Free EBook Samples: Free ebook sample of "On Both Sides of the Diagnosis: A Survival Guide for Children and Adults by a Childhood Cancer Survivor Who Became a Doctor" by Terry O. Scott (powered by Smashwords)

Death crept closely to me when at fifteen years old I was diagnosed with leukemia, a form of cancer. Within a few days, a priest came to my room at Children’s Hospital of Michigan, in Detroit, to administer my last rites: prayers said to the dying and the dead. However, I would “not go gentle into that good night” (Thomas 128). I am now a physician, and in this book I will tell you how I rose from my deathbed to capture my dreams, and how my experiences can help you overcome any hardships that you face in life.

Before getting diagnosed, I had been sick for several weeks, and no one knew exactly what was wrong with me. By the time that I finally went to the hospital, the cancer was in a very advanced state. Doctors had to give me high doses of chemotherapy—a treatment with chemicals so toxic that they cause a person to lose their appetite, much of their body weight, most of their energy, and all of their hair. Because chemotherapy (or chemo for short) is harmful to patients’ entire bodies, in addition to their cancer cells, it worsened my overall health. I was once a carefree and ambitious high school athlete, yet after one week of treatment I was still very ill and at risk of dying. The priest returned to administer my last rites for a second time, while my loving mother, Gloria, cried at my bedside. As the days went on, I fought hard against the cancer. I held on tightly and dearly to life. I refused to die.

II: What is Cancer?

Cancer is a life-threatening illness, which affects millions of us. Simply put, cancer is a disease that occurs when some of a person’s cells genetically change and begin to multiply out of proportion to normal cells. These cancer cells steal the resources that are meant for the rest of the body. Because cancer cells are the person’s own cells, cancer is initially hard to detect, typically difficult for a person’s body to fight, and very complicated to treat medically. Also, as stated earlier, cancer cells are part of a person’s body, so to kill cancer cells is oftentimes to greatly harm the person too.

Whether directly or indirectly, cancer touches the lives of about one in every four people in the world! If you live to be at least seventy-five years old, the chances are one in three that you will have had cancer yourself. However, how you react to it helps reveal and shape the person you are. Cancer also helps reveal and shape the ones who love you. Most importantly, it can help prioritize and create the memories you cherish and the life you lead.

III: More Things That Cancer and Its Treatment Can Do to You

I fought tooth and nail for my life throughout my first month of chemo, and eventually the cancer in my body largely subsided (this is called remission). Then, my doctors allowed me to return to my home in Livonia, a middle-class suburb of Detroit, Michigan. This made me extremely happy, yet I soon became gravely upset when I had to relearn how to use my muscles just to walk around the house. Although chemo killed much of the cancer inside of me, the chemo had been breaking down the rest of my body too. In a way, cancer had reduced me back to a baby—a bald baby.

After being home for a few days, I went to church. Five weeks earlier, before I began feeling sick, I bounced around like a typical vibrant student athlete at Detroit Catholic Central High School. But now, on an emotional day in church, I staggered into the restroom in order to cool my head in the sink. This particular May morning had grown more hot and humid than someone in my condition could bear. I took off the baseball hat that I had been wearing to conceal my head, which was recently made bald by chemotherapy. Under a cool stream of water, I rinsed my head and then patted it dry with paper towel, while I tried to collect myself. Witnessing this, a teenage boy who had just come out of one of the restroom stalls looked with disgust at me and said, “What kind of person does that to their hair to where they have to hide it with a hat in church?”

I answered, “I’m sick.”

"Yeah, sick in the head,” the kid scoffed as he walked out of the restroom.

This brought me to tears. Five weeks ago, I had been training during the off-season for my school’s cross country and basketball teams. I was striving to be a straight-A student. A promising life seemed to be before me. Yet, here I stood in my church restroom, a defoliated, skinny, and fragile teen, fighting for my life with every ounce of my energy, while being insulted by my peers.

