To Be Alive!: There, but for the Grace of God, Go I

By Chris Hessler

I remember sitting by your bedside when you recalled for me some of your thoughts during your darkest hours in the hospital. You expressed them as: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where will I go once I survive? Where would the courage come from to conquer fear? Deathly sick, you were determined to beat the odds. You recalled thinking of your Mom, the passionate musician, the high school valedictorian and straight A college student, caring mother of four, who fired up her children to make good grades so as to get into the best colleges and universities. The children obliged.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514493281

Chris Hessler

Chris Hessler is a two-time cancer survivor, father, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and triathlete. He is the executive chairman of Linkwell Health and serves on the leadership council of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. He is the father of five and lives with his family in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

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Copyright © 2016 by Chris Hessler.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2016907695

ISBN:                Hardcover                  978-1-5144-9330-4

                          Softcover                    978-1-5144-9329-8

                          eBook                         978-1-5144-9328-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Afterword by Fred Hochberg

Foreword by Hans H. Jack Hessler

Rev. date: 12/23/2017

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CONTENTS

All My Tweets

Foreword

Section I: Do Bad Things Really Happen to Everyone?

Chapter 1     You’ll Never Get into Dartmouth

Chapter 2     A Busy Life, and We Loved It!

Chapter 3     If Only We’d Sided with the British, Not the Italians!

Chapter 4     Dad, It Was the Best Thing We Ever Did

Section II: Diagnostic Purgatory

Chapter 5     Is She Hot? Could I Date Her?

Chapter 6     Where is God?

Chapter 7     You’re Dying of a Brain Lymphoma

Chapter 8     To Me, Dr. Hochberg Is God

Section III: Grinding It Out

Chapter 9     Your Mind Doesn’t Matter

Chapter 10   Welcome to Industrial-Strength Medicine

Chapter 11   Sandy, I Just Talked to God

Chapter 12   I Can Make Pain Go Away

Chapter 13   It’s Just Like Business Travel, Except You Might Die

Chapter 14   Hey, Buddy, You’re Not Supposed to Take the Nurses Home

Chapter 15   I Still Think It Gives You an Edge

Chapter 16   The Cancer Card

Section IV: Art and Science

Chapter 17   Why Two Miguels?

Chapter 18   You Don’t Like to Lose, and I Don’t Like to Lose

Chapter 19   Back to the Beginning

Chapter 20   You’re Getting Four Times the Normal Dosage

Chapter 21   I Have Good News and Bad News

Section V: The Finale

Chapter 22   I Reserve the Right to Change My Mind

Chapter 23   Maybe I’d Rather Be Dead

Section VI: The New Normal

Chapter 24   A Goal is a Dream with a Deadline

Chapter 25   Can You Get Us Tickets to the Heat Series?

Chapter 26   Bad Things Happen in Threes

Chapter 27   Question for Steve Jobs: Do You Have Any Regrets?

Chapter 28   Boston’s First Fun-Raiser Fund-Raiser

Chapter 29   Dad, We’re Doing P90X!

Chapter 30   You Have a Beautiful Reverence for Life, and It Shows

Section VII: Sandy’s Chapter: Life Happens

AFTERWORD

Section VIII: A Bird’s-Eye View of What the Family Was Thinking

Chapter 31   Philip’s College Essay

Jack’s College Essay

Chapter 32   The Sky’s the Limit

Chapter 33   Stem Cell Nightmare

Chapter 34   Cancer—A Challenge to Man, Mary Lou Fanning

A Note Thanking Dartmouth Classmates and Friends

All My Tweets

Final Chapter– Your brain is fine.

For Brolin, Philip, Jack, Jimmy, and Nikki

Dr. Hochberg asked me to use my creativity and resources to make a contribution to cancer—and here it is. I hope you find it inspiring. Looking back, it certainly was for me! Some of my early readers affectionately started to call this the book of hope. I love that.

I’ve tried to pass along some of the love, the lessons, and the generosity my family and I received as we fought the good fight and endured the physical, emotional, spiritual, and logistical challenges of dealing with cancer.

And some practical lessons along the way that definitely helped me to be alive today!

I hope that whoever reads my story—whether he’s a cancer patient, survivor, overwhelmed caregiver, or you just love someone who is sick—gains some strength for the battle from what I learned.

And if you’re a patient who just got that oh shit feeling following a tough diagnosis, all I know is that your story will be different from mine. Your tumor, your therapy, your doctors and nurses, how your family and friends care for you, how you come out of it—it will all be unique to you. It’s my sincere hope that you’ll gird yourself for the battle of your life—for your life—and dig deep to find the reasons you want to be alive.

And if reading my story gives you strength, then it was all worth it.

