by Erma Bombeck
"It's like the story of Moses when he came down from the mount bearing those pendulous tablets. There were a few of his followers who rushed up to him and said, 'Master, Master, what happened?' And he said with that stern Charlton Heston demeanor, 'There's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that I got Him down to ten. The bad news is that adultery stays in.'
"There's good news about cancer that's coming out of patients—patients living one day longer, one day at a time, confronting the reality of the disease. Doing research is good news. The bad news is that we've got to do it faster."
It's easy to understand what makes Marty Murphy fight his own private battle for survival, but what makes Dr. Martin Murphy, the scientist, run? How can he maintain this sense of urgency and passion about his research when he never sees the faces of his patients—only a long line of petri dishes and tissue in incubators? He smiled:
"In 1970, I was a mouse doctor, so to speak... cloning mouse cells in Australia. I was seventh-year post-doctoral living largely off my father and mother. I remember when I told my dad I was coming to the States to give some speeches; he said, 'Does that mean that you are for the first time in your thirty-one years of life gainfully employed?' So anyhow, St. Jude was the second speech on my schedule. That's where I met Dr. Pinkel, who is now head of pediatrics. I spent two intensive days with him when I called home from a motel and told Annie to pack the footlockers but label them for Memphis.
"I had never interfaced with patients before— let alone children. St. Jude didn't have the huge building, that big hospital, then. It had seven beds. All the children were treated as outpatients. They were in waiting rooms with IV drips, in their mother's or father's or grandparent's arms. It [cancer] was everywhere and also the retching was everywhere. You couldn't avoid it.
"Dr. Pinkel put my lab right next to one of these waiting rooms for leukemia patients. So I went to Don [Pinkel] and said, 'Don, you've come through on every one of your pledges'—and he's known for that; his word is his bond. I said, 'The one thing I didn't talk to you about was where my lab was going to be placed. I gotta have it moved because I'm dealing with all these little white and black mice and it's just no good for me to come in and out with these children here retching and God, Don, this is...'
"He looked at me and said, 'That's exactly where you ought to be.' I didn't see it. Took me months and months of time. I got resentment for that man. "What the hell is he doing to me? To these children? These patients? I'm a scientist. I'm not one of these clinicians. You take care of your patients, but I'm answering questions of the cell." Then all of a sudden it hit me. We're just people here with a commonality of mission. For the first time I realized that it really had to be a team; it had to be a partnership. Don said, 'You have had the opportunity to pursue science. Now you have a responsibility to prosecute science.' I was pursuing my own ambitions. I began, of course, to convert entirely to childhood cancer."
He was quiet for a moment before continuing:
"I had to get marrow every month from some of those little tykes and they would scream and I made myself go there and tell them why. They deserved to know why this was happening. Their parents deserved to know why. You know how a child can scream and sustain that screaming to the point where I mean it hurt. Oh God, I remember this one little boy and the parents from east Tennessee .. .the real hill country. They were dirt rich in the sense they had their riches of dirt. They were also dirt poor in wordly goods, but they had such a love for this little boy. He was one of the early ones in total therapy, three in which chemotherapy and radiation was given, and as far as I know he's alive and probably has grandchildren by now.
"On that day I remember telling him that after five consecutive marrows this was likely going to be the last one if nothing nasty grew in the dish. He jumped up on my knee—this was this little backside that had been invaded repeatedly with these horrible needles to get this marrow—and he called me 'Superdoc' and he said, 'Superdoc, I hope I never see you again.' And he gave me the biggest, warmest hug. I loved him and I hope that I will never see him again."
As the morning approached noon, Dr. Murphy surveyed his laboratory and took a deep breath. I followed his gaze. We were standing in an arena of cancer rarely seen by cancer patients and yet, their future lives here. So does Marty Murphy's future. Their futures are kept alive in this cold laboratory—and others like them throughout the world—in rows of tissue cultures in petri dishes; in the computers, incubators, and refrigerators; under the microscopes that line the counters; and on the blackboards with their foreign-looking equations.
I noted a plaque on his wall and smiled, remembering how one of the kids told me about Murphy's Medical Law: "The more boring and out-of-date the magazines are in the waiting room, the longer you have to wait for your scheduled appointment."
