It Must Be Fiction: It Can't Be Real... and It Never Ends

By W.I. Rivers

This book is completely fictitious and any similarities to living individuals is purely circumstantial. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

As life would have it, I need to start by saying that I have stage four kidney cancer. I've had three surgeries. One to robotically remove part of my kidney, another to try and remove a tumor on my pelvis the size of two coke cans, and the last to put three 7 inch screws in my pelvis to keep the bones from shattering.

So, here I am in my sixties fighting to stay alive and writing this book because everyone always said I should write a book about my life. They say that because the stories I tell are so outlandish that nobody would believe that they could possibly be true, but you can decide for yourself...

We all have stories to tell, but how we tell them makes the difference. Mine will probably make you smile, laugh, cry, curse, and wonder who is this guy?

Order your copy NOW and send me a note when your're done reading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Oct 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781684712038

Book preview

it.

INTRODUCTION

I’m writing this feeling pretty good at the moment. I go for infusions every two weeks, check-ups every six weeks and scans every three months.

You see, I have stage 4 kidney cancer. I have had three surgeries. One to robotically remove part of my kidney, one to try and remove a tumor on my pelvis the size of two coke cans and the last to put three 7 inch screws in my pelvis to keep the bones from shattering.

I have also had two rounds of radiation on different tumors. The first round was in the southern part of the country for a month and the last was only for three days in the city. The first stay was in a small town that had a large cancer center. The center was massive but it felt homey. It also felt magical and full of hope. My wife and I flew down there for three days to get oriented and met with every kind of doctor you could imagine. We met with a naturalist, a nutritionist, an oncologist, a radiation oncologist and a specialist in lymphedema; We even met with a parishioner.

After orientation, we flew back for the first week and stayed in a luxurious hotel nearby which had a large discount arranged by the cancer center. After the first round of tests, I was only in radiation for about twenty minutes a day. The rest of the day was just hanging around the hotel. My brother and his wife also came to stay for the first week to make sure everything was cool. At night there was a fire pit where everyone gathered to stay warm. It was November and the evenings were still quite cool, even for the southern US.

I met a lot of people around that fire pit. All with different types of cancer. None with mine though, or so I thought. There was a cop and his wife from Tennessee. He was quite standoffish at first and he had prostate cancer. There was a southern belle from Georgia who traveled with her mom and she had breast cancer. There was a teacher from Kentucky, I think, with lung cancer who played the guitar. He traveled with his whole family.

There was a photographer from Florida with a crazy boyfriend from Alabama. She also had breast cancer. Lastly there was an older gentleman in a wheelchair traveling from Tennessee with his doting son. He had liver cancer. There were many more people but I only met them in passing and haven’t kept up with them like the others. We had some good times around that fire pit. A group of twenty or more people just hanging around, telling their stories, laughing and singing.

At the end of that first week, my wife, who was still smoking at the time, met a man who had kidney cancer like me. She came back to the room and nonchalantly mentioned that she had met this man. She couldn’t accurately describe him nor did she know his name. Now you have to understand that for almost a year I had been researching my disease and I had never met someone with kidney cancer. I was dumbfounded that she didn’t see the importance of this chance encounter. I raced down to the front of the building looking for an older gentleman, slightly overweight, balding and who smoked. You can guess that I didn’t have much luck finding him.

I spent two days scowering the place until I found him at breakfast. There he was that miracle man who shared my very rare, it seemed, cancer. After talking to him it was apparent that his past doctors knew nothing about kidney cancer. He wasn’t on any type of diet and his digestive system was a mess. I convinced him to start eating right. He eventually turned the corner and started to feel better.

My sister came to stay with me for the second week and that’s when I started writing. I also got to re-bond with my sister. You will see later that we kind of drifted apart. My sister bonded with the couple from Alabama and quickly became friends with her and a truck driver, whose husband was there with liver cancer. We even had a couple of barbecues out by the pool. I found out that the old guy in the wheelchair loved to play cards so my wife bought a poker set with cards and chips. The marathon poker games began. They ended when he left to go home, where he continued treatment until he passed away.

