Cancer: A Thief in the Night

The Complete Cancer Survival Guide: Everything You Must Know and Where to Go for State-of-the-Art Treatment of the 25 Most Common Forms of Cancer
by Peter Teeley, Philip Bashe

When you are fighting for your life, you need to know your enemy and have the most effective weapons available. The Complete Cancer Survival Guide provides a full arsenal of absolutely essential information for anyone diagnosed with cancer.

Drawing on the advice and information provided by specialists at dozens of major cancer centers in the United States, this book provides the most up-to-date, cutting-edge information available on how each of the twenty-five most common forms of cancer is diagnosed and staged, what the most advanced treatments are, and where to go to get the best possible care.

Vetted by doctors and specialists, this updated edition provides new information superior to anything you'll find on the internet. Complete with the newest cancer therapies and referrals to trustworthy organizations and agencies offering support and services for people with cancer, it remains the single best resource for empowering patients and their families.

Cancer is a disease that takes years to develop, yet it can plunge you and your family into upheaval the instant it takes the doctor to deliver the news no one wants to hear: "What we've found is a malignancy."

At the time my cancer was discovered in 1991, I'd never been seriously ill in my life. By then I was six years removed from daily politics, busy running my own consulting firm in Washington. I'd entered government life back in 1970 as press secretary to the assistant U.S. Senate minority leader, Robert Griffin of Michigan, my home state. I went on to serve in the same capacity for Jacob Javits, helping to reelect him to his fourth and final term as senior U.S. senator from New York.

In 1976, I took a leave of absence from Senator Javits's office to handle press duties for President Gerald Ford's campaign committee. Coming on the heels of the Watergate scandal, the election was a debacle for the Republicans. Jimmy Carter edged out Ford for the White House, and the Democrats gained seats in both the House and the Senate. Not long afterward, I became communications director and chief spokesman for the Republican National Committee as the party set about rebuilding itself.

I'd been hooked by the excitement of a presidential race, though, and had the urge to do it again. To help shape a winning campaign and be part of moving the country in a direction you believe will benefit the American people is a dream that too few ever experience, especially someone like me--an immigrant who as a boy came to the United States from England on a battered troop-carrier ship following World War II.

George Bush, the former congressman from Texas, United Nations ambassador, and director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was gearing up for a presidential run in 1980. He was widely respected, but certainly considered a dark-horse candidate. Although I didn't know him well on a personal level, I'd admired him as a public official. So I was delighted to become his press secretary in 1979. The association, which has lasted to this day, included his first term as vice president under Ronald Reagan.

In 1985, I decided to leave politics and launch my own business. As happens to many public servants, I was worn out from the eighteen-hour days and constant travel. It wasn't unusual for a foreign trip with the vice president to log twenty-five or thirty thousand miles over the course of three weeks as we leapfrogged from Alaska to Japan to Korea to Singapore to Australia to New Zealand to China to Hawaii before finally returning home. And the fall political campaigns frequently resembled a cross-country derby. We used to wring a few extra hours out of the day by opening with an early-morning campaign stop on the East Coast. Then we'd work our way west through the time zones, with stops in, say, Chicago, Kansas City, and Denver, before winding up in Los Angeles by nightfall.

Another reason for my departing the White House: I was newly married, to Valerie Hodgson, a photographer. Our daughter Randall was born in 1987, and Adrienne arrived three years later, on my fiftieth birthday. My two daughters from my first marriage were already in their twenties: Susan, a speech pathologist in Livonia, Michigan, and Laura, then a communications major at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

In all, it was a happy time. I had a wonderful family, and a thriving business that allowed me to enjoy them. Then everything was abruptly put on hold.

The ordeal began innocently enough: I had a dull pain in my right side. The kids had been suffering from the stomach flu since Labor Day, so I figured I'd picked up what they had and didn't pay much attention to it. But after it persisted for a few days, I went to our family doctor for an examination. She poked around a bit, told me not to worry, and sent me home. When the pain didn't subside, I saw her partner, with the same result.