The plaque on the wall of Hippie Laboratory reads:
THIS DISEASE OF CANCER WILL BE BANISHED FROM LIFE BY CALM, UNHURRYING, PERSISTENT MEN AND WOMEN WORKING IN HOSPITALS AND LABORATORIES AND THE MOTIVE THAT WILL CONQUER CANCER WILL NOT BE PITY NOR HORROR. IT WILL BE THE CURIOSITY TO KNOW HOW AND WHY.
A couple of days into the New Year of 1989, my curiosity got the best of me. I called Marty Murphy to see how he was doing.
He laughed, "If I felt any better... I'd clone myself!"
15
Never Take a Pessimistic View—You'll Probably Be Wrong Anyway
"Better Mottoes " Association
Dayton, Ohio
I told you in the introduction to this book that I suspected I would not be the same person at the end as I was when I started writing it.
I got that part right.
Before I was invited to visit the world of cancer two and a half years ago I thought I knew children pretty well. I knew they had the strength to move sofas if so much as a cookie crumb fell behind one. I knew they had the dexterity to take the bell out of a ball in fifteen seconds. This, before they could even focus their eyes. I have always believed that an army of fifteen two-year-olds could bring any enemy power to its knees in less than a day.
But I never realized how resilient children are—how much physical pounding these small bodies can take and still come up smiling. Emotionally, they are like corks. Just when you think they are lost forever in the swirl of dark waters and rough seas, they surface to bob along innocently awaiting the next assault.
There were other surprises. Their instant maturity, for example. Ginger from Tampa, Florida, was told by the social worker she had leukemia. Ginger turned to her mother and said, "Mommy, you don't need to stay while we talk." The mother hid around the corner to listen to this bizarre conversation between the social worker and her four-year-old child.
In a modern society where "tough decisions" has almost become a cliché, one cannot help but be awed by Kara, Greenwich, Connecticut, who realized that a bone transplant would have involved subsequent operations to keep up with her growth and opted instead to have her left leg removed. Her family was so astonished at her calmness they asked the doctor, "Do you think we should call a psychiatrist for her? She isn't upset enough."
The twelve-year-old put all of her feelings into her poetry, including her version of The Twelve Days of Cancer (with apologies to all the milking maidens, squawking geese, and nesting partridges):
On the Twelfth Day of Cancer my doctor gave to me,
Twelve months of remission,
Eleven frustrated doctors,
Ten Ewing's tumors,
Nine prosthetic limbs,
Eight bald children,
Seven pairs of crutches,
Six amputees,
Five joking nurses,
Four fuzzy wigs,
Three blood tests,
Two rounds of chemo
And a big needle for my arm.
There were other revelations. When I asked the kids for three wishes they would like to have fulfilled, I didn't dream there were so many six-year-old boys who knew how to spell Lamborghini or so many ei
ght-year-old girls who wanted to meet Tom Cruise with matrimony in mind.
But the biggest surprise was their humor. Most of it at first seemed like the dark side of Mary Poppins... but it worked for them. I have always set personal boundaries of what is funny and what is not. I have been quoted as saying, "There are just some things you don't poke fun at." I was wrong. Laughter rises out of tragedy when you need it the most and rewards you for your courage.
Without it, it would have been impossible to imagine how these children and their families could have endured their load.
The giddiness of a moment when fifteen-year-old Jessica, Burlington, Vermont, with a "below the knee" amputation, was playing soccer and not only the ball, but her prosthesis sailed through the air leaving "the tall, gorgeous, humorous person I am" convulsed on the floor with laughter.
Sometimes it was a situation that cried for perspective. Ryan was treated for neuroblastoma at age three with surgery and radiation. Eleven years later, he emerged with no health problems, but there was just one little glitch. He only perspires and blushes on one side of his body. Ryan may use less deodorant than the rest of us, but his sense of humor was left intact, as is evidenced by his artwork.
Betsy of Boston, Massachusetts, speaks of optimism and humor as her "caretakers" during her bout with cancer. It put the following experience in perspective. The seventeen-year-old entered a treatment room to receive her radiation therapy. Several people were already there so she dropped her gown
and prepared to get on with it. Upon questioning she found that the extra people in the room weren't medical students as she had assumed, but painters there to estimate the cost of repainting the room!
