Prose To Go

You might have watched him on "Oprah" June 9. Grant Achatz is the revolutionary chef who spent three years trying to get his tongue cancer diagnosed.

He went to dentists and at least one doctor who told him not to worry about it. It was a sore that didn't heal and the pain was excruciating. For three years, he listened to the experts tell him it was nothing. Finally, he saw an oral surgeon who did a biopsy.

Stage 4 tongue cancer. In six months, without the radical removal of his tongue, mandible and part of his neck tissue, he'd be dead, experts said. Good Lord.

We're talking about a Chicago man recognized as one of our best chefs. Last year, Kim Cattrall announced that he won the James Beard Foundation's Outstanding Chef award, arguably the biggie for chefs.

Not only was he lucky to be alive and still tasting his creations, he'd won this fantastic award. He and his Alinea restaurant partner Nick Kokonos have baked a book proposal, Life, on the Line. I'm sure that's only the working title.

Since I was diagnosed with an earlier-stage tongue cancer at 27, I'd give anything to ghostwrite that book.

After his diagnosis, Achatz searched the medical community for an oncologist who would do chemo and radiation before removing his livelihood. On his fifth try and running out of time, he found that specialist at the University of Chicago.

His book will carry a take-home message for us all. Fight for your survival. Don't accept the usual recommended surgery if it can provide future survivors with an alternative. Never give up on what's most important for your mental and physical health. 

When humor writer Erma Bombeck set out to write a book about kids surviving cancer, she didn't expect to hear them talk about anything but despair. After all, they had been tapped on the shoulder by destiny and told, "We interrupt this life to bring you a message of horror."

She visited a camp for these kids in the late 1980s, when cancer was still considered a death sentence. Parents, teachers and adults in the grocery store would stare at these bald children in horror and shock.

The children, however, had other ideas. They talked about friends who did drugs. An 18-year-old man with friends on drugs told them: "You wanna do drugs? Do chemo for a year. It'll give you the same effect and make you feel just as lousy."

Although she'd been resistant to writing about the children, she was touched by their honesty and humor. Bombeck published I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise: Children Surviving Cancer in 1989. She donated all proceeds to the American Cancer Society and other health organizations.

"Humor and optimism had kept these kids in the mainstream of life," she wrote. "Perhaps laughing and believing in themselves was a major part of their survival. These were kids who had every intention of living long enough to go to Disneyland, drive their mothers crazy, live in bedrooms that should be condemned, go to the prom, eat pizza for breakfast and grow old."

The doctor becomes the VIP of any cancer patient's life. One girl sat on an exam table "popping jelly beans and gazing forlornly at a dead plant on the doctor's windowsill. Her observation: 'I hope he's better at taking care of people than he is his plants.' "

Our attitudes about cancer have changed tremendously since Erma wrote her book over 20 years ago. We no longer think that cancer is contagious. Most of us no longer call cancer patients victims. It's the second leading cause of death, but people are surviving over five and 10 years at phenomenal rates, thanks to early detection and better treatments. Children are surviving cancer at rates as high as 94 percent for leukemia and 85 percent for brain tumors.

One thing hasn't changed, though. Children use humor and their fighting spirit to cope with cancer. Like healthy kids, they live in the moment. They find ways to bring some sense of normalcy and control back to their lives with laughter. They don't usually moan and groan and ask God why they've been so tormented.

After all, they're going to grow their hair back, grow up and go to Boise.

Almost nine million people watched Farrah Fawcett's documentary on her anal cancer journey. Almost as many as the number of cancer survivors in this country.

Fantastic. We learned that Farrah is way more than a pretty face and gorgeous thick hair. That's how I always thought of her, at least. That Charlie's Angel with everything in the world. Men adored her physical beauty, tacking up that sexy poster everywhere and fantasizing about her soft, sweet voice. Women wanted to be her, pure and simple.

Yet cancer knows that no celebrity is immune. It taunts us, like the devil.

Watching Farrah praying and going through her days, exhausted and trying to cope with the stress of learning her cancer was returning to the original site and in her liver, I was awed by her spirit. Somehow, some way, she held it together even when her partner Ryan O'Neal, friend Alana Stewart and son Redmond O'Neal felt miserable, hopeless and lost.

That spirit is what sustains you through the cancer journey, the trek no one wants to take.

