Articoli correlati a Making Miracles Happen
A Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and his partner recount his remarkable triumph over brain cancer, the result of a global pursuit of conventional and unconventional treatments, as well as faith and determination. Reprint.
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L'autore:
Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh have collaborated on many books, including The Mormon Murders, Final Justice, A Stranger in the Family, and Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, which was a National Book Award finalist and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. They are also co-editors of the well-known reference works The Best Doctors in America and The Best Lawyers in America. Their most recent book was On a Street Called Easy, in a Cottage Called Joye. They live in South Carolina.
Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:
Three Months
They said I had three months to live.
According to the doctors, a benign brain tumor, which I had been managing nicely (thank you) for more than a decade, had suddenly turned malignant. After just a few months of undetected, exponential growth, it was now, suddenly, officially "inoperable."
Thus, the inevitable question (asked like a bad actor in a B movie): "How long do I have?"
Thus, the inevitable answer (delivered with studied, stunning off-handedness): "Three months. Maybe six."
That was ten years ago: December, 1986--just a week before Christmas. I had flown to the Mayo Clinic in snow-covered Rochester, Minnesota, instead of home for the holidays. "Frosty the Snowman" and "Jingle Bell Rock" floated through the hospital corridors. I remember it all too well. The seasonal gaiety made the bleak news seem even more surreal, harder to absorb. The fact that it came from such a reputable institution made it even harder to deny.
So what was the first thing I did?
I went back to the hotel and ate every cinnamon bun in the coffee shop. Then I took stock of my life. I was thirty-four and halfway through the first really important book of my career as a writer: a biography of the artist Jackson Pollock. Strangely, I was far more distressed at the prospect of not finishing the book than at the prospect of not finishing my life, which, I figured, was also about halfway through.
No doubt, children, if I had had them, would have changed that calculus. But, as it was, the Pollock book was my child, and I grieved for the uncertainty of its future far more than the uncertainty of my own.
Not until sometime later that day, after more cinnamon buns, some calls to family and friends, and not a few tears shed in the dreadful loneliness of a hotel room, did I realize what a fool I was being. How stupid. The news was simply wrong. Not the part about the tumor--I had seen the scans myself and the ghostly lily pad of tumor floating in the little gray pond of my brain. No, what was wrong was the death sentence that the doctors read in those ghostly images.
Three months. They said I had three months. But what did that mean exactly? Was it like the expiration date on a carton of milk? Maybe, if conditions were favorable, if I didn't get left out too long or used too often, I might last a little longer ("maybe six"), but the laws of spoilage, like the laws of aging, were irreversible and inescapable? Or was it like the expiration date on a driver's license? As long as I was safe and careful, or lucky, I might go on forever?
Then it hit me. As I was medicating my depression with the tranquilizer of television, a local weatherman came on to say, with an apologetic smile, "Better break out those umbrellas, friends. Tomorrow's gonna be a wet one." In my fatalistic mood, I thought, "Oh great. Just what I need. How appropriate." The dark clouds, the shrouds of freezing rain. God was giving stage directions for my last act ("thunder and lightning off stage left"). The smiling weatherman was followed by one of those playschool graphics with a frowning sun holding an umbrella and the words "Tomorrow: 90 percent chance of rain."
That was it. My doctors were weathermen! They were making predictions based on previous experience, not on immutable laws of nature. When the weatherman said "rain tomorrow," what he meant was "there's a good chance of rain tomorrow--a 90 percent chance--but still just a chance. Out of every ten days with the same or similar atmospheric conditions, it will rain on nine of them--but not on one. Rain is a good bet--a very good bet--but not a sure thing."
In other words, it was all about odds. My doctors were just better-educated, better-paid weathermen making predictions about the course of my illness based on previous experience. When they said "three months," they were reading a statistical table, not a crystal ball. What they really meant was not that I would die in three months, but that a substantial majority of patients with symptoms like mine died within three months.
