Health
Medicine and Miracles
How Texas’ leading humorist helped cure himself of a deadly serious disease.
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“After radiation, the bone will be dead,” he answered.
“And if I don’t take the radiation?”
He responded matter-of-factly that then all of me would be dead. “Your cancer is nearly a four. Between a three and a four. They go from stages one through four,” he explained. “When they are fours, there is not much hope. Usually fatal.”
I embraced the notion of radiation without further ado.
That session with Dr. Ang got to me. As Liz and I walked out of his office his words—“size of a lemon…the bone will be dead”—throbbed through my head. Suddenly I burst into tears. Liz squeezed my arm and said, “Go ahead and cry. It’s good for you, darling.” It was my first realization that, my God, I could die.
Those clinic corridors were full of people in worse shape than I was. We saw wives pushing wheelchairs with their badly disfigured husbands, relatives and friends helping patients with throat and head wounds, and other signs of agony and suffering. Hell, they were the ones who should have been shedding tears. I realized that I was really much better off than many of them; I had a wonderful support system—a large family, numerous friends, and the caring of many people I hardly knew.
Julia Bowman, a warm-spirited speech pathologist, had her office next to Dr. Ballantyne’s at the clinic. We were longtime friends. As we left Dr. Ang on our way to see Dr. Ballantyne, I impulsively went in to see Julia. “You’ve had some experience in this thing,” I said, sitting down in her office. “I keep bursting into tears. It’s embarrassing as hell. Is this par for the course?”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “Look, you’re scared. If I had what you have, I’d be scared too. This cancer is trying to kill you. Your body knows it. It is calling up all its resources to defeat the cancer, and tears are one of its weapons—a way of washing it out. Go ahead and cry. Lots. When patients come in to see me, I’m never worried about those who cry. I worry about the ones who don’t.”
Other friends came forward around that time to give me spiritual and material aid. Annette Jones, a Methodist minister in Houston, spent many days helping me with my meditation and visualization. A fellow I knew only by reputation, attorney Dick DeGuerin, insisted we take over his high-rise apartment in Houston as his guests and flatly refused to let us pay for anything. We moved in, and the next day former governor Mark White called to offer us an apartment gratis. State treasurer Ann Richards called to say that she had asked M.D. Anderson to give her a weekly report on my progress, just to let them know I had friends in high places!
Another friend, a Houston socialite who had seen my one-man show when it opened there, is Carolyn Farb. I’ve become very fond of Carolyn because she’s so determined I’m going to make it to Broadway. She thinks I’m one of the greatest artists she’s ever met and so informs everybody she meets.
One day she told me, “You know, I was talking to somebody last night, and they said you ought to name your tumor for somebody you don’t like very much. That’s the way to show your cancer that you resent its intrusion into your life.”
That was at the height of the debate over Robert Bork’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, so I said, “Okay, I’m going to name it Judge Bork.”
Carolyn is a dedicated Republican, but I guess friendship comes before party loyalty because she thought that was an absolute riot. So Carolyn went around telling all her Republican friends that my slogan had become that of a lot of Democrats: “Judge Bork must go!”
Bernie Siegel and others encouraged the use of visualizing to cope with cancer. Through meditation, one visualizes the cancer disappearing during radiation or chemotherapy. I did that each day and before I went to sleep at night, imagining that my cancer was a block of ice, melting a little each day.
So I visualized, I prayed, and I meditated. There came over me a great sense of well-being. I found that I could reach outside my personal boundaries and get in touch with a larger force that could cure me—the so-called life force, I suppose. I had as much support as a man could ask for. Of course, I had a goal too. I wanted to do my show before I got much older, but first I needed to get cured.
I finished my six weeks of radiation just before Thanksgiving. The intense radiation had permanently destroyed the saliva glands in my mouth and made my throat so sore I could scarcely swallow. It had also reduced my energy level to near zero. But in spite of all that, I was as high-spirited as a colt on a spring morning.
My doctors had told me to return in mid-December for a checkup. At that time they would test me to see whether the cancer had been reduced in size and what further therapy I would need.
One morning, about ten days before we were to return to M.D. Anderson for the checkup, Liz announced quite calmly, “Your cancer is gone.” She said it with such conviction that I thought maybe Dr. Ballantyne had called from Houston.
“Who told you that?” I asked. By the way, although Liz was raised in the Church of England and I as a Methodist, neither of us had gone to church since childhood.
“I don’t know,” she said, “but whoever it was told me that in the car yesterday afternoon when I was driving home alone from the grocery store. Then this morning, just before I woke up, the voice told me again that it was gone. Completely disappeared.” She was so matter-of fact about it that I could only murmur, “That’s a right gratifying piece of information for you to pass along, my love.”
Later, when we returned to Houston for my checkup, Liz sat in the corner of the examination room while the radiotherapists examined me. Dr. Ballantyne had been on a vacation but was expected soon. This time a tiny television camera on the end of a very thin, flexible tube was used to probe my nasal passages. Dr. Lester Peters, the head radiotherapist, took the first look. After a moment of probing, he exclaimed, “Absolutely astonishing! There is not a trace of the tumor!” Dr. Ang was eagerly having a look when Dr. Ballantyne arrived. They invited him to have a gander at it, which he did. Then with a face wreathed in a smile, he went over to Liz and ceremoniously announced, “Good news, Mrs. Faulk. It’s gone. Completely disappeared.” Liz smiled, a bit smugly I must say, and said, “I know. It’s been gone nearly two weeks now.”
A rather emotional scene followed. The doctors all had another look, nodding and making pleasant comments. They were obviously pleased with what they regarded as their handiwork. Liz sat smiling graciously and thanking each of the doctors. I burst into tears.
Since then, I have been back for checkups several times with the same results. The tumor has apparently disappeared for good. I have also had a chance to reflect on my experience. Of course, the skill of my doctors was important, but I do not attribute my recovery wholly to those scientific skills. A very important element in my recovery was the expressions of love and concern that flowed my way from Liz, my family, a multitude of friends, and strangers who called or wrote with the same spirit-lifting message: “We love you, and we are pulling for you to come through.”
I believe that science and medicine are entering a phase in which they will not only recognize but vigorously support the role of self-healing recovery. As Bernie Siegel says, we can aid the therapy we receive and contribute to our own recovery.
What have I got my mind on these days? Well, I just passed my seventy-fifth birthday, and I plan to open my show October 3 at the Live Oka Theater in Austin for four performances. Further productions will have to wait because I have accepted the John Seigenthaler Chair, Professor for First Amendment Studies, at Middle Tennessee State University for the fall semester.
John Henry Faulk told his story to Austin writer Tom Ferguson, the editor of Medical Self-Care magazine. The M. D. Anderson Cancer Center has a daytime toll-free information number. Call 1-800-4-CANCER or, Houston, 792-3245.
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