Very slowly, the differences between being a survivor and victim became clear, and I started making a list. I’m sure every survivor can add one or two more. This is just a start.
• Being a victim is a state of body. Being a survivor is a state of mind.
4
ON
FAITH
I have found that four faiths are crucial to recovery from serious illness: faith in oneself, one’s doctor, one’s treatment, and one’s spiritual faith.
Bernie S. Siegel, M.D.
Going for the Prize
It takes a lot to get my mind off golf. Like most members of the Professional Golfers’ Association, I eat, sleep and drink the game. That’s the life of a pro. Or at least that’s what I used to think.
Dr. Jobe called me unexpectedly on Friday evening after the second round of the 1993 PGA Championship at Inverness Club outside Toledo, Ohio. The PGA is a big tournament, one of the four “majors” (along with the Masters and the U.S. and British Opens).
At the time, I had the dubious distinction of being known as the best player in the world never to win a major. Sure, I had come a long way from salad days struggling to make the qualifying cut at the PGA “tour school.” Back at the 1987 British Open, I had held the lead all week on the misty, windswept fairways of Muirfield in Scotland, only to suffer a devastating loss to Nick Faldo on the last hole. Though I won a lot of other tournaments, a major title still eluded me.
At age 33, I was at the top of my game and feeling pretty invincible. I was in good shape going into the third round at Inverness, just a couple of shots off the pace behind Greg “the Shark” Norman, an Australian. My family was in Ohio with me, which made golfing even more of a pleasure. It was a heady feeling competing for a $300,000 purse in front of a global TV audience. The pressure was definitely on. That’s why it was strange that Dr. Jobe would call me at my hotel. My wife, Toni, handed me the receiver with a quizzical look and hushed the kids.
I had been having trouble again with nagging pain in my right shoulder. Dr. Jobe, one of the premier sports physicians in the world, had operated on my shoulder in 1991, and I had recently seen him in Los Angeles about the recurring soreness. Now he got right to the point: the X rays he had taken concerned him. “Paul, I want you back in Los Angeles for a biopsy as soon as possible.” Biopsy? I thought. Is he crazy? I’m in contention here. I have the rest of the tour to finish and the Ryder Cup. I can’t take time off now!
Dr. Jobe finally relented and agreed that the biopsy could wait until later in the fall, when I would be in California for a tournament. Until then I would survive on anti-inflammatories, aspirin and prayer. Tendinitis, I told myself, and banished it from my mind.
I went out the next day, a boiling hot Saturday, and shot a solid 68 to climb one stroke behind Norman. At the end of Sunday’s final 18 holes, I was in a tie with the Shark for the Wanamaker Trophy. Then, on the second hole of sudden-death play, Greg missed a tricky putt for par and I made mine to become the PGA champ. I had my title! Not one to take things mildly, I leapt into the air. Next I gave thanks to the Lord, which is what I had always promised to do when I won a major. With Toni and our daughters, Sarah Jean, seven, and Josie, four, at my side, I went to raise the regal trophy high for all to see. Suddenly a sharp pain sliced through my right shoulder. It was all I could do to lift the silver cup.
I was determined not to let the pain lessen the thrill of victory or undermine my plans. I went to England and played with the United States team against the Europeans for the 1993 Ryder Cup, which we retained that year. But the pain never went away. By late November, when I finally saw Dr. Jobe in Los Angeles, I was barely able to operate the stick shift in my car. In fact, sometimes I drove and depressed the clutch while Toni shifted gears. As I sat on the table in Dr. Jobe’s examining room that Monday morning at Centinela Hospital, showing him the spot on my shoulder that was now red-hot to the touch, he was irritated that he let me talk him out of doing a biopsy earlier. He took a pen and gently drew a line across the hot spot. “I’m going to make the incision right here,” he said thoughtfully. “Don’t shower that line off tomorrow morning.”
As I dressed, for the first time I felt a stab of fear. Come on, Zinger, I reproached myself. It’s probably nothing. That’s what I told Toni that night back at the hotel while we talked quietly in our room and the kids went to dinner with Mildred, their sitter. What was the worst it could be? A stress fracture or some infection? I would be back on the course in no time. The next morning Dr. Jobe scraped out about a capful of tissue and bone for testing. We waited a few days for the results.
That week—a week of worry and prayer for Toni and me—I thought a lot about our life together and how intertwined with golf it was. We married in our home state of Florida in January of 1982 as soon as I got my tour card, and Toni was a golf wife from the start. In those hard, early years Toni and I traveled the country in an old camper, chasing the tournaments. In the off-season back in Florida, she worked as a bookkeeper while I practiced, practiced, practiced. It might be my name up there on the leader board when I’m playing well, but really, Toni’s should be there too. She’s been as much a part of my success as I have.
When Toni and I went back to see Dr. Jobe, I dispensed with the usual pleasantries. “How am I?” I blurted out.
He looked me right in the eye. “Paul, you have cancer.”
One simple word. Cancer. Impossible. It was a good thing I was sitting. Toni gripped my hand and I rocked back and forth in my chair, shaking my head. I had been worried about my career, not about dying. Suddenly everything changed. “Paul, if the cancer is still localized, then it is treatable.”
