I was 35, working as an executive for a high-energy startup company, and my blood pressure was going up. “Probably workplace stress,” my doctor said. Then he paused. “But you’re pretty young for that. Let’s get a kidney scan just to be sure.” He explained that the kidneys control blood pressure.
Thinking nothing of it, I went to get my scan. In those days, techs were not supposed to say anything to the patient about what they saw, but at one point, the young woman doing the scan turned to her colleague, pointed at the screen, and said quietly, “What’s that?”
That didn’t sound too good.
A couple of days later, around dinner time in a driving rainstorm, there was a knock on the door. It was my doctor. “I need to talk to you,” he said.
“You have a large tumor behind your kidney,” he explained after we had invited him in. “We need to do further tests to find out what it is.” He talked on about details, but as soon as I heard the word tumor I had stopped listening. Cancer, I thought.
As though reading my mind, my doctor said, “We don’t know if its cancer. It’s too soon to tell.”
To make a long story short, it was cancer, but a highly treatable kind. They gave me an 80% chance of long-term remission. It’s now nearly 40 years later so, obviously, I survived. But in thinking back to that long-ago moment, it felt as though lightning struck for me that day. I was facing a life-threatening illness; perhaps I would die. I had a wife and a nine-year-old son. What would happen to them if I did die? I was in a daze and stumbled like a sleepwalker from one medical office to another for tests. Then my chemotherapy started—a cocktail of toxic chemicals every three weeks for nine months, followed by more weeks of daily radiation. It was a grueling protocol; some people died not from the cancer but from the treatments.
I dealt with it by seeing my cancer as an enemy that was trying to kill me. In my mind, I was doing daily battle, my dukes up, my sword out. My oncologist offered to refer me to psychological counseling, as he did for all his patients, but I refused. “I’m okay,” I said. “I can handle this.” My hair fell out and my skin turned yellow, but I kept going to work every day—the tough guy who didn’t allow himself to feel weak, sick, or needful of sympathy or help. It was the cancer and me, mano a mano, in a fight to the death. I see now how much I was motivated by a single thought: Illness is weakness, and I am not weak. Today I look back and see this approach as totally wrongheaded. I now see that illness is not weakness. I should have taken my doctor’s advice and sought counseling. Then I would have discovered that the underlying motivation for my macho attitude was fear—not fear of the cancer as much as the fear of being perceived of as weak.
Like most men of my generation, I was taught that “boys don’t cry,” they have to “be a man.” In my newest book, Every Breath, New Chances—my book on aging for men–I write extensively about this masculine stereotype. Men of my generation had it drummed into us, and consciously or not, it suffused our identity as men.
So that’s the lesson I learned from having cancer: illness is not weakness. Illness has nothing to do with “being a man.” Actually, from a Buddhist point of view (and I have been a lifelong Buddhist) we become ill because we have a body. That’s all. From time to time the body falters and illness comes. Eventually, death will come too. That’s just how it is. Weak or strong has nothing to do with it.
In truth, the strongest and most courageous response to illness is to accept it for what it is, to seek help if you need it, and avoid thinking that if you do it is any reflection on the kind of person you are or how strong you are. During my cancer treatments, I sometimes became depressed, I sometimes cried, I sometimes floundered and lost hope. That’s normal. I was lucky, I survived; some people don’t. Life is like that, and the real strength comes in appreciating the gift of life at all times, ill or well.
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Beautifully done, Lew. Short, sweet, and to the point. I can related. We all can. It seems so long ago that I held those beliefs, but realize they still lurk in the dark corners of my fearful heart. Don’t be weak. Well, clearly, sharing our truth is a good antidote for our fear of weakness and acceptance of the truth of our huMANity.