A few days later I went to the emergency room for X rays. My doctor read the films the next day and assured me she saw nothing unusual.

"But there's obviously something bothering you," she continued. "So I'm going to schedule you for an MRI scan tomorrow afternoon." No sooner did I return home from the imaging procedure than the phone rang. It was my doctor. "I want you to get over to the hospital," she said urgently, naming a nearby community hospital. "You've got an inflamed appendix, and you need to have it taken out now.

"I've checked you in. A surgeon will meet you there and remove it right away. I'll see you in the recovery room."

I tossed some clothes into an overnight bag, called a taxi, and went off to have an appendectomy, or so I thought.

The next thing I remembered was waking up in a darkened hospital room. Though still drowsy from the anesthesia, I knew it was late at night, perhaps 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. Three hospital attendants were hoisting me into a bed. I hurt badly all over and sensed something was seriously wrong. But I was too exhausted to pursue the thought. I just wanted to sleep.

At about 7:30 in the morning, the bedside phone rang, jarring me partially awake.

"Teeley! How ya feeling?"

It was George Bush calling.

"I really feel bad, I'm sorry, I can't talk now," I mumbled, and dropped the receiver back into the cradle.

I thought to myself, I just hung up on the president of the United States.

Later that morning the surgeon would explain how he'd been surprised to discover a tumor and had to remove a one-foot section of large intestine, along with the appendix and the lymph nodes for biopsy. If he was surprised, I was stunned beyond belief, especially when the pathology report came back a few days later noting that three nodes out of twenty-two had tested positive for cancer.

The entire situation grew stranger still. A week to the day after the first surgery, a Friday, I went under the knife again, this time to untangle the twisted colon. "It'll take twenty minutes," the surgeon informed me. "Don't worry about it." Apparently, he had failed to mention to the anesthesiologist that I'd been throwing up black bile all week. When it happened again during the operation, the fluid slipped into my lung, essentially drowning me and causing aspiration pneumonia to set in. Though it's no longer the threat it once was, pneumonia is still the fifth deadliest disease in the United States.

Valerie was allowed to see me briefly in the recovery room while the medical team prepared to move me up to the intensive-care unit. "It was awful," she says with a shudder. "Peter was unconscious and on a mechanical respirator. When they took him off the machine, he started convulsing because he wasn't getting any oxygen. I just kind of stood there, not knowing what to do." Then the doctors and nurses took their places on either side of the gurney. Looking much like a bobsled team, they hastily wheeled it and me out the doors and down the hall.

Despite massive doses of intravenous antibiotics, the pneumonia held fast. The night that the pulmonologist conceded that I might not survive, Valerie went to bed assuming she was about to become a thirty-five-year-old widow with two young children. She recalls thinking to herself, They'll call me if Peter dies. And if I wake up in the morning, and no one's called, I'll know he's still alive.

Finally, after seven days, I regained consciousness, once again to find her on the edge of my bed.

"You've been through a terrible time," she said, smiling, "but you made it. You're going to be all right." Because of the breathing tube down my throat, I couldn't talk.

"It's Friday," she added.

Friday, I thought. The day of the operation. "Friday a week later."

The Friday after that, October 11, I left the hospital, intent on never going back there again. Valerie had brought the girls. As an attendant wheeled me out to our van, it struck me how brisk the air was compared to the balmy Indian summer day when I'd checked in three weeks before. The trees had now taken on their fall colors. Other than taking a few walks around the neighborhood to rebuild my strength, I relaxed over the weekend, grateful to be home.

In the aftermath of a cancer diagnosis, many men and women go into shock, perhaps believing that there's been some mistake: The pathologist must have misinterpreted the slides. Or the radiologist is going to call any minute with the glorious news that what had appeared on X ray to be a cancerous lesion was nothing more than scar tissue.