Something like a silent explosion overwhelmed me. “I need the restroom,” I gasped, rushing out the door and down the hall. Bent over in that tiny bathroom, I put my head in my hands. I thought about Toni and the girls, about our life. I thought about golf. Dear Lord, help me. I’m scared to death! Then I cried until I heard Toni knocking on the door, asking gently, “Paul, are you okay?”
After I pulled myself together, Dr. Jobe brought me in to see an oncologist, Dr. Lorne Feldman, who put me through a battery of tests to determine if the cancer had spread beyond my shoulder. Late in the day, Toni and I went back to our hotel to struggle through a weekend of waiting for the test results. As I played with the kids I thought about the PGA title, and what a cruel twist it would be if it turned out that I should have been in the hospital instead of competing with Greg Norman in the heat and humidity at Inverness.
We took Sarah Jean and Josie to a mall on Saturday to take our minds off our situation, but all the Christmas decorations going up just made me more anxious. Early Sunday morning a false fire alarm roused us from bed. Toni noticed a sign in the lobby announcing church services in one of the ballrooms. “Want to go?” she asked me.
Toni and I had become Christians back in the days when we were bouncing around the country in our old camper—happy, carefree, uncomplicated days, they seemed now. Sometimes it is when you have the least that you are most aware of how much the Lord provides. We always managed to put enough food in our mouths and gas in the camper. We took turns driving and reading aloud from the Bible.
Now Toni, Mildred, the kids and I slipped quietly into the back of the ballroom where services were being held by a local church whose regular facilities were under construction. The big room was full and smelled of cut flowers. That false alarm had not been so false after all. There was a fire in the air, a spiritual charge I felt throughout my body. I sensed I was face to face with God, and an excitement I hadn’t felt in years came over me. I knew that Christ wanted not just my cancer, or my golf, or my fears about my family, but all of it—my whole life, if only I would give it to him and recommit myself to faith. I need you now more than ever, Lord, I whispered silently.
That afternoon my parents flew in from Florida, and the next day we got the news from Dr. Feldman that as far as they could determine the cancer had not spread bey
ond the right scapula. I was immediately scheduled for six chemotherapy treatments, one every four weeks, administered right there in his office, starting that day. Between treatments I could return home to Florida.
That first chemo session was a doozy. I suffered intractable nausea and got so dehydrated that I had to be rushed back to the hospital for emergency treatment. But after a few days, Toni and I flew home. Coming home is always a relief to a professional athlete, the real reward at the end of the game. This time it was even more so.
Anyone who has seen me golf knows I am not a player who disguises his emotions. You don’t need the TV commentator to tell you if I am happy or upset with a shot. I’ll let you know. That’s me, not exactly Mr. Mellow. Yet the first few days home, I found myself spending hours in our backyard just looking at the flowers and the trees, or watching birds through binoculars. I was getting so mellow it was beginning to scare me! “Maybe the chemo went to my brain,” I told Toni, joking.
The phone rang regularly with well-wishers, including President Bush and even my PGA competitor Greg Norman. I found out that the Shark has a soft side.
Then one morning while I was getting ready for the day, something happened. I stood in my bedroom praying, wondering in the back of my mind what would happen if I didn’t get better. The sun was forcing its way through the blinds when suddenly, a powerful feeling swelled over me like a huge, gently rolling wave lifting my feet off the sand bottom of the sea. I stopped everything I was doing and experienced an incredible, peace-giving sensation. I knew that God was with me, and I felt absolutely assured that I would be okay. It wasn’t that God told me what would happen next or that the cancer would go away. I simply felt positive I was in his complete and loving care no matter what.
I am blessed to say that today, two years after my diagnosis, the cancer is gone. I’m back on the tour trying to shake the rust off my golf game. Dr. Jobe said it was probably a good thing I didn’t rush out to California right after the PGA title because at that time, the number of cancer cells in my body might not have been sufficient to show up on a biopsy. I guess in a way, my competitive drive saved me after all, but what keeps me going most these days is the chance to be an example for others who are struck by disease, to help them see that God is there for them no matter what. That’s all you need to know to get through anything in life. That is the real “major.”
Which is not to say, of course, that the next time I find myself in a playoff with the Shark you won’t be able to tell how I feel about a shot. I am the way God made me, and I don’t think the Lord is interested in tinkering with my golf game.
Paul Azinger
Say a Prayer
I was taking my usual morning walk when a garbage truck pulled up beside me. I thought the driver was going to ask for directions. Instead, he showed me a picture of a cute little five-year-old boy. “This is my grandson, Jeremiah,” he said. “He’s on a life-support system at a Phoenix hospital.” Thinking he would next ask for a contribution to his hospital bills, I reached for my wallet. But he wanted something more than money. He said, “I’m asking everybody I can to say a prayer for him. Would you say one for him, please?” I did. And my problems didn’t seem like much that day.
Bob Westenberg
On Faith
Pray to God, but row for shore.
