The Complete Cancer Survival Guide: With Advice from Dozens of Leading Cancer Specialist at More than 30 Major Cancer Centers : The Most Comprehensive, Up-to-Date Guide for Patients and Their Families - Softcover

Teeley, Peter; Bashe, Philip

 
9780767919890: The Complete Cancer Survival Guide: With Advice from Dozens of Leading Cancer Specialist at More than 30 Major Cancer Centers : The Most Comprehensive, Up-to-Date Guide for Patients and Their Families
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0767919890 ISBN 13: 9780767919890
Verlag: Broadway Books, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

A valuable resource for anyone diagnosed with cancer provides a comprehensive plan for obtaining the best care available, drawing on advice from leading specialists to discuss treatment options, how to find the most appropriate and effective therapy for each type of cancer, the latest scientific and medical research, and more. Original. 10,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Teeley, who served as press secretary to Vice President George Bush, was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer in 1991, and attributes his recovery to the fact that he gained access to a state-of-the-art clinical trial at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Cancer Center. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Philip Bashe has written or cowritten seventeen titles spanning several genres, including health and self-help, parenting, sports, biography, autobiography, and popular culture. He lives in Baldwin, New York, with his wife, author Patricia Romanowski Bashe, and their son, Justin.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

Cancer:

A Thief in the Night
 
Cancer is a disease that takes years to develop, yet it can plunge you and your family into upheaval the instant it takes the doctor to deliver the news no one wants to hear: "What we've found is a malignancy."

At the time my cancer was discovered in 1991, I'd never been seriously ill in my life. By then I was six years removed from daily politics, busy running my own consulting firm in Washington. I'd entered government life back in 1970 as press secretary to the assistant U.S. Senate minority leader, Robert Griffin of Michigan, my home state. I went on to serve in the same capacity for Jacob Javits, helping to reelect him to his fourth and final term as senior U.S. senator from New York.

In 1976, I took a leave of absence from Senator Javits's office to handle press duties for President Gerald Ford's campaign committee. Coming on the heels of the Watergate scandal, the election was a debacle for the Republicans. Jimmy Carter edged out Ford for the White House, and the Democrats gained seats in both the House and the Senate. Not long afterward, I became communications director and chief spokesman for the Republican National Committee as the party set about rebuilding itself.

I'd been hooked by the excitement of a presidential race, though, and had the urge to do it again. To help shape a winning campaign and be part of moving the country in a direction you believe will benefit the American people is a dream that too few ever experience, especially someone like me--an immigrant who as a boy came to the United States from England on a battered troop-carrier ship following World War II.

George Bush, the former congressman from Texas, United Nations ambassador, and director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was gearing up for a presidential run in 1980. He was widely respected, but certainly considered a dark-horse candidate. Although I didn't know him well on a personal level, I'd admired him as a public official. So I was delighted to become his press secretary in 1979. The association, which has lasted to this day, included his first term as vice president under Ronald Reagan.

In 1985, I decided to leave politics and launch my own business. As happens to many public servants, I was worn out from the eighteen-hour days and constant travel. It wasn't unusual for a foreign trip with the vice president to log twenty-five or thirty thousand miles over the course of three weeks as we leapfrogged from Alaska to Japan to Korea to Singapore to Australia to New Zealand to China to Hawaii before finally returning home. And the fall political campaigns frequently resembled a cross-country derby. We used to wring a few extra hours out of the day by opening with an early-morning campaign stop on the East Coast. Then we'd work our way west through the time zones, with stops in, say, Chicago, Kansas City, and Denver, before winding up in Los Angeles by nightfall.

Another reason for my departing the White House: I was newly married, to Valerie Hodgson, a photographer. Our daughter Randall was born in 1987, and Adrienne arrived three years later, on my fiftieth birthday. My two daughters from my first marriage were already in their twenties: Susan, a speech pathologist in Livonia, Michigan, and Laura, then a communications major at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

In all, it was a happy time. I had a wonderful family, and a thriving business that allowed me to enjoy them. Then everything was abruptly put on hold.

The ordeal began innocently enough: I had a dull pain in my right side. The kids had been suffering from the stomach flu since Labor Day, so I figured I'd picked up what they had and didn't pay much attention to it. But after it persisted for a few days, I went to our family doctor for an examination. She poked around a bit, told me not to worry, and sent me home. When the pain didn't subside, I saw her partner, with the same result.

A few days later I went to the emergency room for X rays. My doctor read the films the next day and assured me she saw nothing unusual.

"But there's obviously something bothering you," she continued. "So I'm going to schedule you for an MRI scan tomorrow afternoon." No sooner did I return home from the imaging procedure than the phone rang. It was my doctor. "I want you to get over to the hospital," she said urgently, naming a nearby community hospital. "You've got an inflamed appendix, and you need to have it taken out now.

"I've checked you in. A surgeon will meet you there and remove it right away. I'll see you in the recovery room."

I tossed some clothes into an overnight bag, called a taxi, and went off to have an appendectomy, or so I thought.

The next thing I remembered was waking up in a darkened hospital room. Though still drowsy from the anesthesia, I knew it was late at night, perhaps 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. Three hospital attendants were hoisting me into a bed. I hurt badly all over and sensed something was seriously wrong. But I was too exhausted to pursue the thought. I just wanted to sleep.

At about 7:30 in the morning, the bedside phone rang, jarring me partially awake.

"Teeley! How ya feeling?"

It was George Bush calling.

"I really feel bad, I'm sorry, I can't talk now," I mumbled, and dropped the receiver back into the cradle.

I thought to myself, I just hung up on the president of the United States.

Later that morning the surgeon would explain how he'd been surprised to discover a tumor and had to remove a one-foot section of large intestine, along with the appendix and the lymph nodes for biopsy. If he was surprised, I was stunned beyond belief, especially when the pathology report came back a few days later noting that three nodes out of twenty-two had tested positive for cancer.

The entire situation grew stranger still. A week to the day after the first surgery, a Friday, I went under the knife again, this time to untangle the twisted colon. "It'll take twenty minutes," the surgeon informed me. "Don't worry about it." Apparently, he had failed to mention to the anesthesiologist that I'd been throwing up black bile all week. When it happened again during the operation, the fluid slipped into my lung, essentially drowning me and causing aspiration pneumonia to set in. Though it's no longer the threat it once was, pneumonia is still the fifth deadliest disease in the United States.

Valerie was allowed to see me briefly in the recovery room while the medical team prepared to move me up to the intensive-care unit. "It was awful," she says with a shudder. "Peter was unconscious and on a mechanical respirator. When they took him off the machine, he started convulsing because he wasn't getting any oxygen. I just kind of stood there, not knowing what to do." Then the doctors and nurses took their places on either side of the gurney. Looking much like a bobsled team, they hastily wheeled it and me out the doors and down the hall.

Despite massive doses of intravenous antibiotics, the pneumonia held fast. The night that the pulmonologist conceded that I might not survive, Valerie went to bed assuming she was about to become a thirty-five-year-old widow with two young children. She recalls thinking to herself, They'll call me if Peter dies. And if I wake up in the morning, and no one's called, I'll know he's still alive.

Finally, after seven days, I regained consciousness, once again to find her on the edge of my bed.

"You've been through a terrible time," she said, smiling, "but you made it. You're going to be all right." Because of the breathing tube down my throat, I couldn't talk....

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Verlag
Broadway Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767919890
ISBN 13 
9780767919890
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
988
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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