Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 14, 1993 TAG: 9303150549
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GLENN M. AYERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
KING CANCER IS DOWN THE HALL
LOOKING OUT my courtyard window, down the hall of the school where I have been for the past 30 years, a lone kid stands at the restroom door. He's a sentry.With the trained senses of an Apache scout, he protects those "Smoking in the Boys' Room," as the old pop song described them. If I make a threatening move, the signal will subtly pass, butts flick into flushing commodes, and only the residual smoke remain to circumstantially prove the School Board's tobacco policy has been once more debauched.
My years of experience have taught me this, experience that includes another hall in another school 40 years ago when I stood sentinel for Red and Charlie.
It was exciting business, rather challenging, knowing you could outsmart those with the brains. It is axiomatic that no one gets caught when the guards are posted: an adage as old as illicit smoking itself. Trouble is, the schoolma'ms are not the enemy. Neither are the rules. They are visible, tangible, easily avoided.
The enemy is in the firm, full pack, waiting to be wafted like a genie released from his lamp. Give him a name - call him "addiction." Color him pale.
When Red, Charlie and I left the boys' room for the last time in 1953, we didn't know who went with us. After all, our growth wasn't stunted, we felt good, we even had varsity letters. We went on to college and, without boasting, I can say we did pretty well.
Charlie went into finance and law, has a high-rise office looking out on the Detroit River. Red chose journalism and won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Forget about me. For that matter, forget about Charlie. This is about Red - and the kid I'm watching down the hall.
In June 1991, Red called me at home. He had just done a series of 13 articles on cocaine addiction for the Pittsburgh Press, which we chatted about frequently since I had been using them with my students. He wasn't calling about them, however, though the subject was similar. He was calling Charlie and me - his oldest friends - to talk of inoperable lung cancer. His.
Suddenly what had been merely another malady - an abstraction really - hit home. Red had lung cancer. We who never thought of mortality where the three of us were concerned, were now vulnerable. The party that had begun for some naive status was closing down, and it was time to pay the fiddler. Addiction was there with his hand out.
Fortunately, the tumor was treatable and Red began the long struggle. Six months later he sent me a poignant letter describing chemo- and radiation therapy. It's something that needs be shared.
"I just finished my third round of chemotherapy, the halfway point or better, I hope. I'm scheduled for at least two more, possibly three. They (my oncologist et al.) think I may only need a total of five treatments instead of the originally envisioned six, at least that's what they tell me . . . to keep me smiling. Each one is a 28-day cycle, starting with three days in the hospital, hooked up to several IV bags. I usually go in on a Thursday and get out on Sunday.
"The first week usually starts out like an ocean cruise minus Dramamine with 2-3 days of rolling nausea and spotty appetite, mixed in with several days of lead-footed, off-register lethargy. . . . I've been returning to the office about the second week of each month, not exactly like an eager beaver but just to make a few roll calls. In between there are CAT scans and tons of blood draws, the latter to monitor the blood count. (Now I know why junkies' veins get bad.) The foul-smelling, highly toxic chemo drugs attack not only the cancer cells, but everything else in your body, including your good blood cells.
"All in all, the medical news has been encouraging. They tell me the tumor is no longer visible on the X-rays and I'm a decent candidate for long-term survival, perhaps cure. Just to make sure it's gone, I've started six weeks of daily radiation doses in the chest in addition to the chemo. The double whammy makes me feel a little weaker than with just the chemo but its side effects seem to be diminishing after a few days. I'll probably wind up with difficulty swallowing and perhaps a sore throat midway through the radiation therapy, so I'm told. I've actually gained five pounds . . . Not only fat but bald, too . . .
"I'm already wearying of the medical setting, and it's only been four months. I don't like everything being on hold, the false cheerfulness, the dependence on others, and the way the illness defines your persona in a strange, limiting way. And, least, being around desperately ill patients in the cancer ward every month. Part of that impatience is good, I suppose, because it means that sheer terror is starting to give way to a sense of optimism. And, hey, look at the alternatives, right?"
But, hey, when it was over, it was the alternatives he got. Throughout the spring and early summer of '92, we exchanged a lot of postcards from our travels, all with upbeat messages of good health and cheer.
Then during late summer and early fall, both Charlie and I lost touch with Red, for whom matters had gone terribly wrong. On Dec. 3, I talked to him, listening on the phone to "the breath rattling in his throat." The tumor had returned. I called Charlie to let him know and to keep me abreast of happenings. On Dec. 9, Red died.
I don't know whether the tears in my eyes now are anger and grief for him, or fear and pity for the outpost down the hall. That pale rider whose hold is so insidious, so inexplicably endless wants him just like he wanted us.
He got Red, and I suspect he's not yet finished with Charlie and me. It's been 10 years since I smoked, but I'm still addicted. I won't smoke again, I don't consciously think about it. But I dream at night of cigars, which baffles me only to the extent that it proves what I've said. He's there with his hand out.
Red knew this before I did. In the last lines of his last cocaine article he wrote, "I saw the disease of addiction and the pain it causes everybody. That led me down some other paths, not all of them lovely and light."
Thanks, Red, for showing us those paths. There are a lot of kids around here who aren't as smart as we were. Hopefully they won't have to tread in our moccasins.
Glenn M. Ayers teaches at Staunton River High School in Bedford County.