Russian proverb
Phyllis, a patient who had an extensive pancreatic cancer that was no longer responding to treatment, went home to die. Several months later she returned to the office. One of my partners examined her. He opened the door of the examining room and called me: “Hey, Bernie, you’re interested in this stuff.”
I came in and he said, “Her cancer’s gone.”
“Phyllis,” I said, “tell them what happened.”
She said, “Oh, you know what happened.”
“I know that I know,” I said, “but I’d like the others to know.”
Phyllis replied, “I decided to live to be a hundred and leave my troubles to God.”
Peace of mind can heal anything. I believe faith is the essence, a simple solution, yet too hard for most people to practice.
To verify this I went to God (surgeons have that prerogative) and asked why I couldn’t hang a sign in my waiting room saying, “Leave your troubles to God, you don’t need me.” God said, “I’ll show you why. I’ll meet you at the hospital at 10 A.M. Saturday.” (God likes to play doctor.)
On Saturday he said, “Take me to your sickest patient.” I told him about a woman with cancer whose husband had run off with another woman. He said, “Good case,” and we went up to her room.
I said, “Ma’am, God is going to come in and tell you how to get well. I always introduce him so patients are not overwhelmed.”
She responded, “Oh, wonderful.”
God entered the room and said, “All you have to do is love, accept, forgive and choose to be happy.”
She looked him in the eye and said, “Have you met my husband yet?”
Most of us want God to change the external aspects of our lives so that we don’t have to change internally. We want to be exempt from the responsibility for our own happiness. We often find it easier to resent and suffer in the role of victim than to love, forgive, accept and find inner peace. As W. H. Auden has written,
We would rather be ruined than changed;
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
Yet, when we choose to love, healing energy is released in our bodies. Energy itself is loving and intelligent and available to all of us.
Now I felt I had a dilemma: If God’s love could cure people, I wondered, why should I remain a surgeon? So I returned to him and said, “God, you know one of my patients got well leaving her troubles to you. Why should I remain a surgeon? Why not just teach people to love?”
And God in his beautiful sweet, melodious voice said to me, “Bernie, render unto the surgeon what is the surgeon’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” (I find that God does that a lot—speaks in parables and leaves you totally confused.) Since then I’ve come to understand that God and I both have a role in getting people well.
Let me illustrate what I mean with an old story I’ve adapted.
A man with cancer is told by his primary physician he’ll be dead in an hour. He runs to the window, looks up at the sky, and says, “God, save me.” Out of the blue comes that wonderful melodious voice saying, “Don’t worry, my son. I will save you.” The man climbs back into bed, feeling reassured.
His physician calls me and I walk in and say, “If I operate in an hour, I can save you.”
“No thanks,” says the man, “God will save me.”
Then the oncologist, a radiation therapist and a nutritional therapist all tell him, “We can save you.”
“I don’t need you, God will save me,” is his reply to all of them.
In an hour the man dies. When he gets to heaven, he walks up to God and says, “What happened? You said you’d save me, and here I am dead.”
“You dumbbell. I did try to save you. I sent you a surgeon, an oncologist, a radiation therapist and a nutritional therapist.”
Bernie S. Siegel, M.D.
The Holy Water
Lola was a humor therapist at the time of her diagnosis, so she said her immediate reaction was to find the humor where possible and encourage her friends to do the same. One instance stayed with her.
“I’m Catholic, but go to church anonymously because I don’t want to get involved. I just like to go. Someone gave me some holy water from Lourdes back before the cancer, and I was in the habit of blessing my husband before he left for work. For fun, you know—‘Wait, you haven’t been blessed.’ Well, I ran out of water and wanted some and didn’t want to ask the priest. So I took my little bottle and filled it from the font after everyone left the church. I told my friend I felt bad about stealing holy water. Anyway, after my biopsy she said it was because
I got hold of some bad holy water, and when I woke up after surgery there was a big poinsettia from her and a juice jug of holy water. I still have some in my closet. It’s got algae growing on the bottom, but I can’t bear to get rid of it.”
Kathy LaTour
Great Expectations
Faith is to believe what we do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.
Saint Augustine
May 1st was supposed to be a day of happy excitement, the day I would bring my husband home to our little town in Arkansas from the big city hospital in Memphis. Instead, the doctor had unexpectedly scheduled Byzie for his fourth surgery in six months. Byzie came through it all right. But the uncertainty of his situation—an unfinished battle with cancer—kept me from feeling any relief. Now I sat in the intensive care waiting room. In two hours, I could spend 15 minutes with him.
My thoughts turned to our children many miles away, making do at home while I stayed with Byzie. I found myself remembering a bleak conversation with the two oldest girls after they’d heard the news of their father’s latest surgery.
“When one member of a family has cancer, it’s as if the whole family has it,” 16-year-old Kathey had said forlornly.
Karen, our 17-year-old, nodded sadly. “Now Dad won’t make it home in time for my graduation, will he?”
Karen was right. It was unlikely that Byzie would be home by May 10. And Kathey was right about the contagious effect of Byzie’s illness. Our four children, taking their cue from me, became more despondent each day. Kristen, six, clinged too tightly, cried too easily. Alan, nine, had nightmares.