New World
Sunday, December 21st, 2003
I am writing this from the hospital room where I’ve spent most of the past seven months. After two, unrelated, major brain surgeries in 1996 and 2002, I thought my lessons were learned: evidently not, as I have been in treatment for AML, an advanced form of Adult Leukemia. I have just finished my last of five chemotherapy treatments, and in a few weeks, we’ll find out who drops first, the Bear or me. The press knows me as a Change and Stress Management expert, whose most popular presentation has been “Humor, Risk and Change,” Now, having been offered the gift of practicing what I preach, I’ve learned a good deal more than I ever expected or wanted to know. NEW FRIENDS In this ward I have experienced the death of patients who had became friends. I have seen and been through a dozen lifetimes of miracles and torments. Dilly was 76 when she was diagnosed with inoperable, terminal cancer and was given six months to live. I met her when she was put in the bed across the hall. She was 86. Grinning despite torturous pain, one of the last things she said to me, was: “Tell you what, Charlie, the last ten years have been the best, damned six months of my life.” I have watched families laugh together at unexpected good news, while others have been stunned into near paralysis when confronted directly with the reality of death. One night, I held tight to a railing so that I could support a man who cried until he passed out from hyperventilating: his wife of thirty years had died suddenly, while he was out having dinner. Then there was the shaking, slack-jawed alcoholic they brought into the cancer ward to dry out. The only empty bed in the hospital was right next to mine. I’ve been sober and clean for nearly 23 years. He was just what I needed; I had not worked with a new person in months, and doing is so is critical to my own sobriety. He was also from my same little town and I would be able to continue working with him.