When an author writes that he or she is indebted to certain people, it’s not the same as when a cancer survivor says I’m indebted. For my indebtedness is of the highest order because deep down, I know I’m alive because of the generosity of those to whom I am indebted. Does that make sense?

With that said, I’m indebted to Sandy for everything she did to help me survive, a list of which would take this entire book; to our children Brolin, Phil, Jack, Jimmy, and Nikki; to my parents, Jack and Mary Lou; and to Sandy’s mom, Irene (who each devoted months and months to my care and companionship at MGH); to my bro, Pave (who called me virtually every day from his expat home in Asia); and sisters Anne (who visited from London) and Stephanie (who drove me all over Boston and visited me countless times in the hospital). To our nanny and far more, Silvana, and to our wonderful friends—here, there, and everywhere—who were there for me in droves.

And finally, to the incredible neuro-oncology team at the Massachusetts General Hospital, beginning with, but certainly not limited to, Dr. Fred Hochberg, Dr. Yi-Bin Chen, and Dr. Arnie Weinberg, nurse practitioner Michelle Pisapia, plus all the big-hearted chemo nurses on Ellison 12 and 14. And finally, to the gifted healers in Jackson—my Healing Dream Team: Carol, Derek, Francine, Marian, Monique, and Peter—who brought me back.

You are all amazing! And you taught me so much!

I urge you all to live large! Live strong! Live long!

ALL MY TWEETS

I ’ve never been much for keeping a journal—not exactly sure why—so I don’t have an actual account of my days in the hospital. The chapters that follow are from memory—some of it mine, some of it my friends’.

After Chemo 1, my pal Reade came to visit me at home. Reade is a naturally inquisitive guy and is always on the edge of technology. This was late October 2010, and he introduced me to this new thing called Twitter. He explained that by setting up a Twitter account, I could send short messages of 140 characters to all my friends. He was so taken by my chemotherapy he told me he’d sign up to follow me to keep abreast of how I was doing. One hundred forty characters at a time! That day, I had one follower!

Within weeks, hundreds of my friends had signed up. Tina later told me she loved getting these tiny messages that kept her abreast of my moods and activities.

I came to realize that this was a really good use of tweeting. Far better than, say, someone telling their followers what they had for breakfast that day, which I have always found sort of goofy. Plus, it brought me in to the social media age and made me a bit more like my buddy Reade, who I admire greatly.

So recently, I asked my friend Tana, who’s a social media maven, how I could extract my tweets. Within hours, she’d sent me a word doc labeled All My Tweets. So I’ve included them in the back of the book.

I guess it was my way of journaling.

Thanks, Reade, for a really good idea, and thanks, Tana, for bringing my tweets out of the cloud. It’s a really good use of social media, and I urge other patients to try it.

FOREWORD

I remember sitting by your bedside when you recalled for me some of your thoughts during your darkest hours in the hospital. You expressed them as Who am I? Where do I come from? Where will I go once I survive? Where would the courage come from to conquer fear? Deathly sick, you were determined to beat the odds. You recalled thinking of your mom, the passionate musician, the high school valedictorian and straight-A college student, the caring mother of four, who fired up her children to make good grades so as to get into the best colleges and universities. The children obliged.

You thought it extraordinary that now, at age seventy-five, she sat at your bedside, praying for you. Had she not done this when you were a child? All those childhood memories came rushing back. Mom did not blink for a moment. She knew in her heart that you would survive. She had said, emphatically, that the Lord was on our side.

You brought up many of the events I had earlier related to you from my youth. This prompted me to later reach for the pen and pass on to you stories from my younger days as part of my legacy to you and your siblings. I approached this with some trepidation due to the nature of those events. Distressing as they were because they were war stories, often better left untold, they taught me self-confidence, courage, and how to overcome fear, all with the objective of fulfilling my need to survive. As I overcame fear, so will you, in your need to survive.

The most vivid memories I have of abject horror or fear are rooted in the experience I lived through at age fifteen during the surface bombing of the city of Hamburg on July 23 and 24, 1942. It was on this occasion that Allied planes, by the hundreds, dropped their incendiary bombs over the city, causing it to burn for two nights and days. The sun never shone. A stray bomb came whistling down, most likely released by a plane that had been hit, lodging itself in the trunk of a tree in our garden, too close to the house for comfort. The family took refuge in the bomb shelter in the basement following the wailing of the sirens.

My father, your grandfather, fearless as he was, hearing the explosion of the bomb and the flash of light that followed, grabbed me by the hand to go outside to assess the damage. I was scared to death as all this happened, while above in the sky, a spectacle emerged that is best compared to Dante’s Inferno. The city was now on fire in the distance. The steady humming and roaring of the planes overhead, flying in formation, was interrupted by the wailing noise of planes literally falling from the sky like balls of fire, having been hit by anti-aircraft artillery.