That moment spent crying in the restroom of my church ended a period of denial for me. You see, even during that entire month in the hospital, I had not realized just how terribly sick I was. On some level, I knew it, but I wouldn’t let myself believe how sick I was. My brain was doing this on purpose as a self-defense mechanism. However, while crying in the restroom at church, things became clear. The sickness became real in my mind. I was greatly saddened, distraught, and depressed by this realization.

As a cancer patient, it is normal to use denial to protect yourself, and it is normal for the depressing realities of the situation to catch up with you eventually, so let it be.

IV: Things That Friends Can Do for You

Another week later, at my house in Livonia, I invited over my two best friends—Dave and T—along with Dave’s brother Steve. I told them the story of how deeply hurt I had been by the rude kid in the church restroom. In no time flat, Dave, Steve, and T took turns shaving off T’s long, skateboarder-style hair with a set of clippers. I couldn’t believe it!

“Let me deal with the rude comments now,” T confidently proclaimed.

“Why?” I asked, amazed by T’s brashness.

“It’s hot on the baseball diamond. No better time to be bald than baseball season,” T simply responded as if the matter required no further explanation.

V: Things That Cancer Can Do for You

It takes the darkest events in one’s life to define the greatest depths of their character. How one responds to their friends and family members in crisis, they will remember on their deathbeds; on their deathbeds families and friends will remember each other. I know because it happened to me. I made it through the hardest of times to become a pediatrician—a doctor for children.

This book reflects many events in my life. It is a story about living, and it contains some of life’s lessons for adults and children alike. I, Dr. Andrew J. Dettore, had leukemia. I survived it, and I want to help patients, their families, their friends, and even their doctors to better understand cancer, other hardships, and how to survive them together. Furthermore, I would not be in this position if I had not had cancer. It was, in a way, a great gift.

VI: More about Friendship and Support

T and I have been friends since early childhood. In fact, we were friends even before I turned two years old, which was before he turned one. Before us, our fathers had grown up together as close friends, so T and I naturally followed suit. We lived twenty-five miles apart, so we didn’t get to see each other all of the time. Regardless, whenever we did hang out, within seconds, it was as if we had just seen each other the day before. We always clicked right back into place together. That’s how well we knew each other.

For ten days, at the end of every summer, we went with our families to a huge campground called Camp Dearborn. These were epic times in our childhoods. We went through many silly trends and phases together, all of which to us are now memories etched in stone. We went on double dates and to dances with girls together. We shared music. We played sports together. All told, we played every sport together, and when that didn’t satisfy us, we invented our own sports. We played arena-style football in the snow, rain, frozen rain, and the blistering sun, several years before the creation of the Arena Football League. The AFL still has some explaining to do to us about where they got their idea. We invented a hybrid form of basketball and baseball nearly a decade before the movie Baseketball came out. Matt Stone and Trey Parker have some explaining to do also. We played snow basketball, water basketball (not in a pool, but with a garden hose). We even played entire basketball games while sitting down. We bowled and made up our own more difficult scoring system. Notably, we had and always will have fun in every situation. Most importantly, we had fun even through the toughest trials in life; we had fun together when I had cancer.

Even at very young ages, we discussed politics, religion, philosophy and life in general. During our teen years, we also wrote poetry and rap songs with each other. These were our first passionate experiences as writers.

We played an 8-bit football video game called Tecmo Super Bowl so much that one might have thought we planned to grow up and land careers as professional Tecmo Super Bowl players. Yes, I said “8-bit.” We had fierce Tecmo rivalries with the sumo-D of the Pittsburgh Steelers versus the high-flying Philadelphia Eagles. T and I have always complemented one another like equal opposites. I played the old school philosophies: move slowly, play for field position, and defense wins championships. T liked the new era: fast-paced, the most excitement on two feet, a good offense inspires awe. Although, lucky for him, the Eagles had quite a formidable defense too. Thus, our battles were legendary. Well, legendary to us anyway, but that was all that mattered; silly little things like that were part of what helped me win my battle with cancer.

T and I remain the best of friends to this day. T stood up as the best man in my wedding. He later became the godfather of my daughter, Lilly, and he helped me write this book. Most vitally, T stood as one of my strongest friends during my darkest hours. At times, he helped bring me back from the dark side of the moon, and at other times, he helped pull me up from the darkest abyss.

