How I Overcame Cancer by My Own Will

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We took the car on our way home, and Dorothy set about making light of things for me and laughing with me until the driver wondered at so much laughter. When we arrived we began to discuss the doctor's verdict, of which we had received the like from another doctor. And we discussed the future of the children—and my own future. Yes, I said my future, because I forgot that I had no future; the talk that had passed on the road made me forget the truth. I kept thinking that the doctors had made a mistake and that perhaps there was hope of a cure. Alongside this thought, I was thinking that the miracle I awaited might pass me by and I would die, and people would gather around me knowing how I had longed to live! And now, if no hope of life remained to me, was there not a lesson for my children in my death? But what lesson? So the thoughts circled about me without my finding anything clear about cancer. In sleep and in waking, in speech and in silence, the specter of cancer hung over me, toying with that life it had struck.

Then I entered the hospital to receive the radium treatment, and the nurses, the sisters, and Dorothy surrounded me with every kindness and care. Dorothy kept assuring me that the food was excellent, but I held back from it, because it was still 'hospital' food! And when visiting hours ended and my sister went away, I would feel a painful loneliness that wrung my very soul...

It was summertime, and yet I shivered with cold; I hesitated to ask for a cup of tea or some lukewarm water, and soon drowsiness overcame me, and I dozed off.

In the morning I found comfort in the fact that the operation was performed with such ease and speed. Two nurses came and took me into the operating room; the doctor came and gave me the anesthetic, and I no longer felt anything. I came to and found myself in my room, with a pain caused by the radium, so I made myself forget what was in me by reading. And here I felt something of hope stealing back to me. The outcome was in the hands of God, the doctor, and Madame Curie.

I suffered from the waiting—waiting for that dread hour, the hour of death; this spiritual pain was harder on me than any bodily pain that can befall a human being.

They tried on me the experiment of 'radon,' a kind of radium that gives off rays that enter the affected organ. I did not know whether it would cure, but I knew it had to be tried, so we tried it. From that time on I have been going to the laboratories for blood tests and treatment with X-rays.

And my body began to melt and waste away—little by little at first, then more and more, until nothing was left of me but skin covering bones.

My life fell into a single pattern on all days alike, and Dorothy arranged her time so as to accompany me every day for the treatment. I found no pleasure in walking, for I regarded it as merely setting one foot before the other until I reached the house. The moment I entered the house I would throw myself on my bed, because every limb of mine demanded rest, as though I were coming out of a battle, drained of strength.

Sometimes the pain would fade, and I could amuse myself by playing a few games and riddles with my little children around my bed.

I began to avoid the mirror, so as not to see my skeleton. I hated my clothes and found it hard to put them on each day. As for my hair and my nails, they looked worn and frayed, so I put powder on my face and my lips to hide the hideous sight I had become!

The medicines, the means, and the treatments at the doctor's ran out, and I felt the road looking longer and longer, and the bed calling to me with insistence as time drew on. I received fifty-six treatments of X-rays along with the radium and the vitamins, and my weight fell below ninety pounds after it had been 145; yet there remained in me some strength that carried me to Dr. 'Scott.' He advised me to enter the hospital to be given blood so that I might go forward; I raised my head and asked: What is the use of prolonging my life and my torment?

I left the hospital to spend Christmas with my children. I sat in my room contemplating all the houses we had lived in—and what remained of them within me.

I think that everyone who suffers from cancer tries to go back in memory to the first beginnings of the disease in him. How did this pain begin?

That was in 1944, on the farm, when I first felt the cancer. It began in the form of a pain in my side. Had I gone then to the doctor, he could have laid his hand on the place of the pain and rooted out the germ at the very start of its growth. But I am not sorry for that; at that time I would not have understood the philosophy of life, nor could I have borne the news, and the children might have gone as my victims—and perhaps I waited until this time to prove that I could live with cancer!

When Christ was asked who had sinned, the blind man or his parents, he answered: Neither he nor his parents, but that the works of the Lord might be shown forth in him!

On the evening of the feast I lay in my bed looking at the Christmas tree with the children gathered around it. I felt that this was the last time I would sit with my children at such a feast. I closed my eyelids that evening and thought: just as sleep is the little death that rests the body and renews the powers of the mind, so death will be the great sleep that rests the body and renews the powers of the soul. And I knew that even if death overtook me soon, the memory of this feast I would never forget, and its joys would not go for nothing.

I awoke in the morning wondering, asking myself how I was still alive! And every morning on which I woke was a new victory over death—nay, a light shining into the darkness of the despair in which I floundered.

After my nephew visited us with his bride—since I could not go to her—from that time I resolved to overcome all my pains and leave my bed, and I strove to appear at every party and banquet in the most splendid and beautiful of my clothes.

I wanted to keep the side of gloom and grief to myself and hide it from everyone, so that my image in everyone's memory might remain beautiful and companionable, undisfigured by pain, its freshness unveiled by despair.

And I went on with the treatment, again and again, with a new kind of radium: I swallowed half a bottle's quantity of the remedy and was injected with the other half. I found that this medicine was of no use, and I returned to the hospital and was given new blood, and for the first time I found myself strong and felt something within me driving me to move. Dorothy asked the doctor: is there in that any hope? The answer was: 'From the treatment there is no cure, and the end will be painful and hard.'

I persevered in rising and caring for my outward appearance. My sister 'Billie's' birthday coincided with the fourth anniversary of my being given blood, and I had not the strength of spirit to help me compose verses, as I had done on one of Billie's birthdays.

I rested for two months, then went back to the radium treatment. But its effect was like that of the times before, and the doctor was left helpless, with no means of cure remaining to him. There in his office I sat like the ghost of a person who does not know which way to turn. I had lost everything except life itself, and I was on the point of losing that. This time I went home not to suffer, but to live. The scent of the flowers entered my nostrils and the sound of the bees my ears, but nothing brought joy and gladness into my heart.

For on my last visit to the doctor I had lost my hope, and my hopes were shattered, and with them my nerves were shattered and my bodily strength collapsed.

Anyone looking at me would have believed that I suffered from a sickness of the spirit more than of the body. I took to reading various and numerous books of philosophers and fathers. In every book I found new wisdom, and my knowledge of the philosophy of life increased. And whenever I saw death looking out of my own eyes, I hastened to cover my face.

After much urging from 'Carol,' I began to accompany her on a stroll in the street to divert myself, and I hid my bodily and spiritual condition so as to show something of cheer. And I learned that I must fill myself with gladness and joy—there was no doing without a contented outward appearance.

The world is dark, and to be rid of the darkness we must enter through a painful door. There we find everything we need. When we face death, we face life along with it. We must triumph over fear and over the dread of death if we are to win life.

When winter returned, I began to feel life coming back to me; I would sit by the fire with Dorothy and draw up plans for the future, because I had begun to feel an improvement.

I called on the doctor for a visit, and he marveled to see life flowing from my face; but I learned afterward that the life was only outward, and that the plans I had drawn were illusions—death must surely come.

The second Christmas arrived, and I thanked the Lord that I was still among my family and my children, sharing with them the joy of the feast and the beauty of the carols of remembrance.

In my bed I was always waiting for someone to come to me and take my place, that I might go—that the soul might be carried, my soul that had wrestled with death and thrown it, into another body; but there was still some strength left in my body.

I close my story: to this very day I have not been cured of cancer, but I do not think that I shall die of it. The power of life in the body and the greatness of the soul are stronger than cancer; and the lesson I have learned is not to surrender or grow weak before the troubles and diseases of life. To venture is not the same as to conquer—but it is better than defeat.