A substantial majority--but not all.
All I had to do was somehow find my way into that minority who slipped by the three-month expiration date--and then, maybe, the six-month one as well. All I had to do was be that one sunny day out of ten. All I had to do was beat the odds.
Like every other patient, I heard the question "Why me?" in every tentative beat of my heart. But even before that, I wanted to know "How me?" How did this happen?
For a long time, the only answer I could get from doctors was "idiopathic," which is the Greek way doctors shrug their shoulders and say, "Beats the hell out of me." Later, after plotting the tumor's growth rate and reconstructing events prior to its debut, I was able to identify what I think--although not all my doctors agree--was the "big bang," the very instant at which my universe of medical problems began.
It was 1971 and I was doing the spring vacation thing with some college buddies. We were playing around the pool of a little motel in Fort Lauderdale pretending to shoot each other and doing stunt falls into the water. On one particularly spectacular "death" off the diving board, I went straight to the bottom and hit head-first. I knew instantly I was in trouble. As I floated upward, I struggled to keep from blacking out. I kept telling myself, "Don't let go. Stay conscious. Just get to the surface." When I finally breached, I was holding my head. "I hurt myself," I called out with what seems, in retrospect, extraordinary poise. But my friends thought I was still fooling around, just playing wounded, so they laughed. "No, I really am hurt," I insisted. And just then, as if on cue, a veil of watery blood streamed out from under my hand and covered my face. "That'll teach 'em to laugh at me," I thought as they rushed me to the hospital.
Fifteen years later, I was in New York, writing the Pollock biography. Along with Steve Naifeh, my law school classmate and coauthor, I was attending a Christmas party when I tried to take a sip from a glass of punch and the ruby-red liquid dribbled down my chin and onto my shirt. I started to explain, but my lips wouldn't form the b in trouble, or the p in panic. "Help" came out "Hell." And that's exactly what it was. The right side of my face was paralyzed. I couldn't even pucker to kiss the hostess a frantic goodnight as I fled the room in terror.
Just a few days later, I was in the hotel room with the cinnamon buns and the playschool graphics, thinking about expiration dates and sunny days, and hearing that doctor's voice in my head, again and again, impossibly calm: "Three months, three months, three months."
How did it feel?
That's the question I've been asked most often in the ten years since my Christmas at Mayo. How did it feel to be told I only had three months to live? How did it feel to find out suddenly that my life was going to be cut short, without warning or recourse? For years, I struggled to find a good answer to that question. I tried all the canned responses--"I was shocked/stunned/amazed/speechless," or, "It felt unreal/like a dream/like a movie/like it was happening to somebody else"--but they just never seemed adequate. Some caught the helplessness but missed the terror; others caught the dread but missed the panic.
It wasn't until recently, when Steve and I started work on this book, that I found the answer I'd been looking for: the answer to "How did it feel?" It came from a patient named Darren Weber.
In 1991, Weber was a twenty-six-year-old communications sergeant in the U.S. Army's elite Special Forces. He had been called up after four years of inactive status, during which he earned his college degree, because of the Gulf War. Before he could join Desert Storm, however, he needed a refresher course in parachute jumping. That was how he found himself in a helicopter eleven thousand feet above the Oklahoma prairie.
As a Green Beret, Weber was an old hand at military free-fall parachuting. Indeed, his first two jumps that day went without a hitch. By the third jump, his confidence was back. Finally, he could relax and enjoy the sheer exhilaration of free-falling more than six thousand feet at 120 miles per hour, through a cool, cloudless sky. He even did a few stunts in mid-air--rotation left, rotation right--before picking up the drop zone and "just flying my body toward it." Within only a few seconds, Weber had reached his "pull altitude," four thousand feet, when it was time to pull the ripcord that opened his parachute, and begin his slow descent to the ground.
Only, when he reached for his ripcord, it wasn't there.
