake Placid to see the Winter Olympics. Giving in to a pain in his left knee, he went to a doctor who diagnosed it as osteogenic sarcoma. After his leg was amputated, Pat was not to be denied the Olympics. He created his own event out of his personal irony—climbing a summit called Dawson Pass in Glacier National Park. He made it to the top—crutches and all.
Cancer never comes at the right time. Whether you're in the eighth grade and destined to be the first chair clarinet player in the advanced band or the returning athlete who was the hope of the team who returned with only one leg, it's always "inconvenient."
With Monica Furst the summer was coming and she was engaged in a running battle with her mother, Kathleen McKim, on why she couldn't cut her waist-length hair.
A few weeks later, the summer plans and the length of her hair were both out of their control. The eleven-year-old from Phoenix, Arizona, was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma requiring surgery and chemo treatments.
"I didn't want to go on living," she said. "I only ate one banana a day. I figured, why eat when I was going to puke it up again? My weight went down to seventy pounds. My mother cried a lot. I blamed my doctor. Then I started to think about what I was doing. I felt sorry for myself. While I was puking one day I just made up my mind that I was going to live and go to high school and the prom."
In a world where people live to be seventy and eighty, Monica wanted to be a teenager. In a world where the drop-out rate in public schools is a national epidemic, she wanted to go to high school and to the prom.
Prom night. It has a magic ring to it. But for Aaron Asencio, Crestline, California, it was the ultimate bummer in timing.
His story begins on the night of his junior prom. That magical evening where your friends are so dressed up, you don't recognize them. The gross guys who always belched out loud are on their best behavior. Station wagons turn into limos, and proud parents record the fairy tale event on camera to remember the rest of your life.
As fifteen-year-old Aaron stood in front of the mirror, he barely recognized the tall figure looking back at him as he gave a final tug to his bow tie, adjusted the lapels of his white tuxedo, and smoothed his cummerbund. A closer glance revealed his neck was swollen, but he figured it was just a swollen gland that would go away.
He was ready to dance all night and he did.
Aaron missed graduation practice because he felt lousy, but after graduation, his parents, Adrian and Jane Asencio, had a doctor take a look at his swollen gland.
In the quiet serenity of a hospital in Lake Arrowhead, his doctor said that since he "wasn't a female menstruating heavily, he was probably a male with leukemia."
The summer that Aaron had planned to relax and do as little as possible turned into a visit to Loma Linda University Medical Center, which he refers to facetiously as "Motel Hell." The doctor's suspicions were confirmed. Aaron had acute lymphocytic leukemia.
"I was never sick up until then," he laughed. "Not even a broken bone. Biggest thing was strep throat in the seventh grade and 'brother beatings.' "<
br />
"Went into remission at two weeks. I didn't know that much about cancer. Mom's best friend had it. I learned something, though. A friend of mine had throat cancer and couldn't talk and had to write notes. I learned you don't write a note and go into a bank with it," he giggled. "Makes 'em crazy."
If anyone deserves to scream, "Not now! Enough already!" it's Michelle Hawley, Tempe, Arizona.
Michelle had already climbed her mountain. She had paid her dues to cancer. When she was thirteen, the fastest runner in her junior high school, the president of her class at church, a member of the honors program at school, and a musician who played the piano and violin, she was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia.
After remission, she started to put her life together again. Then the following year she suffered a stroke leaving her with a slight limp and without the full use of a hand. Four years later, Michelle had knee surgery on her good knee to remove bone chips. But she still trusted life and set about to live it.
In her sophomore year at the University of Arizona in Tucson, life was good. She was functioning like a normal nineteen-year-old coed. Then, the cancer came back.
In terms of emotions, relapse is hard to explain.
It's worse than going to Disneyland... and discovering it's closed. It's more traumatic than expecting a new bicycle for Christmas... and getting underwear. It's been compared to climbing a mountain and discovering the "real" peak is another two miles, straight up.
Actually, relapse is impossible to describe—unless you've been there.
When forced into a second battle with the disease, it is not unusual for children to consider suicide. Relapse patients mention the word often. Do not think that what you are about to read is a sign of weakness. You are looking despair in the face. You are meeting people who thought they were going home and are being sent back into combat— one more time.
These are the voices of nineteen-year-old Michelle Hawley and her mother, Sharon. They were interviewed separately. Their feelings were difficult for them to resurrect and sometimes painful to share.
MICHELLE: Well, actually this sounds really awful, but when they said it [cancer] had come back, I said I wanted to die. I said, "Forget it. I don't want to do it ever again. Forget all this chemotherapy. Forget all this being sick. I'd just rather die." So, that's what I said.
SHARON: She was very calm through all of it. She just absolutely refused [treatment]. She said she had friends who had gone through the treatment and relapsed and gone through the treatment again and they die anyway so what's the use of doing it. I excused myself from the room and walked down the hall and into a little room and cried my eyes out. I called my husband and said, "You've got to come. You've got to come."
MICHELLE: They called my dad and brother in Phoenix to come to Tucson. They got a room for us... just to talk and stuff.
SHARON: The doctor and the social worker explained it to Michelle and she was very firm. "I won't do it." We talked about the ramifications if she didn't, how quickly the disease would take her, and the answer was two weeks to two months. And at that time I'm thinking, "My God! She'll be gone by Christmas."
MICHELLE: I guess my reaction wasn't normal. Because everybody, all the kids at camp, I guess everybody, if anything's happening wrong, you just want to get better, try to make everything better.
