---

---

“Man, that sucks… ,” I eloquently replied to Mark Davis, my urologist, when he informed me back in late June 2015, that my prostate biopsy had come back malignant and aggressive. You drive away from his office, head for the beach for a walk. You tell yourself it’s the most common type of cancer among men over 50. You tell yourself it’s one of the slowest growing types of cancer in men. And then you start interviewing oncologists and good friends, many of whom have had the same bug, to see what route you’re going to take to battle the beast. That, and you get your game face on. One onc doc in Eureka came highly recommended-until the first 15 minutes of the interview was consumed with his diatribe assailing Barack Obama, the Affordable Care Act, concluding with a statement I’m still trying to figure out, “He (Mr. Obama) doesn’t really think we’re men.” Not sure if I was going to be accused of being a Kenyan thereafter, I was on the phone to Stanford before I was out of the hospital lot. 

I go to Palo Alto for a consultation with one of their oncologists. He tells me he’s recommending a prostatectomy, using their DaVinci robot to remove my prostate. I ask him who’s going to be at the helm of R2D2 and he tells me he is. I think to myself, aren’t you supposed to see a referring oncologist who recommends what route to take for my cancer (ie. chemo, radiation, surgery, etc.). Then again, hey, what do I know?

###

Relay For Life Keynote Address-July 2015
Del Norte County High School Football Field

“Good Evening- How y’all doing out there tonite? I’d like to thank all the people at Relay for putting this together again and honoring me with the privilege of speaking tonite. Also, for the privilege of being in your Dunk Tank this afternoon—anytime I can be the opening act for Sheriff Apperson, who was kind enough to put in an hour in that Bering Sea frigid water you had to have imported, is a good day.

We’re here to walk for Life this weekend and if you know anything about my story, I have to ask you, who appreciates life more than someone who’s seen the bottom? The answer is simple---you and everyone with a loved one who has or has had cancer.

This shirt I wear tonite shows two young men, artists and musicians from my home state of New Jersey. One is Bruce Springsteen. The other is his keyboard player, Danny Federici. Danny’s exquisite accordion never fails to take me back to the summers of my youth, when I would stalk the boardwalks of the Jersey Shore, knowing I was invincible, never thinking about the finitude of this existence, knowing, like the maids and merrymen on John Keats magic Grecian Urn, that I could dance forever. Danny died on April 17^th of 2008 after a three year bout with melanoma.

I’ll start walking later this morning and when I do, I’ll have three people with me. Which brings me to that dunk tank experience—It was July 2012, I was on crutches with some torn knee ligaments from a July 4 charity dunk tank accident and hobbling around the track here at Relay sometime after midnite. It was dark and there were only a couple folks on the track. I was feeling a bit down, when all of a sudden I heard a voice coming up behind me, “You better hurry up Hopalong or you’re gonna get run over.” I turned around and it was Pelican Bay CO Bobby Rice. We talked for just a bit and then he pointed over to this stage where some people were standing and said, “This is a helluva good community.” We talked about that for awhile and you people that make up this community in a place called Del Norte County and I couldn’t help but think about Lyndon Johnson’s reply when asked why he wasn’t running for a second term and he replied that he wanted to go back home to his ranch on the Perdernales River, a place where “the people know when you’re sick and they care when you die.” Bobby said he was going to move on and left me with my crutches and thoughts, but his love of this community that he shared that night has never left me and it’s why I stay here.

The second person is my best friend and mother, Arlene Alexander. A soft spoken farmgirl, she was born in 1919 in Boone, Iowa. She was one of that generation that Tom Brokaw appropriately named the “greatest generation” that got us through WW II and the Great Depression, people who rolled up their sleeves and gutted out the tough times, instead of whining about them.

My senior year in high school, they told us Mom was sick and had to go to a place called Sloan Kettering in New York. She had breast cancer and in 1968 had radical mastectomies. She and my father never talked about it. I never began to understand what she must have gone through until I returned from my first year of college and found they had moved into separate beds.

We grew up in a factory town where a lot of women got cancer and it seemed like most of them came to my Mom to lean on for strength. Her greatest joy was doing a kindness for someone else who was in need, with no expectation of compensation or even acknowledgment. She will always be my biggest hero. The stone on a hillside in Iowa says March 23, 2006, but she’ll be with me tonite.

And the last person that will be with me tonite is a lady who, like my Mom, had a radical mastectomy in 1974. The first day after her surgery, she asked her husband to make a national public announcement of her experience because she felt for the thousands of women who had undergone the silent scourge of breast cancer and wanted to let them know they were not alone.

In 1975, my Mom sent her a simple Hallmark card thanking her for her courage and compassion. A couple months later, Mom got a handwritten letter from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with a gold embossed Presidential seal on it, thanking her for her kind words and inviting her to stop in and say hello to her and “Jerry” if she was ever in Washington, D.C.. It was signed simply, “Betty.”