It doesn't take long, though, for the reality to sink in, setting off a chain reaction of emotional distress, anxiety, depression, numbness, worry, and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. Your mind plays out the endless variables: What am I going to do next? If I need chemotherapy, is it going to make me sick? How are the kids going to handle this? Am I going to die? So I suppose you could say my reaction was atypical, for despite everything I'd just been through, I felt strangely confident that I was going to survive.

There is no script to follow in the wake of a cancer diagnosis. No timetable. No way you "should" feel. But in a common pattern, after a week or two most patients resolve to do what they can to fight their disease, and they begin to focus on pursuing a treatment plan. That in itself is bound to improve your outlook.

One lesson politics teaches you is not to dwell on such setbacks as an election defeat but to assess the situation and move ahead. The week following my discharge from the hospital, I got down to the task of researching where and how to have my cancer treated. I knew I'd have to make a lot of decisions, and quickly.

Chapter Two

The Basics: What Every Patient Needs
to Know About Cancer

Learning about your disease and being able to envision the battle raging inside your body is the first step to regaining a semblance of control. And brushing up on this chapter's basic biology and key medical terms will give you the confidence to assert yourself with doctors and to take part in the decisions that will shape your medical care.

The Multiple Personalities of Cancer

The first thing you learn about cancer is that it encompasses as many as two hundred related yet distinct diseases, which raises an important point: Inevitably, along the way, concerned friends and relatives will draw you aside to recount their or someone else's cancer experience. Or they'll relate fragments of some report about cancer treatment they caught on the evening news. Frankly, even most patients don't know the specifics about their medical care. We're not suggesting that you dismiss well-meaning advice out of hand: Just be selective when considering information from sources who aren't medical professionals. Ask questions and make sure that what's being said pertains to your medical situation.

"My father had cancer, and according to the doctor . . ."

Which type of cancer? Melanoma is cancer. Acute myeloid leukemia is cancer. The former is a solid tumor of the skin, calls for surgery, and generally carries a highly favorable prognosis if discovered early. The other is a notoriously virulent "liquid" malignancy of the blood and bone marrow for which chemotherapy and bone-marrow transplantation comprise the main arm of treatment.

"Why is your doctor saying you have to have a radical hysterectomy? My sister also had cervical cancer, and she didn't need an operation . . ."

What stage was the cancer? Meaning, how extensive was it? A tumor confined to the cervix and one that has infiltrated surrounding tissue require radically different approaches to treatment: in the first example, surgery alone--and possibly a minor procedure at that--versus radiation therapy with or without chemotherapy.

Knowing the type and stage doesn't necessarily complete the picture. Other factors add crucial elements that may determine the course of treatment: the family of cells that make up the tumor, the cancer's aggressiveness, and a patient's age and general health. An oncologist might recommend prostate surgery for an otherwise healthy fifty-five-year-old man whose cancer has not spread outside the gland. Given the identical tumor in a seventy-five-year-old diabetic also suffering from chronic heart disease, the most sensible strategy might be no therapy at all, since prostate cancer progresses slowly, and an elderly person with other medical problems might not be expected to withstand radiation, much less an operation.

Our point is this: You can't necessarily draw conclusions about treatment based on other people's experiences with the disease, not even when their medical situation seems very much like yours. With so much material to wade through, who needs to get sidetracked by information that's outdated, incomplete, or simply not applicable to your condition?

Excerpted from The Complete Revised and Updated Cancer Survival Guide by Peter Teeley and Philip Bashe Copyright © 2005 by Peter Teeley. Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Peter Teeley, who served as press secretary to Vice President George Bush, was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer in 1991, and attributes his recovery to the fact that he gained access to a state-of-the-art clinical trial at Georgetown University's Lombardi Cancer Center. He now lives in Washington, D.C.

Philip Bashe is the author of many books, including You Don't Have to Die: One Family's Guide to Surviving Childhood Cancer and Cancer Free: The Comprehensive Prevention Program. He lives in Baldwin, Long Island.