VII: Role Models

Many people become role models simply because they measure life not by how many things they have, and not by how many people know their names, but instead by how positively they affect others around them. Also, I believe that most of us look up to people who project the knowledge that no matter what roads we take our responses to the most difficult times are the most critical in shaping the people we are and how we affect others.

Take, for example, the lives of some of my many role models: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Oprah Winfrey; and Pat Tillman. MLK helped raise the social standing of an entire group of seemingly second-class citizens. To do so, he had to remain strong in the face of great adversity and multitudes of naysayers. Oprah came from a background of poverty, dysfunction, and oppression, yet she made a great success out of her life and has used it to help many people in need. Pat Tillman left an American dream job as a player in the National Football League to join the United States Army because he wanted to protect his country and his fellow citizens.

My friend T, at fourteen years old, saw me, his best friend, get diagnosed with cancer. With that, he saw our teenage illusions of invincibility get shattered into dust. Fear, anxiety, and confusion struck at T’s heart. We used to think we had just started out on this long and glorious trip called life, but then all of a sudden it seemed short and brutal. However, T responded in a way that not many forty-five-year-old adults even do. T confronted these terrible times and stood strongly by my side as a friend. He hid his fear when with me, but talked about it at home with his parents, his brothers and his sister. He visited whenever I needed him, smiled a lot, played tons of sports and games with me, had as much fun as possible, and then waited until he got back home to cry.

Don’t get me wrong; you don’t have to appear to be an unshaken friend or family member in these situations. Dave Ambroziak, whom I mentioned earlier, is equally my best friend, and the godfather to my son, Hudson. Dave also stood with me during these dark times, but in a very different way than T. I still vividly remember my first conversation with Dave after I was diagnosed with cancer.

"You are my best friend,” Dave reassured me, “I want to be there for you, but I’m scared. I’ve cried, and I don’t know how to be or act around you. I will always be here to do whatever you need, but I need you to guide me."

That came from one of the strongest and toughest guys—by far—that I knew. He was highly competitive, and a roughhousing athlete. One day, he would become one of the kings of a college fraternity, able to out-drink a three-hundred-pound man. Moreover, during our most troubling times, he admitted his weaknesses, and stood strongly beside me as a friend.

Many people feel as Dave did. They don’t know how to act at first when faced with such a tragedy. Yet, Dave had the courage and insight to ask me about it. Too many other people would have run and hid from the problem instead, to protect themselves and their feelings of invincibility; however, that is a mistake because these vulnerable times, more than any others, shape and reveal us simultaneously.

Fortunately, many of my friends and family members had heartfelt religious, spiritual, and/or philosophical groundings, which allowed them to see beyond themselves. For instance, T and Dave chose to put aside their comfortable and invincible teenage years for a time, and they went to battle with me in any way they could.

Think again of Pat Tillman, who had already become a hero to many while playing football. He was also making big bucks and living a made life. Yet, he saw the infamous attacks on September 11, 2001, and the deaths of many Americans, and he felt his life had a greater purpose than his own comforts. Therefore, he left the NFL and became an Army Ranger. He was eventually killed in action in Afghanistan. Few people make that kind of sacrifice. Many of us don’t even understand it. However, some great people might not necessarily join the army, but might simply see a friend or loved one get diagnosed with cancer and stand there waiting to help, waiting to go to battle for them. Giving that kind of sacrifice and support in the face of adversity says something great about a person’s true nature. It says something more than how famous or rich a person is, or how many competitions they have won. During your last moments on Earth, you will remember your family and friends. You will remember how you treated them, and how they treated you. You will remember love.

I lived this firsthand, and I received a second chance to share my experiences with cancer patients, their families, their friends, and others. My story tells how a person can get through the darkest and coldest of times to find the bright future of spring. This story tells how to live without just going through the motions. This book describes some positive ways to respond to cancer, and what to expect if this happens to your friends, your family, or yourself.

