Jon sunsets a cancer scare

Jon's wife Christy got pancreatic cancer ten years ago, but Jon still carries the fear of losing her. It's a long hallway from diagnostics to recovery, but Jon's found the right doctor: Todd helps him stop over-intellectualizing, cutting through the voices in his head, until only sweet remission (from the Latin "to relax,") colors the horizon. Revealed to Jon on the eve of Thanksgiving, 2022, Todd's tongue-in-cheek poem is written in the talky après-dinner-party style of Tony Hoagland, and features candid, ad-libbed cameos by Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Czesław Miłosz, and Raymond Carver, who, like all of us, just wants to be loved. From sorrow to joy and back again, this story lets Christy have the final word, and has Jon breathing a sigh of relief.

Todd's poem for Jon, "Thanksgiving," quotes a stanza of Tony Hoagland's "Among the Intellectuals," from his posthumous collection, Turn Up The Ocean (Graywolf Press). Used with permission.

Chapters in this episode:

1. I contain multitudes
2. Cancer for Christmas
3. Trying to figure things out
4. Deconstructing prayer
5. Recovery: "She really is okay."
6. Humility is an honest self-assessment
7. The poem: "Thanksgiving."

Chapters

• 0:00 I contain multitudes
• 2:33 Cancer for Christmas
• 5:10 Trying to figure things out
• 9:28 Deconstructing prayer
• 13:30 Recovery: "She really is okay."
• 19:02 Humility is an honest self-assessment
• 21:27 The poem: "Thanksgiving."

Transcript

TB_TAPIT_EP02_Jon_MIXweb_230227

Wed, Mar 29, 2023 1:46PM • 26:19

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

john, christie, ct scan, poem, wife, thought, long, thanksgiving, tumor, hoagland, surgery, people, flannery o'connor, virginia mason, life, read, seattle, cancer, poetry, pancreas

SPEAKERS

Jon, Todd

Jon  00:06

There's been a lot of times in life where it doesn't seem or you sort of look back on your life and you think I'm not one person. Like, there are multiple me's in me.

Todd  00:18

Welcome. I'm Todd Boss. In this podcast, I help strangers discover the poetry in their most intimate stories.

Jon  00:29

It's possible that I'm both the best first and the worst person that's ever lived in this episode. And that's not a contradiction, John.

Jon  00:37

Greetings and salutations.

Todd  00:38

Is that your is that your standard greeting? 

Jon  00:41

Yes, yes, yes. 

Todd  00:44

I love that. We're on Zoom. So I can see John. He's 43 with a cap on his head, glasses on his nose, and a long, Amish beard that traces only the very outermost perimeter of his face, kind of a happy gnome kind of a guy. So where are you? 

Jon  01:02

I am in Olympia, Washington, and I am in my detached office. 

Todd 01:07 

He’s surrounded by bookshelves on both sides and towering high above him, maybe four or 500 of them. 

Jon 01:14

I've got the books that I love that I go to quite a bit right here. Everything from like Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Flannery O'Connor, Dostoevsky. 

Todd  01:25

Throughout the course of our interviews, I noticed John quotes a lot from things he's read, leaning back in his chair, and glancing at the books behind him as if nodding to his friends.

Jon  01:36

 And then I've got a poetry section over here. And there's theology, philosophy, and then a few little art supplies. I’ve, I've tried to not clutter my new office the way that my old one was, but we'll see how long that lasts. 

Todd 01:52

Right? Things tend to collect. 

Jon 01:53

Yes, yes.

Todd  01:54

 I like John. He's the kind of aging hipster you'd want around a campfire on a clear night, when you can see the stars. He's got the inquisitive energy of a lifelong learner. But he didn't reach out to me to talk about books. 

Jon  02:08

I thought, this thing that's happened to me is a story that I still have yet to make full sense of.  I don't think it's ever an event that I'll be able to put my arms fully around. I think sometime in my life, I thought I would get my arms around it. That's why I did call you because I thought this could be an interesting opportunity to tell the story about what my wife and I and my three daughters at the time went through.

Jon  02:34

So the long and the short of it is my wife and I were living in Shelton, and we were getting ready for Christmas.

Jon  02:41

This is 2012. My wife has crocheted all kinds of, you know things for presents for our three daughters. And Christmas Eve rolls around.

Jon  02:55

We were supposed to go over to my mom's house. She starts to get this pain in her back.

Jon  03:01

She's pacing back and forth, making involuntary head movements like she was having pain that I knew was at the level of like childbirth kind of pain.

Jon  03:10

It became obvious that like she wasn't going to go to my mom's house.

