Duct Tape Won’T Stick to a Leaky Ostomy Bag: One Man’S Fight Against Crohn’S Disease and Cancer

By David H. Brantley

David H. Brantleys first serious challenge came when his doctor told him it would be a miracle if he survived another six months. Crohns disease was simply taking too heavy a toll on his system.

Thirty years later, another doctor told him that hed have to open him up for surgery to determine the severity of his colorectal cancer. Even though it was worse than the doctor imagined, Brantley persevered.

In this inspiring account about fighting Crohns and cancer, Brantley looks back at the big dreams he had growing up, including becoming a successful actor and writerand celebrates what he actually became best atbeating the odds.

Through the Crohns and cancer, hes kept fighting and learned that living out ones dreams is not nearly as important as dreaming to live. Of course, hes made the journey easier by playing some Broadway tunes in the background.

If youre struggling to overcome an obstacle that seems impossible, youll be inspired to keep fighting by joining Brantley as he looks back at a lifelong struggle and the lessons hes learned in Duct Tape Wont Stick to a Leaky Ostomy Bag.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Feb 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781480814998

David H. Brantley

David H. Brantley is a former professor of English, communication, and developmental studies. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Frostwriting, Connections Literary Magazine, and other venues. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his partner and devotes much of his free time to charity sewing and handwork.

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Copyright © 2015 David H. Brantley.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-1498-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1497-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1499-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015933855

Archway Publishing rev. date: 02/11/2015

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1   Walking into the Unknown

Chapter 2   What I Needed to Know I Did Not Learn in College

Chapter 3   What’s that Old Saying about Apples?

Chapter 4   Bad News Comes in Threes

Chapter 5   Just the Vapors, or Déjà Vu?

Chapter 6   When Students Become the Doctors

Chapter 7   Just the Facts, Please

Chapter 8   Timing Is Everything … on Stage

Chapter 9   Death, Taxes, and Other Uncertainties

Chapter 10   There’s Something Rotten in Denmark

Chapter 11   Lesson Plans Are Best Written in Pencil

Chapter 12   Never Go Commando with Crohn’s

Chapter 13   Drip, Drip, Dripping Away the Days

Chapter 14   Presidential Visits in Odd Places

Chapter 15   We Bow Our Heads with Thanks

Chapter 16   Taking Baby Steps … Again

Chapter 17   Intermission

Chapter 18   A Winter’s Respite

Chapter 19   Round Two: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Chapter 20   A Taste of One’s Own Medicine

Chapter 21   Short Distances, as the Crows Fly

Chapter 22   Dry to the Bone

Chapter 23   Back into the Wild

Chapter 24   Open Mouth, Insert Me

Chapter 25   Return to (the New) Normal

Chapter 26   How Do You Measure a Life?

Chapter 27   Duct Tape Won’t Stick to a Leaky Ostomy Bag

Chapter 28   A (Surgical) Steel Will

For my parents, Charles and Jo Brantley,

and my partner, Glenn J. Jadney,

without whose support I could not have made this journey,

and for Dr. Joseph Payne,

without whom I would never have succeeded.

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

—Helen Keller

Preface

AT THE END OF EACH OF MY ACADEMIC MILESTONES—GRADUAtions from junior high, high school, and college—I was voted one of the people most likely to succeed. At those impressionable peaks in my youth, likely to succeed meant so much more than the other lists in which my name appeared: most talented, best personality, most handsome (oh wait, maybe that was just a list I aspired to be on).

I had dreams, big dreams, that never really changed—perhaps still have not changed all that much—and to be considered likely to be successful in achieving those dreams spoke volumes to the confidence my peers had in me, a confidence I exuded but, more often than not, actually lacked.

I wanted to be a respected stage actor—not necessarily famous, but respected.

I wanted to be a respected singer.

I wanted to be a respected writer.

My father urged me to pursue any vocation outside of the creative arts, not because he thought I lacked the skills but because he knew the odds would never be in my favor, a concept I couldn’t grasp, in spite of the statistics that upheld his assertion, until I tried to break into the business. Friends, however, told me to follow my dreams. Grandmother Brantley told relatives, especially my parents, that I should do what made me happy. So I got a degree in theater performance, studied voice, and wrote pads of stories and plays and poems. I thought I was happy and, to some degree, successful. I’d earn the respect with enough time.

I never achieved likely to beyond youthful hopes and classmate expectations. I’ve always wondered where I’d be today had I lived up to the honor of having my name on such a list: Most Likely to Succeed.

This, however, is a reflective story about successes, ones I never imagined having to achieve. They have required Oscar-worthy acting to get through some tough performances; they have given me a voice that sings with abandon and praise and strength, each time pitch-perfect and respectable; they have written a new vocabulary for my life, one that includes words for which many people have to look up the meanings; and they have earned me the respect through which I have always defined true success.

This is a story of the three Cs in my life: Crohn’s, cancer, and continuation. Perhaps there’s a fourth: connection. I’ve done well to defy some of the odds; no doubt the lessons I’ve learned are worth sharing, if for no reason other than giving me a purpose.

In youth, I thought success came only in one form: living out one’s dreams. In my maturity, decades later, I’ve come to realize that my success has been dreaming to live.

CHAPTER 1

Walking into the Unknown

FOR EIGHTEEN MONTHS, MY BODY SENT SIGNALS THAT MORE THAN age was settling in. I not only creaked; I cracked. I folded into bed at night without comfort. I awakened in the morning without the motivation to get up, especially having spent little more than two or three (praise Jesus!) of my sleeping hours in sleep. This was the pattern my body established, a pattern I attributed to major changes in my diet, in my activity, and in my social and intimate lives, though by all measures, those changes were healthy—or healthier than the habits I’d lived with into my middle age.