With his body arched in free-fall position and the ground approaching at the speed of a bullet train, he felt everywhere for the ripcord. He thought maybe it had worked its way down. Nothing there. Maybe up. Nothing there. After searching for two or three seco...
They said I had three months to live.
According to the doctors, a benign brain tumor, which I had been managing nicely (thank you) for more than a decade, had suddenly turned malignant. After just a few months of undetected, exponential growth, it was now, suddenly, officially "inoperable."
Thus, the inevitable question (asked like a bad actor in a B movie): "How long do I have?"
Thus, the inevitable answer (delivered with studied, stunning off-handedness): "Three months. Maybe six."
That was ten years ago: December, 1986--just a week before Christmas. I had flown to the Mayo Clinic in snow-covered Rochester, Minnesota, instead of home for the holidays. "Frosty the Snowman" and "Jingle Bell Rock" floated through the hospital corridors. I remember it all too well. The seasonal gaiety made the bleak news seem even more surreal, harder to absorb. The fact that it came from such a reputable institution made it even harder to deny.
So what was the first thing I did?
I went back to the hotel and ate every cinnamon bun in the coffee shop. Then I took stock of my life. I was thirty-four and halfway through the first really important book of my career as a writer: a biography of the artist Jackson Pollock. Strangely, I was far more distressed at the prospect of not finishing the book than at the prospect of not finishing my life, which, I figured, was also about halfway through.
No doubt, children, if I had had them, would have changed that calculus. But, as it was, the Pollock book was my child, and I grieved for the uncertainty of its future far more than the uncertainty of my own.
Not until sometime later that day, after more cinnamon buns, some calls to family and friends, and not a few tears shed in the dreadful loneliness of a hotel room, did I realize what a fool I was being. How stupid. The news was simply wrong. Not the part about the tumor--I had seen the scans myself and the ghostly lily pad of tumor floating in the little gray pond of my brain. No, what was wrong was the death sentence that the doctors read in those ghostly images.
Three months. They said I had three months. But what did that mean exactly? Was it like the expiration date on a carton of milk? Maybe, if conditions were favorable, if I didn't get left out too long or used too often, I might last a little longer ("maybe six"), but the laws of spoilage, like the laws of aging, were irreversible and inescapable? Or was it like the expiration date on a driver's license? As long as I was safe and careful, or lucky, I might go on forever?
Then it hit me. As I was medicating my depression with the tranquilizer of television, a local weatherman came on to say, with an apologetic smile, "Better break out those umbrellas, friends. Tomorrow's gonna be a wet one." In my fatalistic mood, I thought, "Oh great. Just what I need. How appropriate." The dark clouds, the shrouds of freezing rain. God was giving stage directions for my last act ("thunder and lightning off stage left"). The smiling weatherman was followed by one of those playschool graphics with a frowning sun holding an umbrella and the words "Tomorrow: 90 percent chance of rain."
That was it. My doctors were weathermen! They were making predictions based on previous experience, not on immutable laws of nature. When the weatherman said "rain tomorrow," what he meant was "there's a good chance of rain tomorrow--a 90 percent chance--but still just a chance. Out of every ten days with the same or similar atmospheric conditions, it will rain on nine of them--but not on one. Rain is a good bet--a very good bet--but not a sure thing."
In other words, it was all about odds. My doctors were just better-educated, better-paid weathermen making predictions about the course of my illness based on previous experience. When they said "three months," they were reading a statistical table, not a crystal ball. What they really meant was not that I would die in three months, but that a substantial majority of patients with symptoms like mine died within three months.
A substantial majority--but not all.
All I had to do was somehow find my way into that minority who slipped by the three-month expiration date--and then, maybe, the six-month one as well. All I had to do was be that one sunny day out of ten. All I had to do was beat the odds.
Like every other patient, I heard the question "Why me?" in every tentative beat of my heart. But even before that, I wanted to know "How me?" How did this happen?
