Winning Over Cancer

She sits on the side of the bed, clasps one of my hands and says, "I have been thinking about you and praying for you."

I say, "I appreciate those prayers but I'll trade them right now for some good advice on how to get my head straight."

She tells me about the stages that most people go through when confronting a serious illness: denial, anger, then a stage when they try to bargain with God by making a promise that if they are allowed to live, they will do something specific with their lives.

"Finally, patients become depressed and out of their feeling of despair they face reality. This is acceptance," she says.

"Look," I say, "I'm not trying to be different and maybe I am just hiding behind an emotional mask, but what you describe is not the way I feel. Denial? Deny what? I've got a mass in my chest the size of an apple. Angry? At whom? I have lived a great life and have been blessed with much more than I deserve. Bargaining with God? The God that I believe in has all the cards . . . I don't think that God has to sit down and negotiate with his Creations. What am I supposed to do -- say that I will be a television evangelist if I am cured?"

She smiles.

"I don't know if I want to be cured that badly," I add with a grin.

"Hamilton, you have totally blown my nice model and obviously you have already accepted the reality of your disease."

"Well, is that okay?"

"It's terrific."

With my diagnosis final, it was time to begin treatment. But what is the best treatment?

A top doctor at the National Cancer Institute in Washington told me that they were getting 88 percent of their non-Hodgkin's lymphomas into complete remission and that 80 percent of those in remission were cured. I did some quick multiplication on the back of an envelope, "That means you have about a 70 percent cure rate?"