My Story, by George Knaak

There are some things we just don’t want to hear. Some things we think we’ll never have to face. So I knew something like this was happening when the doctor who’d just examined me returns with another doctor to repeat what the first one just did. “Just want a second opinion.”…… He wasn’t asking for mine. They both agreed with each other obviously, because the next thing I hear…Here it comes… “You’ve got cancer. A tumor in your throat about the size of a lemon.” I could have choked to death on just his words. But I didn’t. And I didn’t want to believe it. Wasn’t my house burning a few years ago and my wife dying enough tragedy for one life time? Now this. Was it now MY TIME? I wasn’t ready to process this kind of unkind information. Not something you ever think will happen to you until it does. What next? Do I cry? Say “Why me?” Is all my time left on earth coming to this kind of end? It doesn’t seem right. Will my son lose his mom and dad before he’s old enough to vote?

Treatment is no walk in the park. First thing they prescribed was having my teeth removed. Bone loss in my jaw could cause infections they wouldn’t be able to treat if the chemo was going to do its’ job. I wasn’t going to let a mouth full of molars and incisors stand in the way of beating the odds. So off I went to the dentist and damn if he didn’t pull them one right after the other. I’d always been a little afraid of the dentist but at this maddening juncture I had no time for fear. Fear alone can overtake your mind, just like the cancer was taking over my throat. At least now I knew why I’d been spitting blood before the dentist did his work giving me another reason I’d be spitting blood. The teeth part would stop but the cancer part??? No time for pity. No time for fear. But was there enough time for reversing the fast growing group of cells that would, left unchecked, be my farewell to life?

Next up was a visit to a surgeon who would install a port inside my chest. When I woke up I had a new opening to my bloodstream. A device to stream the metals in the chemo part of therapy directly into me, infused by a pump held in a “fanny bag” that I’d wear for a week at a time. Constant dosing to thwart the intruding cancer cells. Morphine patches on my arm and Vicadin, a hundred per script for munching during the day.

Didn’t take long for the medicine to show it was doing something. Vomit should be a four letter word. They kept telling me I had to eat but try my best it wasn’t easy knowing anything that what went in was quickly going to be coming back out. I’m sure the pain killers were doing something too because, when I wasn’t throwing up, I didn’t hurt in my throat like I did before. The regimen of eat/puke repeated itself over and over. I’d been a six-four hundred ninety-five pound man losing weight faster than butter melts in the oven. When I got down to a hundred thirty eight I was just three pounds away from having another hole poked into my insides. “We’ll have to put in a feeding tube if you drop to 135 lbs. Otherwise your body will start eating itself.” That’s a real attention getter. So I poured my attention into pouring Ensure and Boost and milk shakes (chewing was still a new unpleasant experience with my new false teeth) and bananas down the same throat that held the growth trying to undo me. Drink/Puke/Repeat became my new mantra. Somehow I managed to keep from losing those last three pounds and avoided the stomach tube. I didn’t like wearing the chemo bag, much less the idea of a mush bag too. But that was only half the treatment.

Then began the radiation. They make a mold of your face and create a white mask that covers your face like you see in horror movies on the scary guys. That way they can lock your head in place with the mask on a table and aim this big radiation machine right at the spot they target. Hello, Hiroshima. I think I recall being told it was like getting a thousand x-rays at once. Reminds me of the Beatle lyrics… “I’m looking thru you, where did you go? I thought I knew you, what did I know?” Well, I knew this was going to kill me or save me. I also knew, no matter how hard the doctors tried, they could only apply science. It was up to me to save myself. If I let depression, doubt and fear control me the cancer would win. “I wasn’t going to die this way. I wasn’t going to die this way. I wasn’t going to die.” Why, because I refused to give in, to give up. I didn’t want to let the family, my friends, the doctors down. I sure didn’t want to leave my son alone in this world at the threshold of turning into a man. So I turned inward and told the little voice we all have inside that questions us at every turn to just shut up. At least for now. Let me beat this thing and then you can come back and beat me up with self doubt. Just not now. NOW I had to be strong. Stronger than I’d ever been because the therapy was designed to make me weaker than I could ever have imagined. I had to have that Never Give Up attitude or else. The else being all too obvious for contemplations. No, I had to focus on the immediate. Eat/puke/eat…go to the doctor, start the next round, keep up the fight so I didn’t have to miss a treatment. If your blood work comes back with too low a count for some things and too high for others they’d have to stop and wait. I couldn’t risk that. I persevered and made every deadline so I wouldn’t be dead. Was I lucky? Was it mind over matter or mind over what really matters? The tumor shrunk. It would be five years later that the cancer doc told me it was all gone and I didn’t need to see him again. But I knew before then. I wasn’t going to let a bunch of mutant cells sap my whole life force. I truly believe that I never thought I was going to die because of cancer and because I thought that way I didn’t. I will die someday. We all do but if we want to live now we still can. After all, now is all we have. Make the most of it.

George Knaak
p.s. I wrote this for my good friend Pete because he asked.