For a long time, the only answer I could get from doctors was "idiopathic," which is the Greek way doctors shrug their shoulders and say, "Beats the hell out of me." Later, after plotting the tumor's growth rate and reconstructing events prior to its debut, I was able to identify what I think--although not all my doctors agree--was the "big bang," the very instant at which my universe of medical problems began.
It was 1971 and I was doing the spring vacation thing with some college buddies. We were playing around the pool of a little motel in Fort Lauderdale pretending to shoot each other and doing stunt falls into the water. On one particularly spectacular "death" off the diving board, I went straight to the bottom and hit head-first. I knew instantly I was in trouble. As I floated upward, I struggled to keep from blacking out. I kept telling myself, "Don't let go. Stay conscious. Just get to the surface." When I finally breached, I was holding my head. "I hurt myself," I called out with what seems, in retrospect, extraordinary poise. But my friends thought I was still fooling around, just playing wounded, so they laughed. "No, I really am hurt," I insisted. And just then, as if on cue, a veil of watery blood streamed out from under my hand and covered my face. "That'll teach 'em to laugh at me," I thought as they rushed me to the hospital.
Fifteen years later, I was in New York, writing the Pollock biography. Along with Steve Naifeh, my law school classmate and coauthor, I was attending a Christmas party when I tried to take a sip from a glass of punch and the ruby-red liquid dribbled down my chin and onto my shirt. I started to explain, but my lips wouldn't form the b in trouble, or the p in panic. "Help" came out "Hell." And that's exactly what it was. The right side of my face was paralyzed. I couldn't even pucker to kiss the hostess a frantic goodnight as I fled the room in terror.
Just a few days later, I was in the hotel room with the cinnamon buns and the playschool graphics, thinking about expiration dates and sunny days, and hearing that doctor's voice in my head, again and again, impossibly calm: "Three months, three months, three months."
How did it feel?
That's the question I've been asked most often in the ten years since my Christmas at Mayo. How did it feel to be told I only had three months to live? How did it feel to find out suddenly that my life was going to be cut short, without warning or recourse? For years, I struggled to find a good answer to that question. I tried all the canned responses--"I was shocked/stunned/amazed/speechless," or, "It felt unreal/like a dream/like a movie/like it was happening to somebody else"--but they just never seemed adequate. Some caught the helplessness but missed the terror; others caught the dread but missed the panic.
It wasn't until recently, when Steve and I started work on this book, that I found the answer I'd been looking for: the answer to "How did it feel?" It came from a patient named Darren Weber.
In 1991, Weber was a twenty-six-year-old communications sergeant in the U.S. Army's elite Special Forces. He had been called up after four years of inactive status, during which he earned his college degree, because of the Gulf War. Before he could join Desert Storm, however, he needed a refresher course in parachute jumping. That was how he found himself in a helicopter eleven thousand feet above the Oklahoma prairie.
As a Green Beret, Weber was an old hand at military free-fall parachuting. Indeed, his first two jumps that day went without a hitch. By the third jump, his confidence was back. Finally, he could relax and enjoy the sheer exhilaration of free-falling more than six thousand feet at 120 miles per hour, through a cool, cloudless sky. He even did a few stunts in mid-air--rotation left, rotation right--before picking up the drop zone and "just flying my body toward it." Within only a few seconds, Weber had reached his "pull altitude," four thousand feet, when it was time to pull the ripcord that opened his parachute, and begin his slow descent to the ground.
Only, when he reached for his ripcord, it wasn't there.
With his body arched in free-fall position and the ground approaching at the speed of a bullet train, he felt everywhere for the ripcord. He thought maybe it had worked its way down. Nothing there. Maybe up. Nothing there. After searching for two or three seco...
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- EditoreDell Island Books
- Data di pubblicazione1998
- ISBN 10 0440508371
- ISBN 13 9780440508373
- RilegaturaCopertina flessibile
- Numero di pagine320
- Valutazione libreria
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