On August 27, 1997, my doctor looked down my throat and said, “Uh-oh, Doug, we have a problem. You have a knot about the size of your thumb that doesn’t belong there.”
They cut the thing off and took a biopsy, and a few days later he called back and said, “You have cancer—cancer of the throat. It’s called Valecular cancer, the attachment of the tongue to the throat.”
He added, “Take two months and get your affairs in order.”
He was giving me a death sentence. I guess he didn’t know me very well.
A month later, on September 24, our thirty-seventh wedding anniversary, they started treatment.
I couldn’t imagine how such a thing could happen. I asked the doctor whether perhaps it was because I had played football or because I had been hit in the head and mask by foul balls when I was umpiring.
“It wasn’t that,” he said.
“Then what was it?” I wanted to know.
“It was the chewing tobacco,” he said.
“Nothing else?” I asked.
“Nothing else,” he said.
- - -
I wore another kind of mask when I went for the radiation. They strap you down to a bench so tightly you can’t move a muscle. I couldn’t have gotten up if I had tried. I wasn’t in control.
I hated it.
For six and a half weeks they shot me with X-rays. I weighed 205 pounds when I started. I weighed 140 when they were finished with me.
When I speak to junior high school and high school kids—and I’ve spoken to hundreds of thousands of them since then—I tell them, “This is what you have to look forward to when you start using spit tobacco.”
At first it didn’t hurt. Then after a few weeks it started getting tender inside. I couldn’t swallow food, so I stopped eating. I couldn’t even get egg custard down. At one point I couldn’t swallow a teaspoon of water.
I suffered from renal shutdown, which meant that my heart, kidneys, liver, and lungs were threatening to shut down.
They put a feeding tube into my stomach so I could have nutrition. Just as I was about to go home, I developed an infection. When I arrived home I was so uncomfortable I couldn’t lie down on the bed. Every bone felt like a knife was sticking into me.
For four and a half months, I slept in an easy chair.
After I took my painkillers, I drank Ensure, which was poured down the feeding tube. I was warned never to cough. Try not coughing when you have to cough. One time I coughed so badly I expelled chocolate all the way up to the ceiling. Within twenty seconds my arm was burning. That’s how strong stomach acid is.
Four and a half months later, my weight had risen to 170 pounds.
I was going to live. And when you have cancer, believe me, all you want to do is live.
I called Joe Garagiola, who runs an educational program about the dangers of chewing tobacco among ballplayers.
“I want to talk to the youth of America about this,” I told him.
Joe sent me to dozens of junior high schools and high schools around the country to talk about the evils of chewing tobacco. In California alone, one out of every five high school ballplayers uses some form of chewing tobacco. Try it a few times, and I guarantee you: You will be hooked. It’s made specifically to addict you.
If you want, you can look in just about any magazine for men or boys and you can find an ad in which you can order a free package of Red Man or Copenhagen or some other chewing-tobacco product. All you have to do is mark the little box that says yes and you have to mark that you are eighteen years of age, and it will be sent to you right away. Does anyone actually check to see whether you are eighteen? Not that I know of.
So then you try it out and right away, you feel great.
But the reason they want you to use it for free: After just one month, you will find that you are addicted. The lengths the tobacco companies will go to addict you are great. Ask yourself: Do the tobacco companies give a damn whether or not you get cancer, as I did?
When you begin chewing tobacco, pretty soon you notice that what you are using isn’t strong enough, and you want something stronger. This is precisely what happened to me and to everyone else who starts out.
I started with Red Man, which is 1.8 percent nicotine, and I worked my way up until I was using Copenhagen, which is fully 28 percent nicotine. Once you begin using Copenhagen—unless you are unusually strong-willed and able to go through a painful withdrawal—you will need medical care to beat the habit. And sometimes even medical care isn’t enough, because chewing tobacco is more addictive than alcohol, cocaine, or even heroin.
You want to save up a lot of money? If you’re using a tobacco product of any kind, put aside the money you would spend on tobacco. I was spending $8 a week. That’s $32 a month. By the time you turn around, you’ll have thousands of dollars in the bank.
A lot of young baseball players think it’s cool to chew tobacco while they’re playing ball. Trust me, once you get cancer, you won’t think it’s so cool. I know.