I saw a great post on Facebook on February 4th by Meg Rogers, a friend from Long Island.  My wife and I used to travel in a social pack with Meg and her husband Jack.  They weren’t our best friends, but they were great friends with some of our friends, so we saw each other now and again.  We sat at the same tables at fundraisers, First Holy Communion parties, you get the drift.

In 2003 we were blessed by the birth of our twins and didn’t really pick our heads up for a couple of years.  In that time, 2004 I believe, Jack got cancer in his throat.  Here’s part of his story: http://lungevity.org/support-survivorship/get-connected/blog/i-still-got-this  Thanks Meg for posting it, and thanks for letting me use it.  What an incredible story.  More, what an incredible person.  Unfortunately, Jack lost his race against cancer just over two years ago.  I wish I had the chance to know him better.

Jack’s story got me thinking about my own, much less harrowing story.  I have been thinking about it today, as today is the anniversary of my first visit to Dr. Bruce Gilbert.  Here’s the story:

My wife and I had been married young.  I was 24, and she was 22 – less than a month out of Fordham when we were married. (I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – where I would be, IF I would be without my wife is a legitimate question.  Thank God beautiful women have no taste in men!)  We decided that we would wait 5 years before trying to have children, so we had time to get to know each other better.  Well, five years passed, and we had just bought our first house – rather 1/2 of our first house.  We had entered a deal with my brother to purchase a fixer-upper and renovate it and either flip it, buy it, or sell it to him afterward.  Having kids would have to wait a little bit.

We worked on the house, worked at our jobs, and decided that it was time that we work on our family.  Who knew that having children isn’t always the easiest thing in the world?  We sure didn’t know.  From what we heard, people got pregnant just by looking at each other!

A couple of years passed, and nothing was happening.  By this time, my wife was seeing a specialist – I still think he has the best name for an OBGYN of all time – Ira Spector.  (Get it?  I respect her) She had been prodded and poked in all sorts of different ways, and I don’t mean by me!  Everything checked out on her side, so I was up next.

I was slated to go get checked out by Dr. Bruce Gilbert – urologist to the stars. I had taken the day off – it was a Friday, and we had plans with a big group of our friends to go into the city to a place called “Café Wha?”  We were all excited to see most, if not all of our social group, which dates from kindergarten.  Some of us were meeting on Long Island to train it into the city together, and the rest probably were already there for work.

So I went to visit Dr. Gilbert to get the plumbing checked out.  As he was doing an ultrasound, he said, “It looks like there’s a little more here than we bargained for.” I didn’t give him the “that’s what she said” line.  He said that it looked like he saw a tumor.  He sent me across the street for an MRI – I literally just walked across Northern Boulevard.  An hour later, I was back in Gilbert’s office with a confirmation – I had testicular cancer.  I was given the number of a doctor to call at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

I got in my car a little stunned, but Dr. Gilbert had told me that a fella can live just fine with only half of his original set, so I wasn’t really that worried.  (Luckily for me, I had a great friend from college who had just been going through this same problem.  He became a great source of information and support, and I’m sure I still owe him a couple of beers.) I used my cell phone to call Dr. Herr’s office to set up an appointment for the next Monday.  With that taken care of, I headed towards Valley Stream to meet up with a couple of the girls with whom we were going into the city – I had known both of them since high school – longer than I had known my wife.  We were very comfortable with each other and had a great ride on the trusty LIRR into Penn Station.  We made our way down to McDougal Street and met up with the rest of the group.

The food left something to be desired at Café Wha? but the music – ah, the music!  The Café Wha? Band is very well known in the area – they have a huge horn section and I would bet that anyone my age would know every word to every song they play.  I have actually sung with them at one wedding I attended at the Yale Club (’cause that’s how I roll…).  Great night!  Couldn’t have been better!

We headed for the exits and our trip back to LI on the LIRR with most of the gang. I still hadn’t been able to tell my wife, and I didn’t want to ruin a night out that we had planned for so long.  We eventually made it home, and we were winding down from the night – talking about the music, and our friends, when I finally had to tell my bride, my best friend, that I had cancer.  I’ve noticed over the years, when I have bad news, I’m usually pretty good at keeping my composure – until I see my wife, and then I break down.  A friend passed away recently, and I was speaking with his brother on the phone – sending my condolences, asking if there was anything that we could do, or if there was anyone we could contact – I was a rock until I had to tell my wife that our friend had died.  (Geez, I’m getting weepy now just thinking about it.)  Well, maybe this is where that all started – 20 years ago today when I told her that I had cancer.  I was able to squeak out the words, and we sat on the bed and had a good cry feeling bad for ourselves, and our uncertain future.

