A family faces cancer

Our family’s incredible healthcare sojourn and odyssey began in the summer of 1982 in Winter Harbor, Maine. Shirley took part in the folksy Annual Lobster Festival parade. She felt something in her right breast, attributed it to a pulled muscle from vigorous aerobics in the parade, or perhaps it was the lumpy horse hair mattresses we slept and made love on. Her woman’s intuition knew better, but denial is cunning and powerful.

The inexorable movement toward diagnosis and treatment began in late October, starting with her internist, Jeffrey Weinberger, then on to a local gynecologist followed by the man who was about to become her surgeon, Phil McWhorter, a superb surgeon then and today. Our final step together was seeing Dickerman Hollister, Jr., then a young gifted oncologist, a member of my volunteer board, and a Renaissance man. Dick along with the late Dr. Joseph Murphy, her radiologist and radiation therapist, in hindsight, ultimately saved her life.

Dick’s initial diagnosis and prognosis was numbing and devastating. “We’re too young. I don’t want her to die. I can’t live without her.” The Kubla Ross stages of grief set in: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I dreaded and did not want to be a single Dad raising a child, a little girl, on my own. God did not mean for it to be that way. And yet that’s what we seemed to be facing or I was feeling.

Shirley and I knew from her conversations with Phil and Dick that she had close to the worst of possible scenarios: namely, a Stage 3 tumor with extensive lymph node involvement, an aggressive form of breast cancer with a very poor survival rate. Phil punched me in the gut with his words following her surgery: “The tumor was too large and too deep into the chest wall for us to remove it completely.”

Shirley needed and did undergo a full year, twelve months, of aggressive and extensive chemotherapy, hormone therapy and radiation treatment. Our world was turning dark. About a year after her surgery, Shirley commiserated with former First Lady Betty Ford on the dance floor at a charity ball in New York. That was when I first learned of or was able to take in how many, many lymph nodes were involved. I never shared Phil’s words with her until many years later.

Our first sit down together with Dick Hollister was a moment to remember. We were “playing for all the marbles.” Did we want to save Shirley, a long shot and highly unlikely, or did we want to leave open the option of additional children in the future? Our joint response took a nanosecond. Dick walked us through his proposed treatment regimen: six months of chemotherapy and hormone therapy, followed by six weeks of radiation treatment five days a week, and then an additional six months of the same debilitating chemotherapy and hormone therapy. He also offered us sources for second opinions in New York or Boston, followed by telling us he would take our case and proposed treatment protocol to Yale-New Haven Hospital for review. A no-brainer for both of us then, and in retrospect.

Medicine is built on relationship and trust. A good physician is still a hands-on healer, despite all the technology and resources to be brought to bear. We opted for Dick. We opted for life. Precious, precious life and wellbeing.

Excerpt from Prayer, Laughter, & Broccoli
Copyright © 2003 Witty Fools Productions Peter Flierl Copyright © 2018 Peter Flierl Revised & Reprinted All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. For information on speaking engagements or purchasing bulk copies, email broccolisoupllc@gmail.com