My wife came the third week, and my sister came back the last week. After four weeks I was finished with radiation and I started looking for a surgeon to secure my damaged pelvis. I ended up going back to the northeast whereby I continue getting treatment to this day.

At the moment I am in limbo as to my current medical condition…I’m waiting to see if my immune system has learned that I have cancer. I’m conducting my own experiment to see if radiating a tumor while being injected with immunology drugs will kick start my immune system. It’s risky but it’s better than taking the poison that turned my hair white and made my skin paper thin. To me that was just kicking the can down the road, because those kinds of drugs stop working after a while and eventually you need to find something else.

So here I am in my sixties fighting to stay alive and writing this book because everyone always said I should write a book about my life. They say that because the stories I tell are so outlandish that nobody would believe that they could possibly be true, but you can decide for yourself…

CHAPTER 1

The Beginning

M y life started with a bang. It seems I was the first born male grandchild of my father’s immigrant family. To celebrate this, they all got together in my grandparent’s basement. By all I mean my mom, dad, grandparents, aunt and uncle and I believe the neighbors. It seems that one neighbor had a machine to make vinyl records (yup a real record- 78rpm at that). You can hear them all happy and pretty toasted, singing baby songs and proclaiming words of honor to me. I always thought I was special because of the party but it wasn’t till much later that I found out I was a twin and that my sister died before birth. It seems Mom was not getting enough nourishment to sustain twins. The doctor told her it was survival of the fittest. From as far back as I can remember, this made me feel both blessed and guilty at the same time.

Mom has told me stories of when I was young and how stubborn I was. An example she always uses is when I kept crawling into walls thinking the door would move to me (just in case you are wondering, the door never did move). So I’ll keep Mom’s stories to myself or she can share them with you later. Mom also has pictures of me as a toddler that are pretty scary. She called me King Faruk because I had three chins. There is one picture of her holding me and she can’t even put her arms completely around my waist. I was only three in that picture. I think my weight stabilized around then and I didn’t gain weight until I graduated high school.

Dad was a tall (6’5"), thin, good looking man with dark hair and light-blue eyes. He looked like he was always privy to an inside joke. Mom was petite with dark hair and dark eyes. Dad was from a middle class, Irish Catholic, working family. Mom was from an upper class, Methodist family. I think what brought them together was the good times they had. They were all having a low pressure life without a lot of responsibility. They call that the Peter Pan Syndrome but we’ll come back to that later. They had some good times but eventually, along came four kids.

The earliest memory I have of my mom and dad is cooking lobster in the kitchen. I think this was when we lived in an apartment. Dad brought home some live lobsters. Mom put a pot of water on the stove to boil. While the water was heating, Dad put the lobsters on the kitchen floor so I could play with them. We didn’t have any pets at the time so this was my first real exposure to any kind of wild creature other than my siblings. When he put the lobsters in the pot I swear I heard them scream. I refused to eat them and got in trouble. It was not the first time and certainly would not be the last.

The next memory I have is of me and my sister Misty sneaking into the kitchen, in that same apartment, to make some sandwiches in the middle of the night. Misty was a redheaded mischief maker. We made a horrible mess with ketchup and mustard. Little did I know that Misty, upon seeing the mess, had come up with an escape plan. She had me put my pajamas in the hamper in the hall and helped me put on new ones before we went to bed. You can guess who the clues pointed to the next morning… I guess it was my destiny to become the child who was always skirting trouble.

After a while my brother Walter came along. Walt was a wide eyed blond with a pretty slow intake and he trusted everyone. Now here was a kid who did not know how to fit in. I remember him running away all the time and it was my job to help find him. Mom eventually got a child harness and he was tied to a tree in the courtyard when we were out to play. Imagine a typical apartment courtyard back in the sixties. It was very sparse, with a single sapling tree and a picnic table.