Dr. Wendy Schlessel Harpham was a doctor with three young children when she got the news no one wants. In 1990, the news yanked her across the great divide from physician to patient, as she writes in "Happiness in a Storm: Facing Illness and Embracing Life as a Healthy Survivor." She had non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a slow-growing cancer of the lymphatic system with no known cure.

As a doctor, she knew that what matters is not how long a person lives but how she lives. As she went through the dizzying cycle of tests, treatments and fatigue, she made a promise: "I will learn how to live my life most fully despite illness and maybe even because of it."

She was happily married and only 36, with children aged 2, 4 and 6, when she suffered from excruciating leg pain that led to her diagnosis.

"For them, I've always had blue eyes, brown hair and cancer," she writes. Their youthful honesty and outlook helped her shape her own attitude. As her oldest daughter Rebecca described, "Sometimes she's in treatment, and sometimes she's on a 'mission,' " her term for remission.

When Harpham's colleague also was diagnosed with lymphoma, Rebecca's response was: "You two can be survivors together!" Not exactly the way an adult reacts when he gets the news.

It's all part of being in the CC, the Cancer Club. It seeks you for membership relentlessly, whether you want to join or not. Like a nasty used-car salesman or a thief in the night.

As more and more people are learning, however, that devil can be dealt with. It may take your body parts, your hair, your physical beauty, but it can never rob you of your soul. You will always be the same person you were before cancer, only stronger. A new normal, as some of us like to call it.

Have you hugged your spirit today?

Today is a new day for Lisa's blog. I have decided that since cancer has been so insidious in my life, that I must kick its ass.

I like to say I was fortunate to have cancer at age 27. People stare at me, mouths agape. Who wants to be ill so young?

Because I survived. It wasn't a horrible cancer like what Farrah Fawcett is going through. I've seen my mother-in-law succumb to colon cancer. My dad is dealing with the same illness. I love to eat, so I can't imagine a worse deal.

Mine happened on my tongue first. A sore that wouldn't heal. Remember that. My dentist sent me to a specialist after three weeks. Talking to me as if I were a child, that doctor mentioned surgery, radiation ... it was a blur. He even notified me over the telephone. How kind of him. Not unusual, though, when I've shared stories with other Cancer Club members.

That's what I call it, the Cancer Club. There are over 10 million survivors in this country alone. CC membership does not discriminate. You can be 10 years old or 90, white, black or brown. You could be a doctor, steel worker, even a priest. No one is immune.

That's what makes it so scary. I never had a family history of head and neck cancer. I didn't smoke cigarettes or marijuana. Never touched either. I didn't drink a lot or take drugs. Well-meaning people asked me those questions over and over again.

Then there was that look of pity in their eyes. That was the worst. I didn't want their sympathy, I just wanted to be normal again. A woman with hopes and dreams, like everybody else on the planet. To succeed in my career, win some awards, maybe even a Pulitzer.

Not this, what was in 1989 still considered a death sentence. Not my specific cancer, although an intern had written in my file that I had a poor prognosis. Rather, I had an 85 percent chance of being cured. Being young with cancer is a blessing. You are otherwise very healthy. In fact, it's still considered an older person's illness. Which means that often it isn't detected soon enough.

When Kate Jackson described her friend Farrah's illness, she stressed the importance of early detection. Exactly. What a smart woman, I reveled. That is the answer.

We hate getting those tests. The colorectal one is incredibly icky, at least for me. Drinking that stuff and cleaning out your colon. Being hungry. Ugh. I once said we should make the terrorists do that one. It has to be worse than waterboarding.

Yet it is so worth it. Once you go through the test, you are so relieved. You know what you're dealing with. You're up to date, educated, better prepared to face your future. You can make plans with your children and friends. You're not hanging out in limbo anymore, waiting for test results. You can take control of your life again. You thank whatever God you pray to.

I was blessed that I had a dentist who sent me to that specialist. I ended up having surgery at the local cancer center which I cannot praise enough. Another gift is that one of the finest research centers in the world, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, is right here in Tampa. My surgeon saved my life and continues to practice here in town. He cured a friend of mine a few years ago, a law enforcement officer with plenty of good years ahead of him.

For good or bad, this is now a cancer-related blog. Because we have to kick its ass.