Looking Inward
By Cody Boltz
Three years ago, Dec. 27, 2004, my mom suffered a disabling aneurysm.
On Feb. 5, 2005, I was diagnosed with colon cancer.
I had polyps and was bleeding. They were found by Dr. Cronk during a colonoscopy. They were cancerous, which was strange in a 24-year-old. Everybody was shocked.
I was sitting in the room in St. Francis. Dr. Cronk came in and sat down on the bed and said, “Cody, I have some bad news. You have cancer.”
I laughed; I literally started laughing. He looked bewildered at first, and he said, “I unfortunately have had to give that news to other people, but nobody has ever laughed at it.”
And I knew right there that I had to go through it because I was just finally starting to regain my mental composure from my mother’s illness, and after that, cancer was nothing. I was, like, well, OK, get me started. I knew that I had to get right on it, because the sooner I got on it, the sooner I would beat it. Dr. Cronk was just overwhelmed that I would just laugh at cancer after that.
It was definitely, it was a saga, oh … man. It’s kinda hard for me to put into words how I felt during that time because there were ups and downs. I basically was forced to turn inward to find inner strength to get through this.
Of course, I had my family, but we were splintered and all coping with all of our tragedies. My dad with his wife sick and now his son had cancer. Our family life has never been the same. So I had to look literally inward for the strength to keep going.
I had part of my colon removed because the cancer had spread into the actual wall of the tissue. It traveled to a couple of lymph nodes that had to be taken out.
After Dr. Cronk removed everything, I started chemo with Dr. Copur at St. Francis. On his recommendation, I went to Creighton University and talked to a geneticist, Dr. Lynch, because I had no family history of colon cancer or polyps.
My cancer was genetic. I have Lynch’s disorder, which means during conception my genes got whipped around with my mom’s and my dad’s and I had a pre-disposition to be more susceptible to cancer than normal people. I have a 16-year-old sister, and now she is 70 percent likely to develop cancer.
Since it’s genetic, there is nothing they can actually do, so I am “pseudo-terminal,” I guess you would say. I’ll be fighting it the rest of my life because it always has the chance of coming back. I was just told in early November (2007) that my initial cancer has been cured, which was a huge burden off my mind.
I went through chemo, 12 sessions for two weeks, so 24 weeks. During that time, I maintained a 40-hour per week job at Hastings bookstore. I took chemo on my days off, but I needed to keep money going. I was living on my own and wasn’t making much and had to work through chemo.
My regimen was 48 hours of straight chemotherapy. I had a pump. They had installed a port in my chest. I would go in for an hour session, and they would hook me up to a pump. Then I would go mobile.
St. Francis has a wonderful cancer staff. The nurses are great and there if you want to talk. Our family motto is, “We kill our own skunks.” So I was raised that we fixed it ourselves. If we have a problem, we don’t burden anybody else with it. We find a way to deal with it ourselves, and then, if we need help, we ask for it later. The staff created an atmosphere where it didn’t feel like I was necessarily as sick as I was, and I ended up talking to more and more patients than I did nurses.
I was obviously the youngest guy there. The nurses would sometimes have me talk to patients or ask me if I could talk to these people because I’ve been taking it so well and such a positive attitude to go on at it, just chugging away and getting it done. So I would help myself by kinda helping other patients.
I didn’t conduct a seminar but little things like, “Hey, if this young kid can beat it, you can, too.” Sometimes I had a hard time talking to people who were terminal. That was a lot to take on. I had so much trouble with that. I had no frame of reference.
When I was diagnosed, everybody was shocked and wanted to help, but I never was pitied.
Everybody saw that I was working 40 hours a week. Basically, they were blown away that I was working, helping customers while I was being given chemotherapy.
I was lucky, too. Hastings was there for me the entire way, the corporation, the structure. The guy who runs it, Joel Meyer, is my best friend. He was supportive more as a friend and a boss.
Being underweight already was alarming to the staff and the doctors because one core reaction to chemotherapy was a constant upset stomach and not wanting to eat, so I was going to lose weight. And I don’t have weight to lose.
So we had to look at it from a diet point … the staff dietitian was with me at St. Francis, trying to create some sort of help. They provided me with shakes designed for chemotherapy, like Jumex or juice. Then I drank Ensure and stuff like that. I basically had to force myself to eat.