Worth noting is that the incident happened in 1965, and Betsy added, "I wish there had been organizations and opportunities available twenty-four years ago to allow me to share 'experiences' rather than 'memories.' "
These children have a unique approach to their life-threatening illness. Instead of looking backward, they look forward. I discovered that everything in their lives takes on a new importance and that nothing is taken for granted. Not a friendship... not a kindness... not even tomorrow. No deed goes unnoticed. A mother from Missouri put a notebook in her son Daniel's room with blank pages and everyone who came into his room to administer some service to him was asked to outline his hand and sign his name.
When Daniel left the hospital, he had a collection of forty-two hands—big hands, little hands, hands that mopped the room, hands that held the bowl when he threw up after anesthesia, hands that held a scalpel.
The longer I was involved in the lives of these children, the taller and more perceptive they became and the more I diminished in size and wisdom. How many times had I threatened my children with the horrors of the "real world." How often had I made the ultimate threat that one day they would grow up and have to face a harsh, cruel world with all of its responsibilities and burdens.
Cancer. You can't get any more real than that. And yet, no one had to tell them how to deal with it. To them, it was a detour... nine miles of bad road in their lives and they took it one day at a time. Did we ever know that? Or had we just forgotten it?
I had to look at them and question when I lost the child in me. When did I become so rigid that I couldn't shoot baskets with the kids because I had to clean out the refrigerator and change the baking soda?
When did I look at a new puppy and see only puddles instead of something to love that would love me back?
Was it the day I traded a live Christmas tree that filled the air with pungency for a practical "fake" tree that revolved, played a Christmas carol, and snowed on itself?
And small things. How long it had been since I had looked at a piece of worthless broken glass and christened it a "diamond" because I had the power and the optimism to make something into anything I wanted it to be.
The joys of eating snow and burnt marshmallows, burying myself in leaves, saving gum that had been chewed, throwing rocks, getting feet wet, and kissing the dog had given way to greater expectations from life—none of which seemed to give the same joy as those had. Don't even think of asking me to close my eyes and hold out my hand for a surprise. Trust was one of the first things to go.
When did I start dissecting relationships and all of their ramifications instead of simply asking, "You want to be my friend?"
I could produce a litany of words about what these children have contributed to my life: hope, optimism, pride, perspective, compassion, and humility. But those are just words and sometimes, unless you can visualize something, they remain just words.
I remember the word "eternity" was just a word until Dorothy Parker described it as "a ham and two people." Then it took on new meaning.
Take "Hope." It's a word that is used often in this book, but what is it? What does it look like? Feel like? Smell like?
A group of kids who had cancer and their siblings were asked one day by a social worker to describe hope. They sat there like portraits.
Finally, she said, "Okay, let's imagine that 'Hope' is an animal. Now what does he look like?"
Slowly and thoughtfully they began to put together this mythical animal that had been such an important part of their lives.
"Hope is about two and a half feet tall."
"He is covered with fur and it's fluffy."
"And soft."
"Hope smiles a lot and has blue eyes and a short bottle brush tail that wags. It is the color of sunshine and happiness. One ear stands up and the other flops down."
"Hope giggles."
"When it talks, you're the only one who can hear it."
"Hope raises its voice sometimes. It has to talk louder than fear."
"Occasionally, Hope is shy and likes to hide."
"Sometimes you can coax it to come to you, but most of the time you have to be patient and wait. Then it will come to you."
"It has to sleep with you as it's too fragile to sleep outside."
"If you don't take good care of it... it can die."
"You musn't cling or hug it too much because then it will become too big... and it would control you."
"It's an animal you can't buy or cage. You have to keep looking till you find it."
"It will come to you only when you need it."
"Hope has offsprings like any other animal. They're called 'Hopelets.' You don't keep them. You share them with other people who need one."
To these kids, "Hope" came out looking suspiciously like a thirty-inch, sun-drenched rabbit.
I have my own version.
To me, the animal "Hope" is small. Sometimes it has two legs, sometimes not. Sometimes it has hair and sometimes it is bald. It can laugh and cry in the same breath. It doesn't have to talk. Its very presence is enough to change the course of your life.
It has a name. It is called a child fighting cancer.