Reflections: A Story of Hope, Healing, Facing Fears, and Finding Purpose

By Brian Hobbs and Fia Hobbs

Reflections takes readers on an honest journey through dealing with fears, coming to term with illness, facing death, and acceptance.

Reflections is a gripping story written from two perspectives: Brian Hobbs, a songwriter with a terminal cancer diagnosis with months to live, and Fia Hobbs, his caregiving wife as well as his therapist.

They share with readers their journey through hope, despair, and finally to peace and acceptance. During Brian’s illness, he wrote down his thoughts and feelings in a blog that became a huge inspiration for people to let go of their own fears and to find purpose in their own lives. Reflections is a continuation of Brian’s blog and helps to inspire readers to make them realize what matters in life as they follow his last months.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642797077

Book preview

My Happy Places

August 23, 2017

My happy places consist of many childhood memories; so please bear with me while I list a few.

Staying with my Grandma Hobbs and being greeted with an ice-cold Co-cola (that was her way of pronouncing it). Her giving me a quarter and walking down to Mr. Paul’s store on Creek Road where I could get an orange popsicle, football, baseball or Batman cards, Sweet Tarts and Bazooka Joe bubble gum.

Staying with my Grandma and Granddaddy Meads and helping him in his garden, enjoying a dinner (read lunch…in the south at that time the daily meals consisted of breakfast, dinner and supper) with fried chicken, boiled greens and potatoes, cornbread, sweet tea, homemade biscuits, and if I was lucky, a piece of Grandma’s chocolate cake. Granddaddy always had peppermint chewing gum and we’d chew that after dinner and sit out in the swing in summer.

Visiting my father at Culpepper Motor Company on Elizabeth St. and looking at the new cars in the showroom. I especially loved Christmastime because there was a big aluminum tree there and a life-size Santa sitting in one of the chairs.

Friday nights at Granddaddy and Grandma Meads’ when most of my aunts, uncles and cousins came over and we heard stories from long ago out on the front porch with background sounds provided by frogs and crickets and the occasional car riding down Thunder Road with the radio on and windows down. My cousins and I played until we were exhausted and covered in sweat. That’s when we’d come in and get a drink of cold water from a green pitcher filled with rainwater from inside my grandmother’s ancient Frigidaire.

Weekends at my parents’ place down on the Albemarle Sound where my imagination ran wild with images of pirates, Indians, damsels in distress and whatever other images I conjured up from the books I read. My mother would cook fried potatoes and green beans and daddy would grill burgers or pork chops. It was heavenly! When I got older I would drive down there alone with my high-school girlfriend (although alone is probably not the correct term). As live, walking contraceptives, we were always accompanied by my sister and at least 2-3 of my girlfriend’s younger siblings. It worked.

Saturday mornings when my mother and I were home alone and we would listen to music (an awful lot of Gershwin) while we cleaned.

My father teaching me to play golf.

Band trips…anything to do with the band.

Soft ice-cream from Nu-Quality in the summer.

Stopping in to see Grandma and Granddaddy Hobbs after church on Sunday nights and getting powdered donuts, another Co-cola and maybe a slice of plain cake with white icing.

Hearing my mother play piano or organ at church.

Christmas pageants.

Church picnics. Dinner on the grounds.

My parents taking me to Peter Nero concerts in Norfolk…

There are many other people and places that I have visited but that’s enough for now. In addition to visiting my happy places I also started counting my blessings:

A devoted wife who has been with me through this whole ordeal, and in addition to taking excellent care of me, has also dealt with all the practicalities of insurance, doctors, phone calls, as well as my own ups and downs, etc.

My two boys, who have taken time out from their lives to help out at home and also kept me laughing.

A mother and father who are still there for me in every way.

A sister who has been extremely supportive and helped my mother and father help me.

Family on both sides of the Atlantic who have helped out and kept me in their thoughts and prayers.

Friends who have offered to help in any way they can, along with colleagues and former students who have showered me with love and good thoughts.

My main songwriting collaborators who continue to check in and inspire me. (I’m horribly afraid that one day they will find out they don’t need me).

The fact that I made it through major surgery and still ended up on this side of the dirt.

The fact that after only 3 weeks I’m relatively mobile and feeling as good as could be expected.

That I can listen to music again and that it moves me more than ever.

That I can see beauty and find joy where I never saw it before.

That petty bulls***, which somehow was incorrectly filed under IMPORTANT in my life has now been refiled under PETTY BULLS***—deal with this later.

All in all, I’m happy. Of course I wish I didn’t have cancer and I still don’t know what the outcome will be but I’m positive, thoughtful and thankful. And my advice to everyone is this: take your moments and create happy places for yourself and people you love. Never forget that the most insignificant things you do (like giving someone a quarter to buy an orange popsicle on a hot summer day, or just spending time with someone) can be a lifetime memory for them. And don’t be afraid to turn around and look your mortality in the face. It’s the best way to remind yourself to keep petty bulls*** in the right file. And most importantly, love each other and be kind.

Thanks for reading and please check out the rest of my site. And if you want to start being especially kind…download or stream my album, GENESIS OF WHO I AM.

Best, Brian

The Diagnosis

A background

On July 17, 2017 I was diagnosed with kidney cancer. I had a 12 centimeter tumor on my left kidney. An operation was planned immediately but it had already metastasized to the liver. I don’t think the seriousness hit me until much later. I was more fascinated by the size of the tumor on my kidney. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that it was a death sentence. It changed my life obviously. I’m still not sure I realized the gravity of the situation until I spoke with the oncologist. You can see that in my first blog entry. This was written before meeting with the oncologist.

I had had thyroid cancer seven years earlier and that was a walk in the park. This cancer would not be. It was aggressive and nasty. I was preparing for the operation not thinking about the disease. I felt the operation would clear the cancer. How naive I was. I gradually realized that I had a very serious disease that could kill me.

My wife was with me the whole time, giving strength and guiding me. Like I wrote, I was naive and still had no idea what I was up against. That naïveté came crashing down around me over the next few months. I guess it hit me hardest when my doctor put a number on things. I was told that with treatment I could expect an average survival rate of 22 months. I was then given information about the drug, Sutent. After looking at the literature with my wife we both decided the side effects took away all quality of life and opted out. We did agree to start a second level of treatment with Votrient. I ended up taking the drug for six days.

Before, I had been able to sit and walk a little but the treatment totally incapacitated me. It took more than a week to recover from the effects of the drug. After that, Karolinska hospital cut me loose and I was placed in palliative care, which meant that as far as any recovery was concerned I was on my own.

Fia’s Reflections

I knew from the start that it was a tough diagnosis. I decided not to let Brian know just how serious it was as I feared he would have given up immediately and not even wanted to go through with the surgery if he knew.

Brian had thyroid cancer back in 2010 and although he describes it as a walk in the park, and it was in comparison to the kidney cancer, it still shook him to the core. About six months after the operation there was a psychological backlash that proved to be a struggle for him. I thought the first cancer, being a wake-up call, would have inspired Brian to make more changes to his lifestyle but it lasted only about six months before he returned to his old habits of too much candy, bad diet, no exercise and an overload of