June 2015
The word paradigm comes from the Greek paradeigma. It was originally a scientific term, but today is more commonly used to mean a perception, an assumption, or a frame of reference. I was first introduced to this term as nothing more than one of those annoying SAT words with a silent G. Then I came across one of my now favorite books, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Reading it for the first time years ago, I was taken with Covey’s description of how our paradigm, at an individual, human level, is really the way we “see” the world—not with our eyes and ears, or our taste and touch. It is through a particular framework built in our minds that we perceive and understand things, and it is through that framework—that paradigm—that we come to possess the beliefs that guide our lives. It is through the changing of that paradigm that we grow and evolve.
Covey described it this way:
Many people experience a fundamental shift in thinking when they face a life-threatening crisis and suddenly see their priorities in a different light, or when they suddenly step into a new role, such as that of husband or wife, parent or grandparent, manager or leader.1
If you had met me prior to 2015, you would have encountered a stable, disciplined, and focused sixty-three-year-old man. My syndicated radio programs with my wife, Connie, and son, Gib, were thriving on three-hundred-plus stations. We owned and directed the expansion of our Intelligence for Your Life media brand. I was performing an average of twenty-five live concerts a year. Our adult children were thriving and we had just welcomed our second grandchild. We were enjoying creative and financial freedom. We were physically and emotionally content.
In January 2015, Connie’s eighty-six-year-old mother, Ann, broke her hip in a fall in Palm Springs while visiting her son. Following the surgery to repair the fracture, she suffered a stroke. This eventually led to a full-body infection, emergency gallbladder surgery, and a dire prognosis. Several doctors predicted that she would never come off the ventilator when she came out of the operating room. They were convinced this would be the end of her.
It did not turn out that way. Three months later she walked out of that hospital on her own two feet. The doctors were stunned. But not me, because I had the privilege to bear witness, as Connie’s wingman over the course of the entire ordeal, to the paradigm shift she underwent as Connie fought with everything she had to save her mom and to prove the doctors wrong. I saw what could happen when the way you looked at the world suddenly changed, through no fault of your own.
Con and I slept at the hospital for weeks on end. Her mother’s three-month convalescence tested the limits of Connie’s patience, the foundations of our faith, and the resilience of my spine after consecutive nights in hospital lounge chairs. But with my wife’s perseverance, inspired by her role as advocate and caregiver, Ann, our spartan matriarch, was back in her senior living facility in Los Angeles, enjoying her recovery, before even the most optimistic among her doctors could have ever imagined. It was a true miracle and an inspiration to many of the professionals on the hospital staff.
Before long, Connie and I were right back in lockstep with the normal cadence of our daily lives. It was our first time back home in Los Angeles in months and we were anxious to catch up with our deferred business obligations, client meetings, and routine health-care appointments. One of those appointments was my yearly physical, which I’d been putting off because of Ann’s out-of-town accident and, frankly, because I was being lazy. Now my checkup was six months overdue, and that was far too long for Connie’s liking especially.
I set an appointment with our family physician, Dr. Steven Galen. I was in no real hurry, since this was just the standard affair—blood test, chest X-ray, and, no one’s favorite, the prostate exam—so I set it for as soon as was convenient to my schedule. And thank goodness I did.
“Hey, wait a minute,” said Dr. Galen as he concluded the prostate exam.
“What?”
“I don’t know. It could be nothing. But your prostate just feels different.”
“Different how?” I asked.
“Get dressed. Let me look at your last PSA results.”
What Dr. Galen found in my history of blood work was that my PSA (prostate-specific antigen) was an average of 0.4 over the last five years and the one from that day was a 0.5, which, depending on the doctor, might have been considered only slightly elevated. But in general, those results revealed that I had a healthy prostate gland and what he had felt with the digital (gloved hand) exam was nothing to be worried about.
What transpired in the next month revealed that there was actually plenty to worry about. Dr. Galen sent me to a urologist. The trip to the urologist became a trip to the ultrasound technician, then a trip to the surgeon for a biopsy, and that trip eventually would lead to the Johns Hopkins cancer ward in Baltimore, where I had surgery.
My diagnosis was dire. I could see fear on the face of each member of my family. I was terrified. And in my terror, I became a different person, transported into a new paradigm. How do you explain a feeling like this? To your spouse, to your children and grandchildren, to anyone, really? Here’s how I’ll explain it to you:
While playing lacrosse at North Carolina State University in the early 1970s, I encountered a savage practice drill called man/ball. You stand with your lacrosse stick, facing two defensemen who are ten yards away from you. They are, ostensibly, on the opposing team. Then the coach tosses a lacrosse ball over your head. When it lands on the field between you and the defensemen, it’s up to you to sprint to the ball and scoop it up and pass it up the field. The two defensive players are trying to work together to beat you to the ball. One of them is trained to yell “Ball!” The other yells “Man!” The player who yells “Man!” is supposed to take you out with a full-body check. His partner can then, without challenge, scoop up the ball because you, down on the ground, have been taken out of the play. However, sometimes in the heat of battle, both of the defensemen will mistakenly yell “Man!” Since you are required to focus only on scooping the ball up into your lacrosse stick (like a receiver in football focusing on the ball in the air), you cannot protect yourself from the impending onslaught.
On the day this happened to me during practice, I don’t recall anything after hearing “Man!” and “Man!” I was told later that I was carried off the field by the team doctor. I spent the night in the infirmary, suffering from a concussion that left me feeling disoriented and dazed. Those were the same sensations I was experiencing now. I had stepped out of my comfortable paradigm (husband, father, grandfather, musician, radio host) and into the new, unwelcome dark world of cancer. I was looking at it through new eyes as well. The eyes of a cancer patient.
Connie’s view of the world had changed as she faced her mother’s health scare. She’d managed it with the same kind of strength and grace and equanimity that made me fall in love with her all those years ago. Now I only hoped I could handle my own paradigm shift half as well.