Bluebirds and whippoorwills

By Raymond D. Fowler, PhD
APA Chief Executive Officer

Cancer is such an insidious factor in our society that almost none of us escape being touched by it. My wife and my sister are both cancer survivors, so I have felt its impact very personally. More recently, I have experienced, with an old friend, the emotional ups and downs that are a part of the cancer experience.

I first knew Ed as an exuberant teen-ager in the small Alabama town in which we grew up. A few years younger than I, he was always eager to challenge the older guys to a tennis game (he was good) or join us on a camping trip. A good student, Ed went to a prestigious college and on to medical school. He could have gone anywhere, but he chose to return to Alabama to practice both in Montgomery and in a smaller town nearby where he became everyone's family doctor.

Our cybersociety

Ed and I lost contact as we established our respective careers. We reconnected again recently when Ed suggested that I join him and other friends from high school to write a book on what it was like to grow up in a small Alabama town a half century ago. We set up a listserv and before long the seven of us were hard at work on our chapters and getting reacquainted with each other by e-mail.

Words flowed from our little group of aging friends, and we began to refer to ourselves as a cybersociety. Because we were scattered over several high school classes, and are now scattered all over the country, some of us had never met and most us had not been in contact for decades, so we had a lot of catching up to do. We wrote thousands of words for our respective chapters, and as we got better acquainted and our friendship grew, we sent thousands of words by e-mail sharing stories about our families, our careers and our life experiences. Ed told us how much he loved his life as a physician and author of books on gardening, but he also told us that he had had surgery for prostate cancer a few years ago and how it had diminished his life and his hopes for a future.

As the book neared completion last fall, we decided that it was time for our virtual society to have face-to-face contact, so we scheduled a weekend reunion in Florida for early April. A note from Ed several weeks before the reunion heightened our anticipation of the gathering: "Had some heartening word from my urologist. He assures me that with a PSA of only 4, it is very unlikely that my disease has spread. Maybe I will make it out to the tapered end of the bell shaped survival curve. I now understand that hope is relative."

Then, just days before the reunion, we got devastating news from Ed: A persistent pain in his hip turned out to be a metastatic lesion--and there were 19 more in other bones throughout his body. Ed's life expectancy suddenly seemed to be measured in months rather than decades. Ed shared his sadness with us: "The pain is really well-controlled, but it starts to hurt in the late afternoon and that's when depression sets in. I may write a diary of my last days. I want to live until I die. I want to reach out to others, to help, to love, to be loved, to be needed. Once I figure out that none of that is possible, I will probably leave."

In the following days, Ed's characteristic optimism and resilience returned. Any thoughts of canceling the reunion because of his condition were ended by his firm statement that he would be there and expected to have a great time. He did, and we all did, enjoying his warmth and humor even though his radiation treatments had reduced his energy.

'I heard whippoorwills'

The world of cancer victims is a roller-coaster. Last week, we got the news we had all hoped for: "My mortality has been pushed back a bit. New CAT scans revealed the bone metastases to be less threatening, and it appears I am already showing some response to the hormone injection. And, of course, the depression is lifting. I feel as though I've recaptured my life, however long it may be. I take these things as good augeries: All three of my blue bird houses are occupied by bluebirds, and last night I heard whippoorwills for the first time in a long time."

APA Home Page . Search . Site Map