August 2015–August 2016
When I was untethered from my catheter and told I was cancer-free, I believed that meant I was officially done. I was no longer a cancer patient. I could not have been more wrong. If I was no longer a “cancer patient,” then why was I now hearing about the statistics on my “five-year survival rate” based on the virulent nature of the tumors they removed? Why did I have to report for regular nuclear scans to look at my pelvis and bones? And why were the doctors still taking my blood regularly? Don’t get me wrong, I was shouting hallelujah every day and giving thanks to God. But this was clearly not Etch A Sketch done. Somebody definitely believed this wasn’t over. Then there’s that awkward experience when you run into an old friend who knows about your cancer battle.
Friend (with head cocked to the side): Hi, John, how arrrrrrrre you?
Now that I’ve been Sick—and it’s always like that with a bad disease; it’s a big scary word with a capital S, like it’s a person with a name—I can see it, everywhere. Sickness, especially one that is originally diagnosed as terminal, can create and then galvanize a unique personality. I believe this is why some of us just cannot get healed. Or won’t. Perhaps, subconsciously, we don’t want to be healed. It’s just too darn comfortable being sick. You have all that attention; you get special meals; you can pretty much get any drug you want (antidepressants, antianxiety meds, would you prefer CBD oil?). You can be in any mood you want to conjure up. Who can blame you? You and your sickness are often the chief topic of conversation.
But then there are the times when the fear really sets in. It doesn’t show up out of nowhere, don’t misunderstand. It knocks on the door periodically from the very beginning, but once you get settled into this postsurgery recovery rhythm, that’s when it decides to kick the door down and move in. Its favorite way of making its presence known to me was by waking me up at 2:00 a.m. and gripping me with doubt and unbelief. The daylight hours would be filled with attention from loved ones, with effort toward recovery, with broadcasting our radio show. And then the nighttime would come, the show would be over, the day’s efforts would be concluded, the loved ones would go to sleep, and the void they left would be filled with the voice of fear and the sound of cancer cells multiplying inside me. Ruminations on recurrence would flood my tortured mind.
This struggle against fear and doubt was hard enough, but what made it worse was when I gave them the power to win and I resigned myself to being defined as a cancer patient. I owned that label; I claimed it. My battle became a huge part of my everyday conversations.
“Well, you know, we are hoping that my cancer . . . blah blah blah.”
“I’m in the middle of my cancer treatments and let me tell you about the [insert inappropriate story about gruesome cancer tests here].”
“You know, I’m at the same age when my dad died of cancer.”
“The doctors say there’s only a 30 percent chance of being cured.”
I was an awful dinner guest. Heck, I was an awful person. I started drinking more and more Scotch whisky at the end of the day. I found a way to make myself believe I deserved it. After what I’ve been through, I’d tell myself, I should be allowed to have a few drinks at the end of the day!
Connie was gentle with me but I could tell she was very concerned, not just about the drinking . . . about all of it. I looked disheveled and unkempt. I was devoured by self-pity. I was becoming more of a cancer patient every day. Even though Gladiator, Warrior, and Braveheart were my favorite, oft-watched films, I was neither a gladiator nor a warrior. I was a coward. So much of this book is about relentlessness but none of that was in evidence now, at least not from me. I had yielded to spinelessness. I had become less of the gladiator Maximus and more of the gutless, whiny Commodus.
Things finally came apart one day when Connie and I ended up in my studio toe-to-toe. It had been almost exactly a year from the day that we got the all-clear from Dr. Schaeffer at Johns Hopkins, and my self-destructive pity party had achieved full bloom. I cannot remember exactly what we were talking about, but I do recall that I basically put flesh on Satan. I could feel the devil in the room with us.
“The devil comes to kill, steal, and destroy” (John 10:10).
I cannot know what, exactly, you believe about the devil in the Scriptures, but I can tell you from personal experience that the devil is very real. Connie and I argued. It quickly escalated. Then I turned the conflagration around in my mind to mean that my wife cared not for my feelings and that I deserved more attention. I guess I felt I needed even more attention for everything, less accountability for anything. Whatever it was, it called for something dramatic. A tantrum, perhaps. Then I did something that no husband should ever do. I turned from the conversation and walked away.
A few hours later I had moved into a hotel by the beach and begun shopping for a touring bicycle. My plan was simple: put saddlebags on a road bike, pack them up with my radio-show microphone and portable production gear, then start riding south, out of Los Angeles. I wasn’t entirely sure why I had picked a bike trip as my elixir/punishment. Renting a motorcycle seemed too predictable for a baby boomer. Hiking was not dramatic enough.
As it turned out I was utterly unprepared for the rigors of a three-day, ninety-two-mile ride down the California coast that included some very steep climbs. It was beautiful, obviously, but it was physically brutal and more emotionally draining than I ever could have imagined. How ironic that the guy who broadcast the twenty-four-hundred-mile Tour de France for seven years was now being tormented by a bicycle, barely able to balance in temperatures touching 100 degrees, with legs that had not been trained for this kind of daily punishment.
After the first fifteen miles, in the middle of a steep climb, it became clear that my choice reeked of self-flagellation. This trip wasn’t about trying to get my head together; it was about playing the pitiful victim and trying in vain to outpedal the shame and fear that had packed themselves into my saddlebags.
Taking ownership of a sickness, a disease, is like sitting yourself down in the electric chair and then flipping the switch yourself.
—Barry Bennett, Charis Bible College
I was punishing myself. I begged God for forgiveness through each mile. If I reached the finish line, I knew it would not include a ribbon or a trophy. I knew I would still wake each morning with thoughts of a deadly disease that could be lurking inside my body, but what of my marriage? Of my family? Prior to my escape onto the road, I had tried to recruit family members into my pity party against my wife. My behavior made everyone uncomfortable and it would take hours of deep family therapy, tears, and reconciliation to put us all back together.
As night falls on that first day, another impossibly steep climb rears itself in front of me, and I punch Connie’s number into the phone strapped to my handlebars. The heart rate monitor on my wrist reads 170 bpm. My lungs are on fire. I am now experiencing what I would describe as a metamorphosis. Much like a water baptism, I feel anger, pride, sin, depression, all being stripped from my body. Connie picks up. Her voice is stiff, cold. But she doesn’t hang up on me. As soon as she hears that I am alive and safe, she cuts the conversation short. I’m grateful just to hear her voice.
We both believe in the God of forgiveness. This gives me hope. Hope that if God will forgive me, maybe she will too. It is hope that gives me chills to think about even today, just remembering how the Devil had used fear and doubt and unbelief to steal hope away from me.
I know now that underestimating the power of a satanic attack will make you very sick. I could have lost everything I held dear. It could’ve cost me my life. Don’t get me wrong, I chose to walk out of our house and ride away on a bicycle. I’m not hiding behind “the Devil made me do it.” I could see the prowler at my door. He was armed and dangerous. I made the decision to let him move into my brain, to let him live there rent-free. And his influence nearly robbed me of my precious Concetta, just as he had tried to do twenty-eight years earlier, before I even had her.