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 Health & Beauty | August 2005 
Flush the Butts
 Keith Olbermann - MSNNBC.com
| | Peter Jennings, former prime-time anchorman for ABC News, died on August 7, 2005 at his home in New York City, the network said. He was 67 and suffered from lung cancer. (Photo: Jim Ruymen) |
I wrote here yesterday of Peter Jennings death from lung cancer. The entry yesterday as nearly all the talk - was, suitably and appropriately, about the man.
Now, about the disease and you.
The statistics are staggering. By the time this day is over, just in this country, 447 people will have died of lung cancer 1,562 from all forms of cancer. Nobody did a better job of remembering the part of this sadness that we are trying to forget than Tom Brokaw, yesterday morning, on the Today show: "To go through this difficult time seemed particularly cruel to me. But I know Peter would want us to say, this happens to families every day, and we can't forget about them either."
To that point, the story now of somebody who quite probably should've been in Peter Jennings' shoes, except for dumb, undeserved luck.
Me.
So, I thought, as I was hunched over, spitting blood into the garbage can in my office, half an hour before the newscast, this is it this is cancer. It gets uglier, I understood that so ugly that those who've survived can't even describe how much uglier it gets.
Still, that imagery that I want to have stick in your mind, is pretty good: They've just had to cut something out, from inside your body because they think it's cancer. And because it doesn't heal up right away, every couple of hours the coagulation breaks and your mouth fills up with blood and all of a sudden, hunching over a garbage can, spitting it out, is the best available option.
I'm not doing some sort of bad taste what-if on the passing of Peter Jennings I have had a tumor removed from the roof of my mouth.
It was benign that makes all the difference in the world, of course.
Except for the part where it doesn't make any difference. Because, I was in that position spitting globs of myself into a garbage can in Secaucus, New Jersey, entirely through my own doing, my own fault.
And maybe there's the chance that if the loss of Peter Jennings hasn't impacted you, that maybe if you listen to my story you might get smart enough in a hurry or scared enough in a hurry so that you don't wind up spitting blood into the garbage can, and spending five days like me, thinking you had cancer or actually having it.
There are some things in life you don't have much control over terrorism, lightning, and even cancer when it runs in your family or when you just get it.
But that's not what this tumor was the one that for five very long days had me convinced I had cancer. This is from me smoking pipes and cigars for 27 years. And if you work for a company that produces or sells pipes and cigars and you are recoiling defensively and saying you don't know that... well, let me quote Robert Novak "bull" I do too know that.
The place where this thing grew on the roof of my mouth, is precisely above the spot where the end of the cigar, or the tip of the pipe, would sit, nearly every time I've smoked. I've been smoking with the first place the smoke connects with my tissue, right in this one spot in my mouth since Jimmy Carter was President.
So, yes, biologically speaking, smoking caused that tumor. Behaviorally speaking, I caused that tumor period.
It's not like this thing that they cut out of me a week ago last Friday just appeared overnight, either. It was there no later than 1991, and a dentist told me then: either quit smoking or keep an eye on this or both because that could be pre-cancerous.
But no until my current dentist Bob Schwartz said "this has changed, go see an oral surgeon" I knew better. Both my grandfathers, I liked to say, lived into their 80s and in the last weeks of their lives, both of them walked into town to get a haircut and some cigars and that would be good enough for me.
Well, maybe that would have been good for me. Except, the point is this: they cut something out of your mouth; it's a benign fibrous tumor; they have to cauterize it with a laser; you wind up spitting blood like Rocky Balboa in front of Burgess Meredith; you spend five days thinking about the radiation and the chemo to come; and by the way ten days later, your mouth still hurts and it'll probably be all healed in six weeks.
And that's if you're lucky so lucky that you start jumping up and down and singing "Happy Days Are Here Again."
Imagine... if it were bad news. |
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