Jon  03:15

We drop off the girls at my in laws. I take Christie to the emergency room. And the ER doctor came in and said it's probably kidney stones. We can do a CT scan, but it's probably kidney stones. It's just up to you.

Jon  03:33

Well, my wife is thinking we're not doing the CT scan because it's expensive, and we're living on one income. So she's thinking money. And I usually think money, too. But this time I was like, No, I think we should get the CT scan. There's a big sign on the wall that says CT results will not be read within an hour. So don't even ask.

Jon  03:52

10 minutes after the CT scan, the ER doctor comes in. So, you have a six and a half inch tumor on your pancreas. It's likely cancerous, you need to see a surgeon right away. Said it just like that. And we were like, come again. Like, I don't even have anywhere to put that kind of news. That was just one of those things you hear about people getting told.

Jon  04:19

So we said like, what about the pain and stuff? And he's like, Well, there's alcohol. I mean, really, he was just kind of like, I don't know what to tell you. If you had a broken arm, I could help you. But this is way outside of my specialty. 

Todd  04:31

The girls ended up spending the night at their grandparent’s house. John and Christie got home at about three in the morning. 

Jon  04:37

And I started getting online and doing research and I'm like, my wife is gonna die. I didn't say any of that out loud. 

Todd  04:45

You just went to this panic place. 

Jon  04:47

Well, I'm really good in emergency situations. I had a friend almost cut his fingers off, and it's like, I was just calm. Wrap your fingers up. Get you to the ER. Like, I looked like I was great.

Jon  05:00

But then I had nightmares for, you know, weeks after that, right? You know, like, I'm a total train wreck. But like in the moment, I'm like, this has to be done right now. And I'm going to do this.

Todd  05:09

 So you're at the computer, and you're thinking my wife's gonna die of cancer. 

Jon  05:13

So I started Googling stuff. And Virginia Mason, the hospital in Seattle, started showing up on the searches, I started going to, like Google Scholar, and I started going to, you know, like, like studies and like, reading actual, like, surgery reports. And, you know, I’m staying up until three, four in the morning, every night trying to figure this thing out. And I get a pretty good sense of like, what all this means, as much as I thought I could, as my way of trying to, like, control the situation. I think now in retrospect, you know, it's like, I want to be able to feel like I know what to do. 

Todd 05:47

Christie had a different reaction.

Jon 05:49

My wife went the other direction. And that is, I'm going to remain hopeful about this. So I don't want to know numbers. I don't want to know percentages. I don't, I just need to know like what I need to do to get better. And it's difficult to decouple all of this from where my wife and I were, spiritually, I had become very closed.

Jon  06:10

And intellectualized in my heart.

Jon  06:17

Only in retrospect, that I look back and recognize how dark of a place I was at. I had, I had lost to a certain degree, the ability to hope.

Todd  06:29

John ended up making the call to Virginia Mason.

Jon 06:31

I said, Hey, the folks down in Thurston County at the surgeon place gave us the runaround a little bit. I think my wife's gonna die. And I heard you guys are the best. Seattle was like, we're so sorry, come up here. So we go see two of the best guys that you can possibly see—guys and gals. And they did the CT scan, again, they looked at everything that it was, and this tumor was pushing on her stomach, on her colon, on the aorta that runs up back by your spine, on her left kidney, on a couple other things. So like the options when we got there were like, Hey, so we could open her up, and the tumor could just slide out. It's not attached to anything. And we'll see you back up and we'll say way to go. Or we could open you up that we could have to do a bypass on your colon, take out part of your stomach, remove your left kidney, take your adrenal gland and your spleen, do a bypass on the aorta, which only like three or four hospitals in the US do it. Or it's going to be so attached to stuff that we're going to sew you back up and talk about palliative care and end of life care kind of stuff. 

Todd 07:42

The Seattle hospital was able to get Christie in 12 days later, which was pretty impressive given that it was just after Christmas and right before New Year’s. 

Jon  07:51

They said the surgery is probably going to be 12 hours.  You’ll probably be in the hospital 10 days.  It’s going to be a long road to recovery. But it could be longer, you know, based on all that. So we go home and kind of, like, my wife is feeling sort of hopeful and scared. And I'm, I'm just numb, like, dead on the inside. And I have this weird thing come up in me where it's like, I'm excited that we're at one of the best places to do the surgery. Like, this is so wonderful that we live near Seattle. And also, like, what level of human experimentation did it get for us to be able to just even say to another person, I'm going to cut you open and touch all the things on the inside of you and put it back together, and it's not going to kill you. Yeah. Right like miraculous. Like, my dark way of thinking went to like the the Japanese camps that they ran in their prison experiments or the Nazi experiment. Like, I'm like, all of this goodness is on the back of so much evil and suffering. In a strange way, I felt like I had kind of a, I’ve never articulated it this way. But this is exactly what it was. I felt like I had like this Gnostic.

