A Cancer diagnosis is never something you want to hear, but many people have claimed that it's the best thing that ever happened to them. The best? Not as crazy as it sounds when they tell you how cancer brought out a powerful love in themselves and their loved ones that fundamentally changed their lives. That love often can be a key to healing. When Jack Dold's wife of forty-seven years was diagnosed with sarcoma, he vowed to make Mary the center of life for her year of treatment. He has recorded that year with all of its ups and downs-surgery, chemo, and radiation, but also delightful family holidays, the ordinary pleasures of loving grandchildren and the ongoing support from a whole army of friends. Jack watched Mary bloom from the love that surrounded her, even during the darkest days. You Don't Stop Living offers encouragement to families facing cancer by reminding them that illness is only one aspect of their lives. They will still empty the dishwasher, weed the garden, be blessed by the kiss of a grandchild and the love of their children, and strengthened by the hug of a friend. Lovingly told, this book is a reminder that cancer families will still have an abundance of life and warmth to share. Text: Jack Dold has been writing his journal for almost 20 years, a chronicle of his extensive world travels as the owner of Golden Gate Tours, and also of the events, large and small, in the lives of his family and friends. You Don't Stop Living filled his journal writings for the past year, as he describes the successful struggle of his wife, Mary fighting sarcoma cancer, and the therapeutic help she received from her family and friends. Jack recently published his first novel, Crosshairs, and is presently working on a major historical novel. (Picture to be provided)

You Don't Stop Living

A Family Cure For CancerBy Jack Dold

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2012 Jack Dold
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4685-7186-8

Chapter One

September

September 20, 2010

I was in China, with one of the University of California Alumni groups, when Mary was diagnosed with cancer. The word hit like a hammer to my temple, almost a crippling blow when I first heard it. It is what we were raised to fear—the dreaded "C-Word," not to be uttered out loud for fear it might hear you, like Valdimort in Harry Potter. We had other fear-inspiring words too, when Mary and I were growing up. We were in the era of polio vaccines, which brought hope in the war on that awful disease. My brother Bob and I had to move out of our small rented house in El Cerrito, because our roommate had tuberculosis. The house had to be fumigated and Hugh sent to a sanitarium. Jerry Lewis was beginning his telethons for muscular dystrophy. We had lots of fearful illnesses in those young days, but none quite as scary as cancer. That was the one you couldn't get out of. Cancer was the end of the line. All of us had friends and relatives, even schoolmates, who had succumbed to the dread disease; fear of cancer was endemic in those days.

The times have surely changed. Today we probably know more people who have survived cancer than those who have lost the fight. "He's in remission" has become a standard phrase, although most of us don't exactly know what that means, or what it doesn't mean. It is almost as common to hear that someone's cancer has "recurred," but our mind continues to stay back on the remission level.

Whatever our toned-down thoughts on cancer are now, they are only relevant if the person in question is not in your family. I found out in China that the word continues to be horribly frightening when it is used to describe someone you love. In that initial shock, my mind bounced back and forth between hope and despair on a plane that was completely outside of reason, as fear provoked tears and doubt battled with certainty.

Mary, as well as our two daughters, Nancy and Anne, urged me to finish the tour, assuring me that there was nothing I could do if I came home early that was not being done already. Of course they are right, but staying on the road certainly created in me a measureable amount of guilt. In my mind, I knew that Nancy and Anne would handle everything that needed to be done, would provide the love and attention that Mary needed at the moment. I was also certain that Mary would be accepting this diagnosis with the same unruffled demeanor that she has handled her entire life. For me to leave the group and rush home would almost be grandstanding; the girls can handle things as well as I. Sometimes it comes as a shock that folks can actually get along fine without you, but I finally convinced myself that my presence could wait.

Over the years my presence often waited because I have been "on the road" for almost forty years. In the 1970s, I was happily settled in as a teacher and vice principal at Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland, California. Then Mary's brother, George, and I decided to go into the travel business. George founded California Field Studies in California and I moved to New England to begin American Field Studies. Simply stated, we took school teachers on travel courses that earned them graduate credits. Field studies evolved into Golden Gate Tours, which we have run in California together since 1985. Since then we have taken groups, mainly senior citizens and university alumni organizations, to just about every part of the world. I have been away from Mary and the girls many times. The tour with Cal, the University of California at Berkeley, was to be my last, the beginning of retirement.

Even though I stayed to finish off that tour, I did make one vow in China that until Mary was cured, she would be the center of all of our attention, that everything else in our lives would take a back seat to her well being. That might seem a small thing to someone not familiar with the Jack and Mary Dold family, but it is not. Mary has never been the center of attention because she never wanted to be, and never has needed to be. She has always been that thoughtful mother and wife and sister and aunt and grandmother and friend who cared deeply for everyone in her life, did things for them, and never asked for anything in return, often didn't even know how to express her thoughts in an emotional way.

I vowed that Mary was about to get payback for the thousands of cards and gifts and Cenacle of Prayer enrollments, the hours of work, the unceasing attention to the needs of others. It is Mary who is now in need of help, and we will provide it without limit. It helps too that I have just retired, after almost forty years in the tour business. Without knowing a thing about Mary's cancer, I mentally checked off the next year as being consumed by that illness. I didn't know then how prescient I was.

Saturday, September 25

This morning I got back to our home in Green Valley, Fairfield, California, feeling very uncomfortable with the world I was about to enter, a world that now contained an unwelcome visitor—cancer. Nancy and Annie have given Mary all of the help and support she needs at the moment, have spoken with the doctors, have assisted her in the multitude of tests that are the beginning of her journey with this illness. They have gone through all of the GI tests, colonoscopy, x-rays, various upper body scans, blood tests of all sorts. Way back in the spring, Mary began complaining of having dry mouth and loss of appetite. She was losing weight in chunks, which we all assumed was the result of not eating enough. In fact, Mary had started again on the South Beach Diet, a regimen she and I had successfully followed a couple of years ago, only to begin putting on the weight again as soon as we finished. It includes two weeks of near starvation at the beginning, which I assumed was what Mary was going through. But the lack of eating became a worry, then a definite problem, so Mary went to her doctor, Dr. Vanita Jain, who instituted the search for the problem. Those tests were still going on when I left for China in September. Of course, they never discovered anything, until they decided on a full PET scan, for the first time bypassing the G.I. assumptions and expanding the search to below the waist. That's when they found the cancer. Nancy told me on the phone that they thought it might be Stage 3 or 4, that it was a tumor in Mary's inner thigh. She said there were smaller tumors elsewhere.

At that time, I didn't know what Stage 4 meant, that the disease had metastasized to invade other areas of the body, but I knew that any stage higher than one was bad news. The doctors told the girls that Mary's cancer was a sarcoma, a tumor in the soft tissue. Two of my college classmates, Tom Meschery and Donald Dirito had sarcomas, Donald's very recently. On the plane coming home I resolved to contact both of them as soon as possible, figuring it would be the first logical step to helping Mary.

Mary's regular doctor, Dr. Jain, contacted an oncologist named Shoba Kankopati, who was with the Epic Group at a cancer treatment center in Pleasant Hill. Mary met with Dr. Kankopati, Dr. Shoba as she is usually more easily called. She is a young, attractive woman, remarkably slim. Her family comes from Pakistan. Dr. Shoba called for a biopsy which another doctor, Dr. Kim, started a week ago, and then stopped, declaring that it was beyond his ability to proceed. Before he closed up the incision, he...