Like most of my 42-year old peers, I spend a lot of time talking about my family (three boys under nine--yikes!) and my job.  A story that almost never crosses my lips anymore is how I was diagnosed with cancer fifteen years ago this February.

It started, as many things do in the lives of young men, with a beer.  I had a sharp pain in my lower back, just above my waist on the right side.  "My dad has the occasional kidney stone," I thought.  It went away with some tylenol, but would return repeatedly for the next several months.  I lost a couple of pounds, and didn't have my normal appetite.  The first time I went to the doctor for the back pain, he sent me home with a book of exercises and a prescription for muscle relaxers.  

At the time, I was living pretty rough.  We had no money; I was playing in a great, fun, loud, hard-drinking rock band.  We were driving hundreds of miles every week.  We slept on uncomfortable sofas and college apartment floors.  I was lifting heavy equipment into weird clubs, eating gas station food, staying up late, avoiding the sun and the fresh air (remember bars and nightclubs before all the anti-smoking laws?).  But I gradually realized there was something else going on--something very wrong.  In quick succession, I noticed a lump above my left collarbone, developed a fever and cold I couldn't shake, and the pain in my back had me hobbling around using a golf club like a cane.  The craziest thing was waking up in a sudden, full-body sweat as though I had lifted weights in a sauna, the infamous "night sweat."  It was so bad I had to shower to cool off, and it was happening a couple times every night.

So I went back to my doctor.  He did a blood test, a chest X-ray, and then started scaring the crap out of me.  He asked if I used intravenous drugs, had unprotected sex, and wondered aloud why a young person like me would have a wild infection in my lungs.  And he sent me directly to the hospital; it was all I could do to get him to let me go home and pick up some clothes.  It was a Thursday night and my future wife was leaving town for a bridal shower.  I had more tests, and the next morning a new doctor came around to "give it to me straight."  Without family or friends present, she said I had "leukemia, lymphoma, or HIV," all of which were outpatient things, so "go home--enjoy the weekend."   

Cindy didn't make that shower, mom was directly to the rescue with the magic homemade soup, and my friends rallied.  One nailed the eventual diagnosis (Hodgkin's Lymphoma) by remembering the fairly recent retirement/return of Mario Lemieux.  A fellow musician brought me more books and magazines than one person could possibly read.  A buddy from Mobile took me for the best steak of my life.  But I felt very, very alone.  I was seriously ill, and had an uncertain future.  

You probably know the rest of the story.  In February 1999, my lymph nodes were so enlarged they had crushed some of my vertebrae, leaving me barely able to walk.  I knew of no one with a similar condition, and without the support of dozens of people could never have made it through eight months of chemotherapy.  Today, I've been a husband and teacher for more than a decade, with something like 1500 former students and the aforementioned three boys keeping my mind and body active.