Cancer's Gifts With Love & Hope
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
At 9:30 on a Wednesday night in the ninth floor medical oncology unit at Yale-New Haven Hospital, an IV pole next to my bed drips rapidly into a PICC line inserted in my upper right arm.
The TV drones on but it’s hard to get interested in a program. I am so nauseous in this second week of Interleukin-2 treatment. I’ve put on some 18 pounds of fluid weight. My hands and face are swollen. My skin has a terrible rash and itches like hell. Not only is it hard to sleep feeling so lousy, the Yale staff has to wake me up every two hours to take my blood pressure and temperature.
Right now, cancer is looking real ugly to me.
The drug is ramping up my immune system so much that it’s turning on my own body. Lacking any other effective treatments, the Yale doctors have said if IL-2 doesn’t work, everything else is experimental from here on out. I know the odds, and they are not pretty. Less than eight per cent will get a “complete response”, a remission. But it’s the last FDA-approved treatment for my cancer. 100 years from now, I’m thinking, this will look so barbaric to future medical practitioners. They’re hyper-activating my whole immune system in the hopes it will somehow attack the cancer as an invader.
An hour earlier, I ordered my Mom and my husband Allen to go home. Throughout my three-year ordeal with cancer, they have stood vigil out of unconditional love. I can see the worry and fear in their faces. It pains me to see what my disease is doing to them.
Several good friends and loved ones have also come to visit. Kind of strange for them to see me like this. Two nights earlier, one visitor fled apologetically when at the precise moment he arrived my body went into the rigors—uncontrollable violent shaking. I shook the recliner chair so hard one of the screws went ka-ching across the room. A nurse injected two doses of Demorol to calm the tremors.
Cancer is looking quite ugly to them, too. But the seasoned professionals who are treating me have seen it before many times, over and over.
A few weeks after I returned home, the bills started arriving. Charges for the first week of Interleukin-2 treatment totaled over $136,000. Charges for the second week: $152,000. All I did was lay in bed hooked up to an IV pole—no surgery, no machines. A quarter of a million dollars for one cancer treatment that I would learn six weeks later did not work. The tumors kept growing anyhow.
The high cost of cancer looks ugly to society as a whole.
* * *
Yet, inside and outside my hospital room, goodness reigns. For all the pain and suffering that cancer has lobbed at me, I have seen so many beautiful aspects of this terrible disease.
I get up out of bed and force myself to walk the halls of the ninth floor, wheeling my IV pole with me. Despite feeling so sickly and weak, the walk comforts me with all the wonderful things I see.
From the floor’s waiting room, I’ve been watching an army of construction workers building a monument to cancer’s defeat: the new 14-story cancer hospital costing more than half a billion dollars. Thousands of people have come forward to contribute money for this amazing new building attached to Yale-New Haven. It’ll be named after Joel Smilow, a businessman and philanthropist who gave Yale much of the total cost of the project.
This is all for people like me, I am thinking, as I gaze out the window way down to the first floor and back up to the top. I get choked up at the thought.
Walking back towards my room, I smile and cheer on cancer’s biggest enemy—the medical teams who’ve chosen cancer fighting as a career. There’s Mike Droniak, the handsome young nurse. So many other avocations he could have chosen, I guess, but he chose oncological nursing with such mixed outcomes. All cancer patients are fortunate he made that choice. There’s Dr. Ruth Halaban who came to visit me, a lifelong Yale cancer researcher who not only is tinkering with my cancer cells, she’s also mapped out my genome. There’s my oncologist, Dr. Harriet Kluger, whom I think is the best at what she does. There’s Sheila Turner APRN, who’s been coordinating my in-patient treatment these two weeks. There’s the social worker assigned to my case, Nora Rightmer, who helps hundreds of cancer patients just deal with it all. At least another 30 Yale staffers are working for me—Bob Heffernan, the cancer patient—doing lab tests, scans, surgery, billing, room maintenance, and on and on.
The true wonder of it all amazes me. The institution itself—Yale—is a bastion of medicine, symbolizing the persistent drive of humankind to quell disease and heal.
In every room on this floor, there are dozens of beautiful stories: one patient after another has chosen to fight cancer. Their personal battles and support from loved ones provides so much inspiration and respect. “Let me know who else has my cancer on the floor, I’d love to chat with them,” I tell my nurses. I’ve quickly learned how special is the bond between patients.
* * *
One out of every four Americans will get cancer sometime in their lifetime, says the American Cancer Society. The odds are great the disease in some way will have touched everyone reading this book. We all know somebody who has been treated for cancer. We know far too many who’ve lost their battle.
Nobody knows more than I how bad cancer is. This book will not sugarcoat the disease. Instead, it’s really a story about how we can find goodness and beauty in even the most terrible things life throws at us. Cancer is all about the intimate human experience. It brings out the best traits in so many of us. How we choose to handle a disease is just that—a choice. We live with cancer, beat back cancer, or sadly succumb to cancer.
I have chosen to focus on Cancer’s Gifts, and the love and hope that go with them.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
Imagine being diagnosed with a disease as seemingly minor as melanoma that quickly progresses to stage four cancer, where the chances of survival drop to less than 10% in five years. And, the options are only surgery, a handful of tough FDA-approved treatments, and a risky experimental therapy hundreds of miles from home.
Usually we think of cancer as an ugly, terrifying disease. But Bob Heffernan's amazing journey against all odds tells an uplifting story of perseverance, hope, and positivity that will inspire all cancer patients. He found that alongside fear and suffering, cancer provides numerous gifts that nourish the human soul. It’s a story about how we can find goodness and beauty in even the most terrible challenge life throws at us: cancer.
About the Author
Bob Heffernan today serves as executive director of three state trade associations and holds a BA degree in journalism from American University, Washington. He is also the author of another book, Cabinetmakers, Story of the Three-Year Battle to Establish the U.S. Department of Education. He and his husband Allen own and operate the White Horse Inn in Waitsfield, Vermont.