SHARON: Michelle maintained her coolness. I couldn't believe how stubborn she was, but I understand her rights. The three of us [her father and brother] were bawling, begging, and pleading. We just told her how much we loved her and how much we wanted her to live and not give up, please at least try, even though it was unpleasant. After an hour... or an hour and a half... forty-five minutes, however long... she finally said, "Okay, I will do it."
MICHELLE: I remember my brother saying—I can't tell you this without crying.... He said, "If you're gonna come back home, if you're gonna be in the next room just dying, I don't want to be there." And he said something like, "Since I'm your brother, I will, but I'm not gonna like it." That's why I love my brother most.
The Hawley family would never in their lives have imagined such a dialogue taking place. They were a family who should have been immortalized on a Norman Rockwell cover, a family who had relatively little drama in their lives. They're a quiet Mormon family with deep roots in their faith, who, according to Sharon, "had always had a great respect and love of life."
I visited with Monica Furst last year in a Los Angeles suburb where she is living with her father, Brad Furst. She was well, happy, and about to enter her freshman year of high school on her march to the prom.
Aaron Asencio had a day off from his summer job renting out rowboats on Lake Gregory. The next fall he would enter his junior year at Rim Of The World High School. I commiserated with the cheerleaders who, by the time they spelled all of that out, the game would be over. He laughed, "It was named by some suicidal, crazed maniac because the school is on the edge of the earth and just sorta drops off."
Aaron is looking forward to another prom night at Rim Of The World High School.
I caught up with Michelle at a Sunrise Summer Fun Day Camp in Phoenix where she volunteered as a counselor. She had been in remission for nine months. As she guided a couple of her charges out to swim in the 116 degree heat, her mother said, "I think she's done really quite well as 'up' as she is. I couldn't do that if I were a kid that age. She's a gutsy kid. I consider this a war that Michelle can win again."
The pretty young counselor did not die "by Christmas" in 1987. At Christmastime in 1988, I received a home-baked gingerbread house from Michelle and Sharon. They had made and distributed more than seventy of them for the holidays.
14
The Other Murphy's Law
When a patient says "Doctor, you can't possibly understand," I can honestly reply, "Yes, I do."
Dr. Martin J. Murphy, Jr.
This book has made me "odds" crazy. Tooling down Kettering Boulevard in a rental car, I had to ask myself: "What are the odds of an important cancer research lab flourishing between a beauty shop and a McDonald's on a stretch of road in Kettering, Ohio? What are the odds of finding a parking space right in front of the door? Or finding the doctor in his office on a Saturday morning?"
If we're talking about the Hippie Cancer Research Center and its director, Dr. Martin J. Murphy, Jr., BINGO! All three turned out to be wager, that paid off.
As I tapped on the glass door for attention, I tried to remember my last meeting with Dr. Murphy. It was a brief encounter. We shared the same dais at a function honoring Daytonians for their contributions to life. His introduction was preceded by a litany of his degrees and honors ending with his scientific breakthrough of cloning cancer cells. Not only did I sit there that night feeling like a shut-in, I wanted to excuse myself and escape to another country. He was an act you don't want to follow.
Actually, I had come to the lab to interview two Murphys. The first is Dr. Martin Murphy, cancer scientist. The second is Marty Murphy, cancer patient. They occupy the same body.
I was not surprised when the white-coated Dr. Martin Murphy answered the door. It's a role he's comfortable in. He smiled broadly as he guided me through his facilities with the excitement of a small boy dragging his mother around a toy store. "If you had visited here in 1975," he said excitedly, "you would have walked into a single lab of about six hundred square feet filled with apparatus and centrifuges and you'd have to sort of slide around like you would in a subway to get through the aisles. [Today, the lab occupies eighteen thousand square feet.] But we were abuzz with excitement because at that time a great turning point took place. Do you know how a scientist defines 'serendipity'? It's looking for a needle in a haystack and discovering the farmer's daughter. We discovered how to clone bad cells. Today, we can take a sample of that living human tumor outside of the body, place it in an artificial environment, have control over it. We can ask the cell functional questions such as 'Are you a cancer clone growing in a petri dish? Are you sensitive to
adriamycin or Cytoxan—the list goes on—or are you resistant to these drugs?' We can do this outside of the patient and not put them through all this experimenting as they get weaker and weaker and their time and energy runs out."
When I asked Marty Murphy to talk about that night in Florida in 1981 when he was diagnosed as having a carcinoid tumor in his abdomen, the perennial smile lessened somewhat.
"It's hard," he smiled, "but maybe it's good that it's hard."
To no one's surprise, he reacted to the news of his diagnosis exactly as any patient would react:
"I repeatedly asked the same questions, having forgotten I asked them. I went from 'I can handle it' and I was macho, macho in the sense I wanted to protect my wife and my children, so I held it all inside. This catastrophe is a family event and they had every right and need for recovery along with me to the extent that I'm going to recover and that I've got to do it as a family, not as a person—and it took awhile.
"For a long time it never occurred to me that I was the problem. It made me angry. 'What do you mean I'm the problem! Are you kidding? I'm a solver of problems, my friend.'
"I thought maybe God in His own mystical way was awakening me to something—that then are special flowers and some of them are children who happen to be mine [five of them] and my wonderful bride, Ann, who is also a boutonniere.
"For a long time I couldn't talk about it to anyone because I couldn't tell people what I didn't know myself. I didn't know, for example, what it felt like to confront mortality and to look at Brendon, my youngest, and think I might never see him graduate from grade school or see my daughters' weddings. But the 'humor is on me now' as the Irish say. The principle is that cancer is an intolerable disease and I'm mad as hell at it. And I have always been, but the fact is our children and our children's children will someday be not only free of cancer, but the fear of cancer.