I noticed the deterioration of my health in gradual stages, although by the time I could discern what physical manifestation plagued me, I could not tell how sudden the onset had been. Some of the changes started well before the eighteen months that led up to my diagnosis; all of them signaled danger.

I couldn’t stand on my feet for more than an hour without shooting pains in my legs—not just cramps but searing heat that ran from my pelvis to the beds of my toenails. I gave up my routine of walking five miles each morning and again in early evening. One doctor suggested I had a developing case of gout. Another lanced my toes and ordered scans of my feet, hoping to identify a possible infection. A podiatrist chided me for clipping my toenails incorrectly and ordered me to wear shoes at the beach, my favorite walking venue, telling me that the soft sand didn’t support my weight sufficiently, although I had dropped fifteen pounds by then and was fitter than ever. Even so, the walks became unbearable, and despite an investment in pair after pair of proper footwear, the distress grew and I had to resign myself to smaller upright movements around the yard and house.

I couldn’t sit in a chair for more than ten or fifteen minutes, if I lasted that long, before my coccyx felt as though it had been sledgehammered, forcing me to either stand or lie flat. Standing by now was out of the question even if I remained motionless because of the pressure on my feet. So I took to my bed and battled the leg and tailbone pains from a reclined position. I spent much of my downtime on top of a heating pad that, even in the swelter of summer, helped to dissipate the pain and lulled me into a sense of feeling better.

My head ached and dizzied. My penis quit rousing altogether, a symptom that had started a few years prior because of excessive bike-riding and undue pressure on my genitals and groin. My urine trickled, with effort. My extremities stayed numb for long periods of time, followed by excruciating stinging when they awakened. I swallowed Aleve, tried Viagra and Cialis, Flomaxed my piss into a struggling stream, and became a heating-pad addict. Nothing helped, and the symptoms persisted.

My doctor scratched his head, stymied.

My patience ran out.

CHAPTER 2

What I Needed to Know I Did Not Learn in College

IN MANY REGARDS, I HAD BEEN AN EARLY BLOOMER, PHYSICALLY. I had a mustache in fifth grade—enough of one that my father dragged me, kicking and screaming, into the bathroom one morning and shaved off the smudge of coffee-brown hair that shadowed my upper lip. I had, at the time (but certainly keeping the news from my father, for fear he’d shave me elsewhere), grown patches of hair under my arms and around my genitals. My Adam’s apple became more pronounced during the same period, and my voice seemed to skip the cracking stage, dropping from mezzo-soprano to baritone before the end of the school year. I grew several inches and went from a size seven shoe to a size ten and a half in the span of a summer. Many of my peers wouldn’t experience these changes for another two years.

In other ways, however, I suffered a slow progression into a more average teenhood, not to mention adulthood. My body tightened around its childhood plumpness, reluctant to let me mature into the kind of slimmer young man most of my friends were becoming. And in spite of activity, I couldn’t drop weight.

I didn’t really start my true maturity into manhood until my late high school and early college days. It’s true that I didn’t care for myself as well as I should have, but those were the years before we got involved in the minutiae of good nutrition. And since I was obsessive about grooming habits, I was more worried about looking and smelling good than about eating vegetables instead of potato chips. It was also a time when I cut back to one scant meal a day, not because I couldn’t afford food but more because I stayed too busy to sit down for more than a slice of pizza and a smoke.

I lived away from my family the first two years of my college life. Other than my older sister, who was in school in Charlotte, North Carolina, the rest of my family lived in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, while I attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I was happy and involved, partying and touring with our college’s a cappella choir. I let my facial hair grow; I lengthened my sideburns; I wore contact lenses and cologne and blue jeans.

And I didn’t feel as well as I should have—too much partying on the weekends and staying up way too late every night, or so I chose to believe.

I transferred to West Chester University of Pennsylvania after taking a half year off. The college was located about thirty minutes west of Newtown Square, so while I lived in an apartment near the campus with my friend Harry John McFadden, I was close enough to my family to have the occasional good meal. Harry’s family was also in nearby Abington, and between the two homes, we spent less time partying like fools and more time getting down to the business of family bonding and keeping up exceptional grades.

Life improved. I was happy and active and involved, eating better, learning new skills, making lifelong friends, misbehaving just enough to remind myself of my age and freedom, and laying out a path for my future.

And still, I didn’t feel as well as I should have.

I was losing weight because of better eating habits and healthier nutrition. I began experiencing pains in my lower back and stomach and having trouble digesting certain foods, and on rare occasions, I’d faint without notice. I could rise out of bed too quickly and wake up moments later face down on the carpet. I could be readying myself to throw up, which was happening with a bit more frequency, and pass out alongside the toilet.

And, damn, I suspected I was getting hemorrhoids.

My condition worsened enough that I knew I should see a doctor, and I asked my parents to make an appointment for me. Our family physician, Dr. Harold Rowland, was on vacation and not available, but his nurse referred me to one of the doctors seeing his patients. He was a kind, older gentleman, a proctologist, who sort of listened to my tale and then told me to bend over, drop my pants, and grab my ankles—before he began a finger probe while I stood before him without the security of stretching across an examination table.

The buzzing started; the blackout happened more quickly than ever, so quickly that I don’t remember falling forward.

When I came to, I was curled into an S on the linoleum floor, the doctor holding a cold compress to my face. I had always had a sense of just