Jon  09:09

Gosh, understanding—like this hidden wisdom, this hidden knowledge that very few other people really knew the severity of the situation. So I was walking around with this, like I had read a lot about all of the things that could happen and what it might be and percentages of success and this and that. I hadn't prayed in a long time. I was convinced that, well if God knows what I'm thinking before I even say it out loud, why would I say anything out loud? I thought I was pretty clever.

Jon  09:42

And I thought that I thought that, that God needed me to say something in order for him to do something when really maybe me saying something is more about what I need and not what he like….

Todd  09:53

 You had deconstructed praying.

Jon  09:55

 Yep, yes, yes. Right. And like I had somebody say, hey, you know, you should probably

Jon  10:00

Like, go and pray about some of this, you know? And I was like, Sure, whatever.

10:06

That's like, what I'm going to say. Like, like, like, like, literally, what am I going to say? 

Todd 10:10

What am I going to say? That God doesn't already? Right? 

Jon 10:17

Yeah. And like, I'm not willing to make the move that like, Hey, this is your fault. Because it's like who am I to say that? That means that I have some kind of crazy knowledge about the way the world should work. And it's like, I'm not willing to say that. But I am willing to say the best I can do is be quiet, which is not what I'm inclined to do about anything. 

Todd 10:36

I don't share John's faith tradition. But I'm beginning to see that if I'm going to write a poem that speaks to John's heart, I'm gonna have to take his faith tradition seriously.

Jon  10:48

So I go to a little coffee shop in Hoodsport. Washington before the surgery. This is like a week before the surgery. And I'm sitting there with a cup of coffee. And I'm just like, What the hell am I supposed to say?

Jon  11:01

And I don't know if this has happened to you before, but where, where lines of things that you have read before will just come sort of blazing into the forefront of your mind, things that you didn't intentionally recall, but they are there.

Jon  11:16

And I had that happen. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the book of Job. But there's a line right when God starts to talk to Job where he says, Where were you, when I laid the foundations of the world? And there's just a whole series of those where were you? Where were you when the doe gave birth to the fawn? And so the lines that came in front of my mind, were actually because we're, we're by the saltwater, on Hood Canal right there. And it was, Did did you tell the tide to go out this morning? You know, did you tell the tide? Or are you going to tell the tide to come back in? Like, did you tell the moon to come out last night? And And what's interesting about that, is that, I just thought, well, of course I didn't.

Jon  12:05

Like, that’s that's not my question. At least at the time, I thought that's not my question. My question isn't whether or not you are in control. The question is, and through 10 years of reflection, it's like now the question is, am I in control?

Jon  12:21

And I suppose that's a question I'm still wrestling with. Or to what extent is your control dependent on my control? 

Todd 12: 34

Maybe you know, someone like John constantly scrutinizing his own life, intellectualizing researching, floating theories, consulting others. Tt's dizzying on some level, this seemingly endless questing but it's invigorating, too, how ready and facile he is with self reflection. 

Jon 12:52

The surgery was the full 12 hours, the doctor spent like two hours just peeling the tumor off the kidney. They didn't have to do any of the bypasses. They didn't have to take out her kidney. They did have to take her spleen out and her adrenal gland on the kidney, and they sewed her back up. And the first few days were really horrible. 

Todd 13:13

The doctors gave Christie an epidural for the pain on her first night after surgery, but it didn't work. 

Jon 13:20

And we still didn't know whether or not like the cancer was spread through a pancreas. They had to remove three quarters of her pancreas, so they weren't sure if she'd be diabetic.

Jon  13:30

But then Dr. Picozzi, so this is now six days later, Doctor Picozzi, he comes walking down the hallway, the pancreatic specialist—he’s like, the reason why Virginia Mason is really well known—well, part of it. And in my mind, I'm thinking like, it's like Dr. Death. And he walks in and he just says, well, there was cancer in the tumor, you know, it was on the inside of the tumor, and but it hadn't spread to everything. You're going to be okay. If you're going to have pancreatic cancer, this is the kind to have.