***

Chapter 2: D-Day:

Diagnosis Day

I: A Date which Will Live in Infamy

April 9th, 1990—a date which will live in infamy to me—I learned that cancer suddenly and deliberately attacked my ability to function normally. It was a surprise attack.

I’ve used war references here because this day began the battle for my life. Since then, every year on April 9th, I feel depressed, nauseated, and stunned by a massive blow to the chest.

I delivered newspapers back in early 1990. In fair to good weather, I pulled the papers around my neighborhood sidewalks in a little red wagon, and I carried the papers one at a time up to my customers’ front doorsteps. It was a piece of cake. I was in very good shape back then. Heck, I could run five miles with relative ease; however, for weeks I had been growing more and more ill. By Saturday, April 7th, 1990, I had to lie down on my customers’ lawns for fifteen minutes between every other house on my paper route in order to catch my breath. My Saturday route normally took me forty minutes to complete. Yet, on this day, it took me five hours.

I knew that I felt terrible. My mom knew something terrible had stricken me. My doctor had already seen me four times in the past three weeks, yet none of us knew just how terrible my illness was. At first, my doctor said I had the flu, then mono, and then the measles. But, I had nosebleeds that lasted for hours. I had trouble catching my breath after walking to the bathroom. All over my body, I had come down with a rash of tiny red dots. I now know these red dots as petechiae. They are caused by very tiny broken blood vessels.

That Saturday, my mom took me to see a new doctor at Detroit Medical Center (DMC) Urgent Care. There, I met Dr. Sharon Tice, an angel put on Earth to do God’s work. The moment Dr. Tice laid eyes on me, she pulled my mom aside and said, “Your son has leukemia, a cancer of the bone marrow, which spreads to the blood and then to the rest of the body, and we need to get him to Detroit Children’s Hospital as soon as possible.” The good doctor hadn’t even done a single test on me, and here I had been seeing another physician for weeks and had many tests and misdiagnoses. I now know that this often happens to children who eventually get diagnosed with cancer. After all, common symptoms of illness do not often get explained by rare diseases such as childhood leukemia. However, Dr. Tice had experience with cancer. Over a ten-year span, God had blessed her by bringing her into contact with three different families, in each of which a member had cancer. Yes, I said “blessed” because those families have all become like parts of her extended family. Strangely enough, a horrible thing like cancer can actually bring people much goodness, such as lifelong friends and mentors.

Eventually, Dr. Tice drew some of my blood, tested it and confirmed her suspicions about me. Then, she told me that I had leukemia.

II: What Is Leukemia?

Doctors classify leukemia as a cancer of the bone marrow, a tissue in the center of bones that produces blood cells. Blood mainly consists of microscopic red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, and plasma. Leukemia causes problems with blood cell production, such as causing a person’s white blood cells to multiply out of control. White blood cells that multiply out of control are bad: They are cancerous. Normal white blood cells travel around the body through the bloodstream and help the body fight infectious diseases and foreign bodies. Thus, you need the right amount of normal white blood cells to keep healthy: too few normal white blood cells and you cannot successfully fight off any bad things in your body, too many bad white blood cells that are multiplying out of control and they will attack everything in your body.

III: Denial Day

At the time I was diagnosed, I had only ever heard of one person in the history of time who had cancer. You might have heard of him: Brian Piccolo. He was a professional football player. A movie, named Brian’s Song, was made about his fight with cancer. The film, in part, shows the great support Brian received from Gale Sayers, Brian’s friend and teammate with the Chicago Bears. T is my Gale Sayers.

I knew that Brian died from his cancer, so when Dr. Tice told me that I had cancer, my heart sunk to the floor. I thought she had either lied to me or she needed to go back to medical school and do some more studying. I thought: I am a teenage athlete, a good student, and I happen to like going to church! Surely, this lady is looking at somebody else’s test results.

D-day, in military terms, means the day an operation begins. We cancer patients, however, often know D-day as diagnosis day, denial day, or deliver-me-anywhere-else-but-here day. Nothing you can do will prepare you for this day—the day the floor drops out from under you, and everything in your whole world changes.

Purchase this book or download sample versions for your ebook reader.
(Pages 1-12 show above.)