So that’s the company I’ll have with me this morning….and on July 30 at Stanford when they open me up with their Da Vinci surgical robot and remove my prostate and whatever else that 8+ Gleason count brought with it. And this is where Ms. Kubler-Ross and her 5 stages of grief and I part ways. Fine, I’ll give you initial Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, but no on # 5--I find my cancer unacceptable---it will not define me, it will not break my spirit, and no matter the outcome, it will not beat or break me. Because I have Bobby Rice and this community standing with me and because I am Arlene Alexander’s son.

As our patron saint back in Jersey, Bruce Springsteen wrote:

“Blood Brothers (and Sisters) in the stormy night
With a vow to defend
No retreat, baby, no surrender.
No retreat, no surrender.”

Tonite we celebrate. Tonite we remember. And tomorrow we go out and beat this thing.

Thank you.”

###

So you go to Stanford on July 29^th, surgery to follow the next day. After a day in court representing the Yurok Tribe, after bouncing around town on a street grid that looks like the bastard offspring of Rte. 199 and Bald Hills Rd., you finally roll into Palo Alto around 1:00 a.m.. The hotel prices are beyond any respect for usury law, until you see a Best Western sign, beaming in the night, letting you know you’re saved. You walk into the lobby where a young girl, beautifully coiffed, takes one look at you and your Cabella’s chic and half sneers. You ask, can she help you. I tell her I need a single room, non-smoking. Stonefaced, she tells me “That’ll be $310 plus tax.” I ask her if she’s kidding. She tells me she wouldn’t kid about something that “serious.” I ask her if she can recommend lodging a bit more economical. Again, the sneer. Sez she can’t “recommend” anything “down there,” but I should try “East Palo Alto” where I can probably find something more akin to my needs. It’s almost 2:00 a.m., but you look around and realize the young woman was talking about ‘persons of color.’

Getting a feel for this burg, I begin looking for the nastiest, greasiest hostel in sight, settling on the “Mermaid Hotel.” Bars on all the windows, steel door and double thick bullet proof glass at the check-in desk, a nice young guy comes out to take my info and a buck and a quarter. I tell him I’m only there for a couple hours, got surgery coming up. He laughs and, as I hit the door, he calls out, “Hey man, you want some company, I can make a call.” I tell him I’ll pass and he shoots back with a conspiratorial laugh, “Well, ya never know, bro.”

The next morning they do a pre-op MRI. Day after that, I’m checked in and they wheel me to a surgery theatre. Not before they bring in a student PA who gets shown how to manually find my growths by hitching a ride on my surgeon’s index and ring fingers. Anyhing for science, I reckon.

Moments later, I’m under sedation, loopy as a loon, out there in Cosby Country, talking smack to a nurse that can’t be repeated here. All of a sudden, I’m looking again at my One Onc Does All surgeon. His face is fading in and out and I can hear the choir in the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” scoring this increasingly bizarre show. He tells me that the MRI revealed a “mass” in my right hip. I start babbling asking him about doing a 2-for-1 hip replacement along with the prostatectomy. Fade to black.

I come to in post-op. Three days later, I still can’t sit up and the social worker is telling me I gotta leave because the bed is promised and there are “people in tents” outside waiting for my bed. Serious, I can’t make this up. I tell her during my lost years, I lived in cars and would in no way be affected by her tortured mendacity. Having driven down there by myself, I am up the creek, until dear pal and savior, Helen Ferguson, wrangles some of her beloved Grange kids to drive down and save me from the Stanford tent people and PA’s Leona Helmsley.

###

Further Down the Road

And so, you get the word shortly thereafter, that your prostate was successfully removed. The other shoe falls and you’re informed the cancer’s out of the “margins” and is floating around inside you somewhere, the safe bet being that the increased PSA number says it’s metastasized into your bones, most likely in the hip area. You get a needle biopsy in your hip bone at the local hospital and get told that mass is benign. You get a second needle biopsy through that hip bone (Hello!) in Medford and get told it’s malignant and aggressive.

You then begin a trek that takes you to cancer clinics in Cleveland, Portland, Medford, Springfield, OR. Irvine, Louisville,KY, Springfield, IA., logging more miles than Patton in The Big One. You take oral chemo (Casodex, Xtandi), injectable chemo(Lupron, Eligard, Taxotere), bone strengtheners(Xgeva injections, Vitamin D, Calcium, protein shakes)-all of which give you chills, sweats, nausea, insomnia, ED, fatigue) all of which only amounts to a reminiscence of the ‘lost years’ when another cancer took you down-and you beat it.