I had nausea all the time. The Ensure and stuff like that, it helped, because I would only have an appetite for one meal a day, so they loaded me up with carbs, basically.
I did lose the hair on my head, not my beard or my eyebrows or any other hair. I knew I was going to lose it, so I decided to do a little something odd. I went to the local barbershop and had them cut “Male Pattern Baldness” in my head, a nod to Hunter S. Thompson, the author. I shaved the top of my head so I had the horseshoe, and I had some of the bangs left over, and I had a comb-over.
I figured I was going to lose the hair anyway, so why not do something odd. It was either that or a Mohawk, and for Hastings bookstore, it had to be a natural hairstyle, albeit, not for a 24-year-old. The barber said he’d been cutting hair for 40 years, and he’d never seen anybody want that haircut. He just couldn’t believe it.
I had to be very careful at work. I couldn’t really feel my feet because of the treatments. If I would have broken my ankle or something, I couldn’t have felt it, and that would have caused problems.
There were other lifestyle changes with the treatment, too. I loved roller blading but couldn’t, obviously. I also had plans to run for city council. I wanted to be the youngest city councilman. I’ve always had dreams of running for political office. That was the biggest thing … and the roller blading.
My diet was high carbs, like beer, but they said definitely watch it because, with the emotional strain that I was in, I could have been, you know, basically swept into alcoholism. That was the strangest thing, to be told, “Have a couple beers a day,” to get the carbs going.
Most cancer patients sit at home. With the physical toll that working was causing me and the treatments, two years of my youth was basically taken from me. I had massive amounts of fatigue.
The usual 24-year-old, bar hopping and college and stuff like that, was pretty much gone.
I caught the cancer early, and they had to cut out part of the colon to prohibit it from spreading into an organ.
The doctors and nurses said that attitude is a lot of it. I didn’t believe it until hindsight and, yeah … going in it knowing that you’re going to beat it and just telling yourself that, even when you think that you can’t go on, you still can. I have no idea how I’m built that way, how I’ve dealt with this much tragedy in two years and come out of it smiling and running three movie theaters in this short time.
I see the scars every day. I’ve got a big scar on my chest, and I have the other scars for the surgery. I’m reminded of it every day of my life, and I’m better for it. In some strange way, I wouldn’t have traded it. It’s made me who I am, and I’m better for it because I found I have the inner strength that … honestly … blows me away … to know I have that in me.
How I got through this comes in bits and pieces. Friends and family were the biggest thing. I made new friends. A female artist named Natalie Ileana from L.A. was playing in Hastings bookstore. She had moved, and I had cancer at the time. I remember her singing a punk version of “Que Sera.” It blew me away, and a friendship developed there that helped me through a lot. I followed her around, you know, to shows and stuff. It made me feel like a normal kid.
Managing the theaters is another thing I wouldn’t have without cancer because, once the chemo was over, I got a second job as a part-time projectionist at the Mall Stadium 7 (Dickinson Theaters) to help with the bills.
That gave me the extra playing-around money, and it wasn’t strenuous enough where it would necessarily hurt because you only work for an hour at a time, and I could sit the rest of the time while the movies were going.
There was a shakeup of general managers and the opportunity to take over the Imperial 3 theaters in Hastings, which I took. A month later, they offered me the Mall Stadium 7. Now I have three theaters because, four months after that, I was given the Island Twin in Grand Island.
The neurapathy and the fatigue stay with you because chemo is worse than the actual cancer itself. Sometimes, for brief seconds, I wished that I had just left the cancer cause that didn’t hurt near as much as the chemo. But I knew that chemo was the best for me. It kills good cells and bad cells. It’s definitely a very strange ride. I’m just starting to regain the feeling in my feet, and it’s been about two years.
I have learned how to maximize rest, because keeping my brain occupied was one of the biggest things to do so I didn’t have those negative thoughts and be stuck in fear and self-loathing. We all have depressive days, and I am no stranger to those as well, but I just had to keep my mind occupied.
UPDATE MARCH 1, 2009:
Diagnosed with colon cancer at age 24, Cody story was about finding an inner strength.
“Three years in remission, that has a nice ring to it. Still, to this day, it seems like yesterday. I have joined the outfit that saved me, St. Francis Medical Center. I roam the hallways and rooms as a small wheel in the big machine, sharing my experiences and story with those in need. Three years and going strong. Once you beat it, you can beat anything.”
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