Jon  13:59

And actually, I haven’t talked about this much. I just walked out of the room. We had some friends in the room with us. I just walked out of the room and I walked around the hallway. And I like collapsed on the ground and was like heaving crying. And I don't know for how long. I mean, I haven't had that happen very often. Maybe once when I was little when my parents were getting a divorce. I had, I had doctors stop and asked me if I was okay. And I said yes, yes and no. And I, I don't even know how long it was. But I came back in the room and you know, I just hugged my wife. I like, I, I didn't know what it meant. Like I didn't know what that meant for the future now.

Jon  14:49

I hadn't realized how much I had prepared myself for her to die, and that she wasn't going to die now, from that, right. It took my wife months of recovery.

Jon  15:00

She has this massive scar on her stomach. And she's okay.

Jon  15:06

And we're, we're actually going to be going to our 10 year checkup after Thanksgiving. And we've had three babies since then. I mean, like, she really, she really is okay.

Todd 15:19

You're still, you're still getting used to the idea. 

Jon 15:23

My mom's had cancer. And I didn't realize when you go in for checkups, after you've had cancer, the sort of fear that, that that creates. And, and that kind of goes back to sort of the anger that I still, and I say, anger in the classical sense, like, I'm perceiving that there's an injustice. And so there's the movement in my heart towards like, wanting some sort of resolution to this injustice that like, we're keeping people alive, but are they alive? You know? And I'm not talking about euthanizing people, in the least bit. But what I'm saying is it like this sort of perpetual checking up on you to make sure that your body is functional.

Jon  16:08

And then if your body's not functional, we're going to do all these crazy things to keep you alive, because the highest good is your bodily life. And it's like, I just reject that outright. That your bodily good is your highest good.

Jon  16:22

But on the same hand, your bodily good is a profound good. Like, right? Like, like, like, you can't just say it's not like, you can't go the way of the Stoics and say it doesn't matter. Because that's the only way we know how to experience the world. It's your body. So like, anyway.

Todd  16:42

Right.  Do you think it affects Christie as much as it affects you to go to these? 

Jon  16:46

Yeah, I think she's probably better dealing with it. Like, I think she's just really honest about it. She's honest about where about where she's at with it, like, hey, like this, like, this is coming up. And then we have some kind of conversation. She's like, Yeah, this is like, you know, and, and she'll cry in a way that is, I think, really healthy. And for me, it's kind of like, I have to kind of fight off the trend to go loaded for bear. You know, because I legitimately do think worst case scenarios around most things. Like if there's something big happening, I think, contingency plans for worst case scenarios. 

Todd 17:20

Well, it sounds like that's the that's at the heart of a lot of this. You know, it really seems like that's what you did at the outset. You know, when it was first the diagnosis, and you, you sort of left yourself unprepared for the possibility that you didn't have to, it wasn't all going to fall apart. 

Jon 17:36

100%. I had zero contingency plans for what's going to happen if she's okay. Yeah, that's kind of come up a few times, over the last 10 years that, in my heart, every now and then, like, I just, and I think it's kind of the other side of the card when I say that, when I finally told her like, I thought you were gonna die. The other side of the card is like, I don't know what to do now. 

Todd 18:03

Yeah, that you're that you're not going to die. 

Jon 18:09

Right. From this at this moment, you know?

Todd  18:14

Yeah, you hadn't planned for that. It seems silly to say because you don't have to really plan for everything being normal. Do you?

Jon 18:24

No. No, no.  

Todd 18:27

And yet, and yet, and yet you feel that dislocation somehow? 

Jon 18:30

Yes. Yeah. I suppose it's been a theme, I guess, in what we've been talking about through this whole thing of like me, controlling, me understanding, me knowing what the future is going to hold, me trying to manipulate it and like, That's exhausting. And I just can't do that. You know, it's ultimately God who takes the first step and the second step and the third step towards me, not the other way around this kind of bootstrapping Protestant notion that like, hey, you know, I'm going to just figure it out. Good luck with that. 

Todd 19:00

John says he's learned that humility is not false self flagellation, or insisting you're the least person in the room. Rather, it's an honest assessment of yourself. He realizes that sometimes it's okay not to be okay. To stay down, to receive comfort, to surrender. 

Jon 19:23

Six or seven years ago, I had this ferocious hunger to talk to God that I hadn't before in the past. And a big part of that was going to confession, you know, bringing a lot of these fears to confession as a way to be healed. 

Todd 19:39

Virginia Woolf said, Some people go to priests, others to poetry.

Jon  19:46

I attempt to go to confession as often as possible because that sort of natural impulse of us that we have to tell somebody what's going on, deep in our hearts, is so necessary, and it can be just like the most powerful gift.