By the next week, the offending testicle was no longer even in my body.  Recovery was short and painless.  Funny story – while recovering from my surgery, a few of our friends from Beaver Lake came out for a visit.  I was helping straighten out the house when I saw our guests walking up the front walkway.  I had in my hand a buckwheat U-shaped pillow that someone might use on a plane and I was looking for a place to stash it, thinking the front hall closet would be a good spot.  Just as I was about to throw it in the closet, a thought occurred to me – what if I turn it upside down, and put it in my shorts to make it look like I was REALLY swollen from the surgery? That would be a mean little trick, wouldn’t it? So I put this huge buckwheat thing in my shorts. It was a beautiful, sunny day and they had just driven out from NJ. They were all wearing sunglasses from the trip. As they walked in a few seconds later, I looked kind of sad and tired and slumped my shoulders a little while sticking the now buckwheat-filled area out a bit. The look on all three of my friend’s faces was priceless – the funniest part was that all of their eyebrows went shooting up when they saw the swelling, jutting above their sunglasses. I thought it was hilarious – one of the funniest reactions that I had ever seen. Aren’t I a good friend? We actually went for a walk around the neighborhood to get a little exercise, and even smoked a cigar to my health!

My story doesn’t end there, but I will say this – when you have cancer, they don’t tell you everything about your treatment upfront (or they didn’t with me). I went in for a checkup a month later, and was given the option of chemo or having my lymph nodes removed. I chose the latter to make sure that the cancer hadn’t spread – I wanted to know, and I took a risk. If the lymph nodes weren’t clean I would have gone through the surgery just to have to heal to have chemo. Luckily for me, my lymph nodes were clean. That operation was a 10-hour job and I was out of work for over a month – probably almost 6 weeks. I still have a 12-inch long scar which is a good reminder to me to remember where I could have been.

Unfortunately for me, at my six-month checkup, it was determined that there was a tumor on the remaining testicle. As I had my lymph nodes removed, it didn’t have anywhere to travel, so I had a little more time to decide what to do. The options were limited. After getting a second opinion at Dana Farber Cancer Center in Boston, I decided to just get that thing out of there. I banked some sperm in the event that we could try invitro fertilization and had the second testicle removed the day before Thanksgiving, 1995.

All in, it was a 10-month / lifetime journey. The good part is that after it was all said and done, I was able to become a father for the first time in July 1997. We had a perfect little girl who goes by “Lily”. The only difference now is that she isn’t so little, anymore – she’s over 5’7″!

A few years later, after some terrorists had driven a plane into a bunch of our friends in the World Trade Center, my wife decided that our little Lily would be all alone in the world if anything were to ever happen to us. In January 2003 our little family grew with the arrival of our identical twin boys. And that is where this story began – with us up to our elbows in twins, not knowing enough about what Jack and Meg Rogers were going through, and us not offering to help them in any way that we could. I think I only saw Jack once or twice more after that, and that is my loss.

I hear from our mutual friends, that his kids are doing great – one is a junior pre-med at Duke, maybe doing a PhD./MD in cancer research, of all things. Another is a freshman at Notre Dame, Jack’s alma mater, and their third is a junior at Chaminade on LI (everyone makes a mistake – Go Stanners!). I don’t know the kids, but I must say that I am so impressed by them, and by their mother. It’s not easy keeping it together, let alone succeeding so spectacularly after losing a father and a spouse. I’ve had trouble regrouping, myself at times. Luckily, I’ve got my wife and family to keep me moving.

The future is still uncertain – my daughter is a high school senior who is headed to college. Her future is upon her, or so she thinks – she’ll have a wonderful life, regardless of what college she decides can loan her the most money. The boys are in the sixth grade, headed to practice. It doesn’t matter the sport – they’re in. They’re too young to think about their future in any real terms. Professional athlete is probably still their number one thought.

I wonder what will become of me. I guess I’ve got to stay tuned for my uncertain future. RIP, Jack.