Living Time Faith And Facts to Transform Your Cancer Journey

Chapter One A Valentine's Day SO THIS IS HOW I DIE. These words ran through my mind as I lay in the emergency room of the Cleveland Clinic on Valentine's Day, 1999. It was in the wee hours of the morning, a time I remembered all too well from my medical residency years at Johns Hopkins. That's when the ER would fill up with drunks and drug addicts, knife and gunshot casualties, car accident survivors, and early morning heart attack victims. Many years had passed since then, but now I was one of them, an emergency room patient in great distress. I had just received startling information that would forever change my life. Only a few hours earlier, my husband, Fred, and I were sitting up in bed watching the Oscar De La Hoya fight on HBO. At some point that I cannot recall, I passed out, only to awaken with the local rescue squad standing by our bed. I was confused. Why were they talking to Fred about my ambulance ride to the hospital? Why was my husband on the phone with his good friend Al Lerner, asking him to meet us in the emergency room? I protested that this was all unnecessary, that I felt entirely well. I had an overwhelming desire to stay and comfort our terrified twelve-year-old, Marie, trembling in the shadows, and to talk to Michele, my sister, who'd rushed over to be with her. Despite these protests, I soon found myself strapped to a narrow gurney in an ambulance with flashing lights, hurtling along dark, deserted streets into midtown Cleveland. Dr. Patrick Sweeney, the gentle, white-haired neurologist who was the attending physician that evening, met us in the ER, ready to perform the usual neurological tests for what my husband believed had been a seizure. Fred is a renowned cardiac surgeon and at the time was the director of the Cleveland Clinic, but he was pure husband that night. He listened attentively to Dr. Sweeney and acted as the best of spouses would, making sure I was comfortable, squeezing my hand, and calming my nerves with lighthearted jokes: "Hey, was this just your way of getting out of watching the prizefight?" But very shortly we found that my blackout had not been an inconsequential seizure after all. Fred knew first because he went off to huddle with the radiologist to review the brain scans. He stood quietly by, eyes swollen, as Dr. Sweeney brought me the shocking news: the spell had resulted from a good-sized tumor growing in the left side of my brain. I asked Dr. Sweeney if it was malignant. Leaning over the rail, peering into my eyes, he said simply, "Yes." Even though Fred and I have an uncanny ability to think the same thoughts at the same time, this was one moment when we could not bear to share those thoughts. After all, we always said we were goose and gander, mated for life; we wouldn't do well without each other. And all I could think was: So this is how I die. Not in a car accident or a plane crash, not felled by a heart attack in honor of my own medical specialty. It would be by my own cells, mutating and roaming inside my bodyin my head, no less. I felt powerless and immobile. My own life's work with the critically ill brought me no special strength or solace; if anything, I knew too much. This cancer was insidious, already having grown to a near-fatal state in my brain without ever tipping me off. Not one hint. Here I was in the prime of life, and fairly diligent about all the healthy habits I had preached so reverently for decades. Though a cardiologist by training, I had also earned my stripes in the war on cancer: I was then the dean of the College of Medicine and Public Health at Ohio State University, where I had been expanding the school's cancer genetics program. Years before, I had headed the Research Institute of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, where I built its first cancer biology department. And as director of the National Institutes of Health in the early 1990s, I oversawHealy, Bernadine is the author of 'Living Time Faith And Facts to Transform Your Cancer Journey', published 2007 under ISBN 9780553804614 and ISBN 0553804618.