Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 23, 1994 TAG: 9407210005
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SUSAN LAD LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
His sandal was flapping because his left leg wasn't moving with the unconscious fluidity that most of us never notice every time we take a step. The culprit was a 10-inch tumor that had grown silently and steadily inside his spinal cord.
So began an odyssey of agonizing pain and loss that would require the Durham, N.C., novelist and Duke University professor to reinvent his life and himself.
``It's a very unfortunate thing for the human race, but suffering is the way people make large emotional discoveries about themselves or about the world,'' Price says today. ``It's a testing ordeal that either strengthens one's compassion and desire to live or it kills us.''
The Reynolds Price of 1994 is like a man who's come out the far end of a long, dark tunnel. He's just happy to see the light and feel the heat of the sun on his face. It is, as the title of his new book indicates, ``A Whole New Life.''
``Even my handwriting looks very little like the script of the man I was in June of '84. Cranky as it is, it's taller, more legible, with more air and stride. It comes down the arm of a grateful man.''
Affable, gracious, charming, Reynolds Price is the quintessential Southern gentleman. Most people fall in love with him immediately. You'd expect someone who's been through the physical hell he's endured for the last 10 years to look lined, pinched, older. But if anything, Price looks younger than his 61 years.
It's sometimes hard for people to believe that Price is as happy as he seems. The tumor that snaked through his spine like a gray eel was killed with radiation, but the treatment rendered Price a paraplegic. He is wheelchair bound and endures unremitting pain from the damaged nerves in his spinal cord.
``A Whole New Life'' (Atheneum, $20) is the chronicle of his illness and recovery. It's not just about the battle to live, but the process of creating a new life out of the ashes of the old and finding that the new life can be even more rewarding.
``When I got sick, people kept sending me books about cancer. None of it spoke to me at all,'' Price says. ``There are lots of books written by survivors - relatives of people who died with cancer. But seldom had the actual soldier of that particular war committed his or her findings to print.''
The book has garnered positive reviews, including several by doctors. This is particularly important to Price; the book recounts the cold and unfeeling treatment he got from some members of the medical profession.
``There was a very interesting review in The [Raleigh] News & Observer yesterday from a doctor at UNC agreeing with and even expanding on the sense that I have that doctors have allowed themselves to get into an almost inhumane posture with patients,'' Price says. ``One said every medical student in the world should read this book, and I'd be delighted if they did.''
Price holds little back in his account of surgery, radiation and the gradual paralysis that crept up his legs, torso and to his chest. It's an unflinching account of the adjustments to paraplegia, from the obstacles that confront the wheelchair-bound to the intimate acquaintance the paraplegic must develop with his own bodily functions.
``I'm already seeing it's the kind of autobiographical book that's likely to make a lot of people feel they want to talk to me,'' Price says. ``The ones so far fall into two categories: the long-term cancer survivors like myself, and the people presently in the trauma of the full initial war with cancer, the ones in the throes of chemotherapy, radiation, the other ghastly forms of treatment we have. The methods we have of dealing with cancer are almost medieval.
``To a very large extent, I wrote the book for people like that. But I'm already realizing there's a certain delicate line I'm going to have to draw between what I have to say in the book and what help I can offer beyond what's in the book. I'm not a trained counselor or a therapist.''
Because the tumor was so enmeshed in his spinal cord, only about 10 percent could be removed surgically. It was treated subsequently with massive radiation - a lifetime dose - which took care of the cancer. You would never know to see or talk to him that the pain still rages unabated. In 1987, he discovered biofeedback and self-hypnosis. Now he uses his mind instead of chemicals to cope with pain.
``The pain is not going away; nothing but death and sleep make it go away,'' Price says. ``What I've learned to do is ignore the pain. The way you can get used to an odor in house or the sound of an alarm going off.''
The turning point in his acceptance of paralysis was the day he told himself that the Reynolds Price he'd been for 51 years was dead and started deciding who he was going to be next. He built a wheelchair-friendly addition onto his home in Durham, arranged to have a graduate student from Duke live with him to provide assistance, and began to write again.
He has produced as many books in the last 10 years as he did in his whole life up to the cancer diagnosis. He suggests in the book that it may be rechanneled sexual energy that has fueled his creativity.
``I never had sense of the grim reaper chasing me,'' Price says. ``I did think it was realistic in 1984 to think I'd be dead in a year, but I wasn't thinking I had to rush so I could leave this legacy. But the work was just coming in a bigger flood than it had before.''
He leaves it to the scholars and critics to decide whether the battle with cancer influenced what he writes.
Price doesn't spend a lot of time analyzing what he might have lost, other than physical function, in the ordeal.
``I'm not that reflective a person,'' he says. ``A lot of writers are that way. You have to be a lot more interested in the outside world than the inside world. It's been said that the poet's implement is the mirror, the novelist's is the window.''
Since Price recovered from cancer, he's published 13 books, co-written two songs with James Taylor, and worked with Oscar-winning filmmaker Charles Guggenheim on a documentary of his life. He continues to teach at Duke and is finishing up a new novel, this one about AIDS, which has claimed three good friends.
``A Whole New Life,'' published in May, has already gone into a second printing. Price is working on some poems and wants to write a play in the fall. He doesn't waste time looking back, or wondering what his life would be like now if he hadn't gotten cancer 10 years ago.
``If you offered me the chance to rewrite the last 10 years, I wouldn't let you change it,'' Price says. ``Not because I'm a masochist, but because of the amount I think I've learned has been so large. I don't think I could ever have learned it otherwise.
``In the first couple of years, I would sometimes think, `If I could just stand up for 20 seconds - stretch, let the blood circulate to my butt - I'd give anything.' I never think that anymore. It just goes away.
``It's kind of like when you lose someone who's very dear to you. You think, I can't survive this. Then a week later, you're having dinner with friends and you find yourself laughing, and you think, `My god, so-and-so is dead. How can I be laughing?' But we do, and thank God we can.''
by CNB