Thank goodness, I was home at last and able to think about getting ready for Linda’s wedding.

I was bald as an eagle. Not only was there no hair on my head, but there was not a single hair on my entire body. I was down to 145 pounds . I looked awful. Annette wanted me, as a favor to her, to get a toupee. “Honey,” I told Annette, “for you I’ll do anything.”

Annette thought the toupee would make me feel better. She thought that I looked old, when I wasn’t really old. She felt that if I looked good, I would feel better. We ordered a $300 toupee. When it came in and they put it on me, I had never had that much hair in my life. Annette sat next to me and told the barber exactly how she wanted it cut, while he did it.

So he cut and trimmed it. When we got home, Annette wanted me to try it on again for her. “That’s still too much hair,” she said. So we went back, and the barber cut more off, exactly to her specifications. He charged us $20, but it made Annette happy. The week before the wedding Annette asked me to try the toupee on again. Again she said, “It’s still too much.” Back to the same barber, and another $20 later I could wear it to the wedding. Here it is, a toupee, and it’s not growing, and it still has to get three haircuts.

I never wore it again after the wedding. Everybody who saw me after the wedding, without the toupee, said they liked my looks better without it.

At the wedding, I walked Linda down the aisle, and I had the first dance with her, just as we had planned before the cancer treatments.

At the end of June, I had to go to Houston for a physical examination. I was feeling substantially stronger. I assumed that it would be a routine test and I would be back home the next night. The doctor said my lung had filled with fluid, and he put me back in the hospital. That was a low blow—just when I felt things were going so well, to have a setback like this.

He wanted to put the tubes back in my side to drain the fluid. I was really feeling too good to go through this kind of pain and discomfort, and I talked him into waiting a few days. After lying in my hospital bed for four days doing absolutely nothing, I had an X ray the morning of July 5. The congestion had cleared itself up and I was free to go home.

On the one hand, I was so happy and excited, and on the other hand, I was angry that they had kept me in the hospital over the Fourth of July for no reason at all. My wife was extremely worried that I had suddenly turned into an old man, a fact that I could not see in myself. Besides my physical appearance, being totally hairless, gaunt and sallow, I moved like an old man. Every move I made was very slow, including shuffling at an octogenarian’s gait.

My wife kept telling me to stand up straight and lift my feet when I walked. She didn’t realize that it was more comfortable for me to hold my right arm motionless, to constantly protect my right side, and to slide my feet, one after another, in a stooped position. She tried to convince me that I was still young and that I should act it. At times I resented her relentless urging, but later I was grateful that she had kept it up. Finally she turned to the doctor for assistance. The lecture he gave me was not to be forgotten; starting then and there, I made a concerted effort to act my age, stand straight, lift my feet, and smile.

Simultaneously, something new was to happen to me. In my childhood I was greatly overweight, and all my adult life I have been on a diet. In the past thirty years I had been able to go from 190 pounds to 165. Candy bars and milk shakes were something to be remembered from childhood. Midnight snacks were for someone else. For thirty years it had been three meals a day, no sweets, no snacks. Now I was suddenly at 145 pounds. My doctor explained that weight loss could be an indication of cancer and conversely, in order to prove that I was rid of cancer, he wanted me to put on weight. This would have been a dream a year before, but after my sore throat, my marijuana brownies, my surgery and chemotherapy, regular eating, to say nothing of excessive eating, was not a pleasant thought. However, I made up my mind that this was part of my cure and I was going to do it.

Some days for lunch I would stop by a pancake house and have pancakes covered with butter and floating in syrup. It didn’t take very long. At 155, I asked the doctor to let me stop, as this was where I wanted to be. Permission denied. At 165, I again asked and was again denied. Finally, at 170, I was allowed to go back to normal eating.

It took a year of strict adherence to conservative eating to get back to 165. It seems like such a long way to 155, but at least I’m here to keep working on it.

Then came my biggest problem. I did not want to take any more chemotherapy. It was uncomfortable, unpleasant and weakening. I felt that these powerful drugs could cause problems with various organs of my body later on in life. I felt that I was cured, not only because of all the treatment I had had, but particularly because no trace of living cancer cells was found after my surgery. So why punish my body further?