In the midst of all this, we ran for our shovels and killed the fire that was now smoldering in the trunk of the tree. The events of this night caused me, as a teenager, to lose my fear. Nothing that I have experienced during my entire life could have been worse.

In the late fall of 1944, the German government drafted eligible high school students into the army. Because I had grown up around horses, I considered myself fortunate to be assigned to the last German Cavalry Division located in Hanover. Since my early childhood, horses had been my passion, and knowing the risk of now becoming a soldier, the idea of being with horses comforted me greatly.

The odds of prevailing in the war had clearly turned by the fall of 1944. This was not the German leadership’s assessment; however, it was being supported by its powerful propaganda machine. The fear of a German defeat became more of a fact to those who kept up with events. By the time I arrived in Hanover from our small village north of Hamburg, the last horse of this proud division had been shipped to the eastern front. The purpose was to assist in delaying the advancement of the Russians. We were shipped to Bamberg, a location in Bavaria, for training as infantry soldiers. As a result of excessively long marches, equipped with a steel helmet, a rifle, ammunition belts, and a backpack, with the end goal to reach the Russian front, as a skinny kid, I suffered excruciating pain in both my knees. A sympathetic military doctor gave me papers authorizing me to return to a military hospital in Hanover. He also supplied me with a welcome pair of crutches.

During this journey, which took days, I traveled by military truck, by car and train, whatever mode of transport was available. I experienced a new war phenomenon, that of constant hunger. Whoever had food would share. I remember vividly that trains traveled by night to escape the attacks from British fighter planes on the locomotives during the daylight, thus blocking the rails and delaying the arrival of supplies and troops to the front. I was in one of those attacks.

The military hospital in Hanover, which I eventually reached, had no room for me, as preference was given to critically wounded soldiers. At this point, those of us with the proper medical papers were permitted to go home, if it was possible. So I was left to more riding on the trains, more traveling on an empty stomach, as well as intensified fear of British fighter planes, which by now were aiming at cars and people on roads.

Finally, this endless journey resulted in my reaching my parents’ home on my birthday, March 18, 1945. I remember clearly that in the minds of every German, toward the end of the war, everyone’s goal was to keep Russian soldiers out of Germany. The events of the war on the eastern front had made them vengeful toward the common people, especially women. The British occupied our village on the day of the armistice in 1945. The big question for me, as a German soldier, was to either go in hiding or turn myself in. We counseled within the family and opted for the latter. After weeks as a British prisoner of war, once again suffering from lack of food, I was honorably discharged from the German army, with the consent of the British. A year passed before I could return to high school.

Luckily, I survived the horror of the Second World War and my knees were restored.

My story pales in comparison with the fate of my father—your grandfather—during World War I. As an officer in the German army, he spent three years on the Russian/Ukrainian front, fighting the war of attrition from the trenches. This came to an end only after the Armistice of 1918. The stories that he told about his and his soldiers’ repatriation from the Crimean Peninsula to Hamburg makes me wonder to this day how he made it. Living off the land in Russia, depending on Russian and Polish trains, traveling with an empty stomach as I did later somehow gave him stamina and courage that I wanted to emulate.

In 1950, I immigrated to the United States. The German grain company Alfred C. Toepfer of Hamburg, in whose employ I had served part of my apprenticeship, offered me the opportunity to be assigned to their New York office, which had recently reopened after the war.

Neither my German boss nor my cousin from Wilmington, Delaware, who had sponsored me, were aware that as an immigrant in 1950, I would immediately become subject to US draft law. This was during the Korean War. Thus, when in March of 1951 I received my Dear John letter, signed by President Harry Truman, at the Toepfer office in New York, all of us were surprised. The decision I had to make was to either join the US army or be sent back home to Germany. Against the better judgment of many, I joined the army together with hundreds of other like-minded immigrants from all over the world.

Good fortune was again on my side. After ninety days of basic training (this time in an American uniform), I qualified to attend the Army Language School in Monterrey, California. I graduated as a triple linguist two years later. That is how I became a US citizen. The key to survival was not to flunk the course, which led to immediate transfer to Korea.

Your grandfather and I were both fortunate to survive. And now you too, in a lineage of Hessler fearlessness, have found the will to survive your own war.

Hans H. Jack Hessler

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

—Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

SECTION I

Do Bad Things Really Happen to Everyone?

CHAPTER 1

You’ll Never Get into Dartmouth

W ere you a betting person, you’d never wager on my parents getting together. My mom was raised in a small mining town in rural Arizona, and my dad came from a tiny village north of Hamburg, near the Danish border.

My mom was a gifted pianist and president and valedictorian of her high school graduating class, who longed to study