Did I mention Walt liked to be naked? Every chance he got he would take his clothes off and run around the neighborhood. You had to see this three year old with white blond hair and a huge smile running away naked.

Next thing I knew Mom was pregnant with Lonnie. Misty told me that babies came out the belly button. I still trusted Misty but I needed to be sure because that sounded a little crazy. I asked everyone I could find who might know, till my parents told me the truth. I guess Misty couldn’t handle the truth and I made the neighbors a little nuts, so they had to tell me.

When Lonnie was born, he had dark hair and dark eyes like me. So we had a redhead, two with dark hair and a blond. Only one had blue eyes like dad. That was Walt. He was also the one destined to be tall like Dad. The girls were tall by usual standards, I guess, as they were both about 5’8". Me, I was destined to be average in height. When I sit down now, I’m the same height as Walt, but he’s all legs.

There are gaps in my memories as I write this so I must apologize for that. It seems we had moved to a small town near my grandparents. The neighborhood was all hills and houses very close together. I only remember the house as being very small and the washing machine was on the porch by the front door. My parents had made friends with the neighbors who lived around the corner. They had two sons and three daughters and we would often go there to play. They were very nice but they had a green eyed Weimaraner which was obviously a demon from hell and could see into your soul. That dog hated me but amazingly was nice to me around everyone else.

One thing I remember in particular about this family was the time we were in the living room watching TV when lightning struck nearby. A ball of electricity came in the window and flew around the house quick as a rabbit, knocking out every electrical appliance it passed. No one got hurt but it was quite a show. This family, and lightning, will come back later on in my story.

We didn’t live in that house very long. My mother’s parents wanted Mom and Dad to have a better place to live, so Grandpa M gave them a piece of his property to build a house on. While the house was being built we lived with Grandma and Grandpa M. They had a big house with lots of property to play on. That didn’t work out so well for our family though. Dad didn’t like the fact that Grandpa was so controlling and Mom like to be controlled because her dad gave her lots of money. I remember helping them lay the cinder blocks for the foundation and Dad looked pretty sad. Remember, he was a young city boy with a lot of pride but didn’t like responsibility. Some people are renters and some are homeowners. Dad was the former. One day he went to work as usual. When we went to the bus to pick him up he never got off. We sat waiting and watching every bus for what seemed like a whole night. I didn’t see him again for a while. One day I heard Mom and Grandpa refer to Dad as legally dead. I later found out that Grandpa made him a deal. He would relinquish all legal rights and Grandpa would support Mom. This he did till he died.

One day, Dad came to the house for what seemed like minutes and then he left again. I was five but I knew he was never coming back. I watched out the window while he drove down the long driveway. I watched till I couldn’t see him anymore and then I ripped the head off of Misty’s favorite doll. That didn’t help though.

I do remember my Dad’s mother and father coming to visit and even my Dad’s brother but I’m not sure of where those memories fit. I’d like to take a minute to mention my uncle though. It seems he got hurt in World War II and had shrapnel in his spine. He was on government supplied heroin and received a check to live on. He was a very nice man to me and my family, but rumor has it he was a hit man. We visited his apartment on Avenue of the Americas in New York City once and I seem to remember meeting Danny Kaye. I also remember my uncle as a quiet guy who made me an airplane out of paper and balsa wood that had a real propeller powered by a rubber band. I don’t think I was supposed to actually fly it, but of course I did and that was the end of the plane.

I don’t remember much about Dads parents. We visited them a few times in New York, where they lived. It was a quiet tree lined street with pretty houses and very nice people. They had a two family house and they rented out the upstairs. I never met the people who lived up there. I do remember Grandpa D playing the Ukulele and it looked like a toy in his big hands. He was an imposing guy, well over six feet tall. He always had green lifesavers in his pocket and