The doctor said that I was going to take chemotherapy. My wife insisted that I do what the doctor ordered, since he had already saved my life.

I had asked everybody I saw about taking chemotherapy. During my recuperation, one of the assistant surgeons said that he had been there during the entire operation. He saw that they had removed every trace of the cancer and that, if it were he, he wouldn’t go through the ordeal of chemotherapy.

While I was home, a friend of many years visited me on my patio. She had had her lung removed because of cancer the previous year, and her surgeon had told her that she was totally cured and did not need chemotherapy.

Another friend had come down with lung cancer two weeks after me. His surgeon removed his lung, gave him a clean bill of health and advised that chemotherapy was not necessary.

I related these experiences to my doctor, and his vehement answer was, “Dick, nobody asked you. You are going to have chemotherapy.”

My wife’s feeling about this was that one should do the best for oneself and never look back and say, “I wish I had,” after it’s too late. When I think how small cancer cells are, they are obviously not individually visible to the naked eye. Therefore, any doctor who says he removed all the cancer really means he removed all the cancer he could see. There is no way he could possibly see a few isolated cancer cells in another part of the body, such as the other lung, the liver or the brain.

Within a few months after her visit to my patio, my friend developed cancer in her other lung. Obviously, surgery and strenuous treatment were no longer an option, since she had only one lung. Soon afterward she died. The same thing happened to my other friend. In the past two years, two more acquaintances were pronounced cured of cancer after a lung was surgically removed. Both had been told they didn’t need chemotherapy. Both died of cancer in the other lung.

I am not a doctor. I am not trying to say that everyone who gets cancer needs chemotherapy. I am trying to say that if I were told I did not need chemotherapy, I would want an oncologist (cancer specialist) to verify that statement. In many cancers, there is only one chance to beat it. If you don’t go all the way the first time, there may not be a second chance.

In order to avoid excessive trips to Houston, my Texas doctor arranged for a young oncologist in Kansas City to give me my chemotherapy treatments. Not only was it convenient to have a local source for treatment, but it was valuable to have a local authoritative source for answers to the questions that would arise. These two doctors were in constant contact about my case.

The basic chemotherapy treatment was to be given one week each month with three weeks following to recuperate. I used to say it was a diabolical scheme—every month they let you get well just to make you sick again.

I think some of the drugs I took were interesting, even though many of them today could be totally out of date. One drug was supposedly the oldest chemotherapy drug around — 5 F.U. I understood it was more than twenty years old. It was given to me intravenously along with the other drugs during my week of treatment. The following week, I would have to go to the doctor’s office for an infusion of this drug. Infusion is merely a shot of it in a vein of my arm. I got to the point where I could take this infusion on my way to the office. It didn’t bother me at all.

By contrast, one of the drugs I took, Adriamycin, was nicknamed “the Red Devil.” This drug had been discovered ten years before, had been tested for two years, and had been used only for eight years. Even though very few people have ever heard of it, the doctor told me that this drug saves more lives every year than the Salk polio vaccine. This is the drug that makes you so violently ill and also causes the loss of hair. Interestingly enough, after my treatments a way was discovered to avoid losing your hair. It’s simply to wear an icepack on your head during the time you are receiving Adriamycin and for a few minutes thereafter. However, this is not always advisable, nor does it always work.

A third drug was Cysplatinum, apparently made from the metal platinum and extremely expensive. After a few treatments, the pharmaceutical company stopped making it. Another company started, but it was off the market several months until the FDA approved the new manufacturer’s process. I was unhappy at being denied this drug for those few months. I felt that, as long as I was going through such discomfort, there should be the best odds of success.

The fourth drug was Cytoxin. Along with my philosophy of positive thinking, I welcomed this terrible ordeal each month. I knew that if it was making me so violently ill, it had to be killing the last traces of any cancer cells which may have spread throughout my body.

But, let me say that this year was not all bad. The last week in July, my wife and I were able to take a one-week business trip to Bermuda. My November treatment was given a week early, and the December treatment a week late to enable me to spend a month in Acapulco.

