“Don’t call it a comeback, I been here for years, I’m rockin’ my peers, puttin’ suckers in fear.” -LL Cool J
The “C-word.”
Inoperable. Stage Four.
Those are words that no one wants to hear come out of the mouth of a physician. Yet, there I was listening to my doctor say those exact words to me.
I sat stunned, and with almost a sense of detached curiosity, heard myself ask, “…how much time do you reckon I have left?” The words tumbled out as if I were only asking for a friend.
“Without treatment, six months, maybe…”
While every cancer patient’s experience is different and unique, normally, the first thing a person experiences when confronted with the diagnosis is disbelief and denial. However, in my case, the swellings on my neck, the open tumors in my mouth and throat causing me to spit up blood leaving behind a coppery aftertaste, were undeniable.
It was also an undeniable fact that the man I saw in the mirror looked gaunt and haggard from the sudden loss of about 15 pounds.
The cancer was real, and it wasn’t going to go away and set up shop somewhere else just because I wanted it to wreak havoc any place other than my body; it was an unwelcome squatter.
Daily readers of The Augusta Press are likely already aware that, over the past few weeks, my byline has been reduced to mainly archival stories that are still relevant, and now you know why.
While I had figured that something was bad wrong with my body for months, I foolishly tried to chalk the onset of pain up to being symptoms of the auto-immune disease that I have battled for years. I did not know that the vertigo and fatigue I was experiencing were the result of cancer invading my cells with all the force and speed of the Nazi invasion of Poland.
After denial, the next emotion cancer patients tend to feel boil up is anger. I was angry at myself for smoking cigarettes like a coal train at full speed whilst being blissfully ignorant or blatantly stupid to the fact that cancer runs in my family, and then kicking the can on down the road instead of going to see my doctor when the symptoms became clearer than red glitter paint on a white background.
I was angry with my wife for not prevailing upon me to seek treatment post haste, as if she has ever had any luck with my stubbornness in the past.
Mostly, I was angry with God as if He were at the helm when the vessel struck the ice. I wondered how God could let someone like Charles Manson live out his golden years enjoying three square meals a day but then allow a faithful servant, such as myself, to begin rotting away from the inside at a time when I should be entering the very prime chapters of my life. Where is the logic in that?
My bucket list had sprung a leak.
The realization surfaced that I would never live out my dream of traveling across the great Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2 and visiting England, Scotland, Germany and Romania. I wasn’t going to be around to witness the birth of any grandchildren, and that thought hit me as a particularly cruel blow.
The anger then cooled to the dull throb of fear. While I knew that The Augusta Press was not going to just cast me aside like yesterday’s spent news copy, the paper certainly could not afford to pay me to lay about listening to the ever-louder, monotonous ticking of the death clock overhead. Disability assistance only covers a fraction that earned income generates in the best of scenarios.
There was also the fear that my friends would begin to avoid me. After all, to acknowledge the seemingly imminent death of an intimate friend or even a social acquaintance requires that the person, at least on some level, acknowledge their own mortality in the process.
However, there was a greater, gnawing fear that bored itself into my inner core: Had I really been a faithful servant in this life?
In the eyes of my Lord, did I achieve my purpose and do so with a humble gait or would I ultimately stand before Him and be judged an arrogant, self-serving agitator who wallowed in the accolades bestowed to him by his peers on Earth? I suppose that is the great Superunknown question that we all feel at life’s most critical juncture, placing second only after that of birth, no matter the cause.
The feeling of futility begins to seep in as a supreme and keen understanding of fact surfaces that we humans, as individuals, our lives, are each merely the size of grains of sand lying on the bed of a vast, wide, almost endless river.
Futility is the absence of faith and embodies the psychological feeling that the universe does not care about us individually, our thoughts, our feelings, our achievements or our failures; it was here long before we joined the party, and it will remain long after we each have disappeared, much like ghostly figures withdrawing back into the fog at the climax of a B-horror movie.
It was with this mindset that I sat by candlelight, holding the little olive tree cross given to me by my warrior cancer survivor buddy Deke Copenhaver and reflected while Hurricane Helene’s winds roared just outside of my bedroom window.
Did the hurricane care if it killed anyone? Nope. Does cancer decide who it is going to kill? Nope. Both are destructive forces that only happen under the right set of given circumstances.
My thoughts then turned to the last sermon that my father, Tommy Hudson, delivered just one month before he succumbed to cancer in June of 1984. In his speech, he compared the spiritual characteristics of the Biblical King Saul versus that of King David.
According to my dad, Saul “freaked out” at any perceived adversity, and his spiritual weakness made him unable to allow his faith to act as a compass to comfort and guide him through times of stress or crisis; whereas David understood that feelings of fear and futility are mere perceptions of reality, not necessarily a reflection of reality itself.
Ships can only sink when their buoyancy is completely lost. When the crew gets to the point of feeling any further action is futile, they may allow unneeded ballast to remain on their vessel under the mistaken belief that despite the most noble of efforts moving forward, eventually, the ship will still sink anyway.
Saul raged about, mentally cutting himself with his own knife of perception. David, meanwhile, faced his adversity with calm stoicism and delighted himself by singing psalms in praise of his creator.
Did I want to be a Saul or a David?
Was I going to continue looking at the warm, plush, linen and pillow covered rectangle in my bedroom as a ‘death bed’ or return to thinking of my bed as I did in my youth: a launch pad to greet the daily rising of the sun.
In the past few years, my dear friends Deke Copenhaver and Debbie van Tuyll both faced the same challenge and both decided to be like David. Both of them beat cancer.
I have decided that I want to be like Deke and Debbie.
I have resolved not to look at myself simply as the pieces of the man I used to be.
It is not that I was the guy who stared down the local sheriff and asked him to his face in front of God, the mayor, the press corps and the public-at-large if he was competent enough to keep the public safe on any given night downtown. I am that guy.
When the next seven weeks’ worth of radiation and chemotherapy are over, I have decided to book passage on the QM2, and I am going to take my bride abroad where we are going to lose ourselves in the lights and cafes of Paris, tour the castles of Bucharest, sample the beer in Berchtesgaden while marveling at the Alps rising just over the German border with Austria and check out historic sites like the Tower of London and Balmoral in the Highlands.
I refuse to play the role of the pitiful victim. I am a fighter.
Yes, we human beings are merely the size of grains of sand shifting around on the bottom of an endless river; but keep in mind that while the atom is the smallest of all the specks in the universe, just one of those tiny specks can unleash an explosion of unimaginable power.
In my opinion, that is the power of prayer, it is unimaginably large and boundaryless.
So, my faith is intact and resting on solid bedrock. I feel secure in the loving arms around me as I continue into this next chapter of life.
Things like a gentle rain beating on my face during a wannabe storm, a nice warm cup of cocoa with maybe a wisp of whiskey on a breezy fall evening and sitting back looking at the stars overhead in awe of the interesting prospects of what the future may hold along with the comfort of knowing that my friends are praying on my behalf all reinforce in me the will to carry on with a cheerful and even a joyful heart.
When I sit in the lobby of my oncologist’s office, I see the same look of disbelief and bewilderment on the faces of the other folks waiting, and my soul weeps for them; I know what they are going through.
If you are facing cancer and in need of a prayer and a reassuring grin or hug, please contact me at my email scott@theaugustapress.com to share your story with me and, most importantly, don’t give up.
Never give up.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
