A dear friend of mine, Jeremy Geelan, a colleague from my
working days, the son of another colleague, Peter, who sold our books in
Europe, celebrated a significant milestone this month, the three year anniversary
of his radical surgery to deal with pancreatic cancer. From all signs it was a complete success and
Jeremy is now in full bloom as Chief Marketing Officer & Conference Chair
at KAAZING Corporation. He morphed into
all things Internet from his humble beginnings as an analog publisher, but true
to his nature even then he was looking to the future being founder and
publisher of the "21st Century Studies" series (back in the good ole'
20th century) and some of those I co-published in US (Jeremy at the time was in
the UK).
He confronted the lethal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer
head on and entrusted his Doctors in Denmark to perform Whipple surgery, not an
option for all forms of pancreatic cancer but, in his case (and probably Steve Jobs had he not pursued naturopathic
options), a hopeful means of addressing this dreaded disease. My father died of pancreatic cancer and I can
attest, it is among the most terrible ways to pass into nothingness.
This radical surgery is a nightmare and it is hard to
imagine what Jeremy had to endure, during, after (I recall he was on his back
for a very long period of time, trying to type in compromised positions to get
on with his work) and then the dreaded follow-up chemotherapy. As he describes the surgery: "The
Whipple procedure cost me the lion's share of my pancreas, all of my gall
bladder, a goodly portion of my stomach, and a portion too of my duodenum
(small intestine)." Yes, it is that
radical, but Jeremy has his life back.
Soon after his Dad died -- of cancer as well (he was a
mentor to me as I would like to think I've been to Jeremy), Jeremy presented me
with a bound edition of the 1979 edition of Logophile,
The Cambridge University Journal of Words and Language of which (naturally)
Jeremy was the editor. It is inscribed
"To Bob from Jeremy 18 iii 1993.
Like books "words ought to be a little wild, for they are the
assault of thoughts upon the unthinking" (John Maynard Keynes). This day in loving memory of Dad, I'd like to
present you with a volume of wildness.
It's where it all (for me) began -- in a garret undergraduate room at
Cambridge belonging to an Open Exhibitioner in English called Jeremy Geelan."
From there Jeremy threw the gauntlet down and never
looked back -- in spite of such health adversity.
I commend any reader to visit Jeremy's blog. He doesn't post there very often, although he
Twitters regularly. But in response to his latest post, I responded,
Dear Jeremy,
I don't know what
led me to your blog today. Call it an instinct. You don't post here very often,
but I felt I ought to visit, and there it was, your fairly recent post.
Brilliant. True. Very Jeremy. But ever since I've known you -- how many years,
at least thirty? -- you've always been "smart." But you were
"bucking bronco smart" -- undisciplined, your mind wondering
everywhere. I would say your terrible, but successful bout with pancreatic
cancer has made you more focused. You are now more smart in a focused way,
about your career, and about the things that matter in life. I feel privileged
to have known you so long, and to say congratulations on passing the third year
landmark of your successful surgery. You did it bravely, trusting your doctors,
and embracing your loved ones and your friends and colleagues. On to the
future! Yours, Bob
I am copying his complete post below:
What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Smarter
In ten days' time
it will be three years to the day since I was successfully operated on for
pancreatic cancer. Some of you reading
this may be unaware of the prior story; worry not, this is not a post about
cancer. It is, though, a post about survival.
There's a saying
about how 'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger' that many undergoing
chemo- and/or radiation therapy often hear, or even use themselves, to make
light of the unpleasantness of the process and to remind themselves that there
is a flip side to the nastiness of the "planned poisoning" that they
are enduring: it may extend their lives and is therefore “better than the
alternative” (as in, death).
My purpled Twitter avatar, to mark World
Cancer Day last month (Feb 4)
But recently a
colleague of mine in the world of the Internet, Guy Kawasaki, hit upon a
headline - I have yet to check whether it was Guy's own or whether he was
passing on something from elsewhere - that, for me, is much more pregnant with
meaning and possibility, in terms of viewing cancer in the first place, and chemotherapy/radiation
treatment in the second, as a potential inflexion point for anyone who survives
one or both:
What
Doesn't Kill You Makes You Smarter
This, for me, is
the much more honest and uplifting statement. Do I feel stronger, having dodged
the bullet - thanks to radical Whipple surgery - of the deadliest of all the
cancers? Not really. If I could restore my strength to pre-diagnosis levels or
above I'd be happy as a clam; realistically speaking, it is not especially
likely, as there remain one or two challenges associated with Whipple surgery
which tend to linger no matter how hard one tries - a surgically rearranged
digestive system is plain not as effective as one that's been left intact.
On the other hand,
do I feel smarter? Most emphatically, yes. The things that addressing and
overcoming adversity teaches you - about yourself, about those who love you and
are loved by you, about your professional colleagues both direct and indirect,
about total strangers and/or long-lost friends; about nutrition, about the
Internet, about the healing power of music and above all of love, about
cognitive mysteries such as "chemo brain" and the reassurances
increasingly offered by brain science; about physical capacity, about mental
agility, about emotion, about faith…
In truth there
isn't a single aspect of the human condition about which you do not, on being
confronted with an early departure from the game of life, end up a tad smarter
if on the contrary you have the good fortune to survive.
"Survival"
and "survivor" remain the metaphors of choice when dealing with
people like me but, speaking here only for myself, I am not sure how useful
those words are. We are *all* survivors, after all; we all survive, daily,
onslaughts of inconsiderateness or even plain cruelty, of injustice either
direct or indirect, of disappointment and/or even despair. We all survive week
in, week out the challenges of work and play, of life and love, of learning and
of teaching, and of the eternal search for meaning in which we are all, to
greater or lesser extents of awareness, engaged.
So the human being
who "survives" cancer, of whatever variety, is no different from one
who survives any other of life's curve-balls: bereavement, for example, or
financial ruin. There is a commonality, and it is that of the bounceback or
comeback. We humans are resilient. We have mastered endurance. We are *all*
survivors. Of something. Of life itself, perhaps.
But the Kawasaki
headline offers a more nuanced perspective.
Just as travel
broadens the mind, or university, so pancreatic cancer it turns out is a hugely
enriching life-phase that does, no doubt about it, leave you smarter. That it
might just as easily have left you dead is not I think the point; many things
kill us, from traffic accidents to natural disasters. But how many things
actually make us smarter? We learn about humility - that is a given when quite
literally your life (in the form of your innards) is for multiple hours in the
hands of a surgeon. We learn about the irrefutable power of positivity. We
learn about the boundaries of medicine and the central role of self-healing. We
learn about the perils of certainty, and the corresponding importance of
flexibility and agile modification of behavior and/or treatment. We learn about
the often neglected importance of hydration. We learn about what truly makes
us, and those around us, tick.
Now don't get me
wrong. There are other ways to become wiser in this world, all of them less
painful, less intrusive, and less detrimental and disruptive to the routine of
yourself and your family. But that does not detract from this one, enduring
truth, and I can vouch for it first-hand: What Doesn't Kill You - really, truly
madly, deeply...take it from me - Leaves You Smarter.
Indeed, very Jeremy.