For some reason, my December treatment affected me adversely. I got quite weak and developed a moderate fever. We left between Christmas and New Year’s to take our three daughters and three sons-in-law on a Caribbean cruise. On the ship, I seemed to be getting continuously weaker. At our second port, Grand Cayman, we called my doctor in Houston. He told me to go to a hospital, have a blood test, and call back immediately with the results. We did, and he wouldn’t believe the results were so bad. He insisted that I have another test and call back. As much as I hate to have blood drawn, we complied with his wishes. The second results verified the initial findings. He explained to me on the telephone that my blood was in such a condition that if I came in contact with any germ, I would have no ability to fight it and would be dead within twenty-four hours.

The eight of us just sat and stared at one another in disbelief. He insisted that I not get back on the ship, but immediately fly anywhere in the United States where there would be facilities to treat me. He talked to the head doctor and explained the situation.

But every flight was completely sold out. The doctor had to use his influence, due to the severity of the situation, to have two people removed from the next flight out so we could fly to Florida. My children went back to the ship and hastily packed our clothes.

Fortunately and coincidentally, my Kansas City oncologist was vacationing in Fort Lauderdale, and he came to see me immediately on my arrival. I had to stay in bed for two weeks, except for going to the hospital every other day for blood tests. Each time, I would call my doctor in Houston with the results. During the second week, he said that the most recent test had to be wrong, and I should have the hospital check it. I called the hospital, and they verified the results. The doctor wanted me to immediately fly to Houston for a platelet transfusion. I said I was feeling too good for there to be any problem. He then told me that if I started bleeding, it would not stop, and he asked if my gums didn’t bleed when I brushed my teeth. I said no. He compromised and allowed me to have another blood test the next morning. Sure enough, this proved that the hospital had made a mistake the previous day. Oh, the highs and lows of this strange disease.

The end of January, we stopped in Houston on our way from Florida to Kansas City for my routine quarterly examination. I was feeling fine, and I knew that everything was A-OK. All the tests were administered the first day, and the second day we visited with the doctor before catching our flight home. He seemed particularly perturbed and kept us waiting quite a while.

The doctor then confronted us with the fact that my X ray had shown a substantial mass in my shoulder. Numerous doctors had reviewed this and could not determine whether it was scar tissue or a new tumor. He wanted me to go immediately to the hospital to be admitted for a needle biopsy.

My wife and I looked at each other in disbelief. This just couldn’t be happening—especially since everything had been going so well. We were completely undone by the whole thing. I had taken every recommended treatment. We had played the game as cautiously as we knew how. I was feeling too well. We were to be secure in our own home in a couple of hours — yet, here we were, in the hospital awaiting surgery. I, myself, had seen the mass in the X ray.

I was ready to cry. I told my wife I could not go through this whole thing all over again. In her strength, she told me we could and we would, if we had to.

The needle biopsy did not show any malignancy. This did not necessarily mean that there was no tumor, as it is possible to miss the tumor or miss the cancerous cells.

The next day we were released to go home with the provision that I would get a chest X ray each two weeks to monitor any change. This indicated to me how fast cancer can grow. These X rays showed no changes.

The last day of March, we again returned to Houston for a routine examination. The next morning in our conference with the doctor, he mentioned it had been a year since I started treatment. He asked my weight, did some calculations, and told me that I had taken all the chemicals my body could tolerate. I was finished with chemotherapy. What a happy day! Those were the most wonderful words I had ever heard in my life.

I would continue to go to Houston for semiannual checkups. During my visit on May 1, 1980, the doctor said, "Dick, I won't be seeing you professionally any more." I didn't know what to make of this statement. He explained that with the type of cancer I had, if there was no recurrence within two years, I had no more chance of getting it back than anybody anywhere. As a matter of fact, I probably had less chance of a recurrence of lung cancer because of the immunization therapy.

Furthermore, in my case, it had been twenty-five months, and each month is important. Some cancers are watched for five years, some for ten years and some for fifteen years, but in my case, the crucial period was two years.

This entire conversation came as a total surprise for me. I thought I'd be going to Houston for years with the constant threat of recurrence. For the second time in my life, I thought the doctor was talking to someone else or about someone else. I could not believe or hope that I would ever hear the words that I was cured. There surely is a Good Lord above.