Funny thing, no matter how nasty things got, the people that know and love you-continued to love you and be there for you.

And then there’s the onc docs that tell you you’re “Stage IV and terminal.” You just gotta laugh. I’ve know too many people that were “Stage IV” that got that moniker laid on them years ago and are still around to delight or piss me off. As for “terminal,” that’s even better. If you can show me anyone who’s not “terminal,” who doesn’t have a date out there that they’re shelf lifed for, other than the man we celebrate on Sunday, I’d like to see the test tube they came outta.

You bump around this life awhile, especially if it’s been something of a roller coaster existence, complete with those times you thought the only thing left was the arrival of the locusts and you get to know yourself some. You know that everyone goes through some dark times. Everybody takes some hard, indeed brutal, shots. Scott Peck didn’t begin his The Road Less Traveled with “Life is difficult,” because “Call me Ishmael” was already taken by Melville. If anything, times like these, you realize how incredibly blessed you are and have been. You look at each day, getting up in the morning, telling yourself, “Today I get to……. .” And you realize that the value of a life is defined, not by the good times, but how you rise up from the tough ones.

This past year, I got to return to Lexington, Kentucky for some new immunology treatment. They put a catheter into your chest, pull a bunch of blood out, infuse it with a new cocktail and put it back 3 days later, each week for a month. That’s the B side of the record. The A cut is, I got to return to the city of my alma mater, visit the haunts of (mostly) innocent youth, see old brothers and sisters, recall my introductions to Kant and Kierkegaard , James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver, Kerouac and Cassidy, and glorious music, so voluminous that time and space deny replay or description herein. I got to visit the most beautiful race track in America, Keeneland, where I put my way through school while beholding the wonder and beauty of the thoroughbreds that birth, grow and champion the Blue Grass country. Tack on some good seats for the Eagles on April 10th where I heard newly adopted Eagle, Vince Gill, bring a sorcerers magic to the anthem, Take It To the Limit … and yeah, like Lou Gehrig, afflicted with terminal ALS, rejoiced on July 4, 1939, at Yankee Stadium, “Some people say I caught a bad break. But today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.” I tend to number myself with the man they called the Iron Horse.

And now, it’s two years later. I’ve been through over a year of IV chemo until the benefits didn’t overcome the down sides. But just when that was looking a bit grim, I found, and have begun, this new radium223 treatment which goes right to the cancer cells in my bones. Which just goes to show you, Yogi Berra had it right on things being over. Or not.

###

And so, this morning, I followed my usual routine. I get up at 6 a.m. and put on my sweats, then my Grundens foul weather gear, so I can walk the beach and mud flats with Jake and Max, my two beloved rescue curs. I walk down the path, leading out of the Battery Pt. Lighthouse parking lot, accompanied by my legions of raven friends, now so adept at catching the treats I toss them on the fly.

We cross Howe Drive and pass by the Marine Mammal Center, whose philanthropic, medical care of the injured, sick and dying seals and sea lions, for my opinion, is nothing less than a ministry doing God’s work. They say that neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays the postal couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. I walk by the Center every morning and can tell you-all due respect, Post Office got nothin’ over the loyal volunteers I see in the pens and pools of the Marine Mammal Center each day.

After that, we walk across the soccer fields, where I usually stop and hit my knees, facing the rising sun as she’s just beginning to crest the Coastal Range, her pink fingers reaching skyward. It’s usually that time when I feel the breeze upon me, indeed wrapping me up in the totality of it all-the sea, the hills, the earth and sky-and I know I’m part of something bigger than myself, dwarfed, yet inexplicably intertwined and held and embraced by it all and I know, no matter how things roll, that it’s gonna be alright because it was meant to be. And about that time, I bend to touch the dewy or frosted grass, then rise to go on with a smile on my face.

At the end of the soccer fields, we make our way back up to Howe Drive and cross down to the beach and the mud flats, tide permitting. With no other dogs in sight, I let Jake and Max run free, all the way back to the Pier Drive, ravens still in tow, then up to the Battery Pt. Parking lot. Today, as I am periodically, I’m greeted there by two of the Jehovah’s Witness representatives, doing community outreach ministry and whose good cheer and intellectual discourse always brightens my day.

And from there, back home, to a place I have but yet to leave.

###

You battle, because nothing has changed since that evening in July, 2015 when you spoke at Relay For Life. You take each day as it comes, a blessing no matter what the wrapping. You’re grateful for this thing called cancer, because it has allowed you to see and feel how precious this life truly is. And on one of those days when some Mensan onc doc finally lucks out and gets that "terminal" thing right, someone out there can say, “He sure didn’t get cheated.”

###

Jon Alexander
Crescent City, CA.
Jon can be reached at jonalexanderlaw@yahoo.com

---

SHARE →