Todd  20:04

I don't pretend to be a shaman or healer or therapist or really any kind of guru or guide. But isn't there a way in which this podcast is a kind of confessional? Even on our shared screen, I sit in one compartment. John sits alongside me in the next. We're both here because we want to witness and transform this intimacy into some kind of grace. I'm grateful he's bringing the reverence he's learned in his religious practice, to this secular space.

Todd  20:41

I reconnect with John a day before Thanksgiving to give him the poem I've written. I know you're eager to see it. I'm eager to share it with you. But first, I want to know how Christy's 10 year checkup went.

Jon  20:54

Yeah. So today was the day that we drove up to one of their remote clinics. She did the CT scan and got bloodwork, and then we just drove home. So then next week, we'll do a teletherapy appointment to look at the results.

Jon  21:11

None of it is dramatic. I would say that everybody's just kind of tired. Both, you know, we're looking forward to just kind of putting it behind us, you know? Yeah. So. 

Todd 21:21

All right. Well, I'll be sending good thoughts your way. 

Jon 21:26

Thank you. 

Todd 21:27

All right. Well, we are you ready? 

Jon 21:29

Yeah. Well, I you know, I mean, I think I'm ready. 

Todd 21:34

How do you be ready for something like this? Right? 

Jon 21:36

Yeah, it's like

Todd  21:38

The poem you're about to hear, is written in the style of Tony Hoagland, which is to say that it seems to take place at a party. Like John's head, this party is overpopulated with intellectuals and writers. Some of his favorites and mine are there, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Raymond Carver, their voices almost overlapping. But because I wanted the poem, not just to reflect John back to himself, but also to shake him out of his head, letting him, as he says, put it all behind him and recognize the enormous gift of life he and Christie had been given every day, right here, right now, I ended the poem with an opportunity for John to laugh at those voices, and to embrace the simple spirit of Thanksgiving. 

Jon 22:30

All right, it's open.

Todd  22:32

All right. All right. The title is Thanksgiving.

Todd  22:36

Inevitably, you find out you are lost, really lost. Blind, really blind, stupid, really stupid, dry, really dry, hungry, really hungry. And you go on from there, says Tony. Flan says, where you came from is gone, where you thought you were going was never there and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.

Todd  23:00

Tom says, I tried following God, but following somebody who's everywhere and nowhere at once is just humiliating.

Todd  23:09

Milo stops kissing the stem of his pipe long enough to say a few of me followed God. A few went crazy. A few got day jobs, and at least one of me is upstairs right now. agonizing over the tense of a verb.

Todd  23:24

A bird trapped in a barn, says Cormac from the couch where we thought he'd been asleep, passes through the slats of daylight bird by bird.

Todd  23:36

I just want to be loved, says Ray is that lost blind, stupid and hungry enough for you screwballs? And now Christy's rounding the corner with a tray of fresh drinks. Shut up, she says, all of you, and pay attention. You don't get too many more sunsets, like this one.

Jon  23:57

That's beautiful.

Jon  23:59

Like really beautiful.

Todd  24:09

To read this poem again, as well as John's response to it and to see photos of Christie and John's whole family, plus a stack of John's favorite books, go to our website, poeminthat.com.

Todd  24:22

This episode is dedicated to the researchers, surgeons and palliative and supportive caregivers who engage every day with cancer, its victims and its survivors. (It’s really, really wonderful. I'm just really grateful.) Thanksgiving, quotes most extensively from a Tony Hoagland poem called “Among the Intellectuals” from his posthumous collection, Turn up the Ocean, published by Greywolf Press. If you liked Thanksgiving, you'll love Tony Hoagland poems. The cause of his early death at 64

was pancreatic cancer.

Jon 25:01

The only thing I could really say that seems to matter is really like I'm grateful that you that you listen…

Todd 25:04

There’s a Poem in That is written and produced by me, Todd Boss, and Co-producer Bronwen Clark, with support from associate producer, Hila Plittman. Audio support from Ben O'Brien. Original Music by Esh Whitacre. 

Jon 25:21

Now, thank you. 

Todd 25:22

It's been a privilege, John.  If you liked this podcast, share it with others or support us with a donation at poeminthat.com. And as always, if you think there's a poem in your story, tell us why by leaving a message on our H

aiku, Hawaii listener line at 808-300-0449

Jon  25:44

Thank you so much, Todd. I'm gonna go inside and share this with my family. 

Todd  25:47

Wonderful. Thanks, John. 

Todd  25:48

Have a happy Thanksgiving. 

Jon  25:49

All right. Peace and love. Thank you. 

 Todd 25:51

I'm Todd boss, reminding you that there's a poem and everything. If you're paying attention.