I wanted more money. I continually irritated advertisers. I was replaced by Erma Bombeck, who was less expensive and less irritating.
From October 18, 1989. – JDW
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left,
and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me’. – Erma Bombeck
I know something about cancer.
My aunt, the one who had breast reconstruction after a double mastectomy, has been undergoing chemotherapy for months.
For an inoperable tumor on her spine.
They’ve recently discovered three the-doctor-called-them “hot spots” on her back. She’s just started radiation treatments.
In August, her husband, my uncle, a man who was never sick a day in his life, “never took so much as an aspirin,” was given two months to live.
August, 1988. 1988. So, for more than a year, he’s been waiting to die. As if the chemo and all the rest of it weren’t bad enough.
He finally went to a shrink – “only because it was free,” he quickly points out – and you know what she told him?
“I’m a doctor myself, so I think I can speak with some authority. We’re not infallible. Your physician made a mistake. He was wrong.”
That’s right!, my uncle thought. They. Were. Wrong. And so there’s a bit more skip in his step now. Especially on the days he can get some food down. And keep it there.
My cousin Tami, a bright, beautiful, vibrant being, died at age eighteen. 18. Brain tumor.
I know nothing about cancer.
Erma Bombeck’s latest book is I Want To Grow Hair, I Want To Grow Up, I Want To Go To Boise. It’s about children surviving cancer. It’s about children who know maybe something about Boise the rest of us don’t. (All monies earned by the author will go to cancer research.)
In 1989, sixty-six-hundred (6600) children will be diagnosed with cancer. Each of them find out, this is not your father’s disease. When Bombeck was researching the book, she had difficulty locating men who were willing to talk about their children and their families and themselves and cancer.
Men don’t much to discuss such things. Most of us have watched too many John Wayne movies. The Duke never cried.
Bombeck eventually found three fathers, all in Portland. One, Ken Raddle, is an executive at THIS WEEK magazine. Solid, sturdy, he looks like a man Hollywood might cast to play the role of a little girl’s dad. But, Mr. Raddle is no John Wayne. Not anymore.
“When Ken decided to share responsibilities with his wife,” Bombeck writes, “he accompanied his daughter, Mary Beth, to her spinal tap. When Mary Beth groaned, Ken turned white as a sheet and fainted dead away.”
In remission three years now, Mary Beth is a senior at Grant High School. Two more years and doctors will put a stamp on her medical files: CURED.
Bill Warbington talked of the frustration he felt when his daughter, Erin, lost her leg to Ewing’s sarcoma.
“Sometimes I thought it would be a lot easier if I could send Jan out and I could stay home. It’s harder being gone. You feel such rage. Something is happening to your family, and you can’t do anything about it. If it’s a guy across the street harassing your little girl, you can go rip his throat out, but this you can’t do a thing about.
“Cry in front of your child? No.”
Ken, Bill and Bob Kreinberg met through Candlelighters, a self-help group for parents of children with cancer. “It’s a support group for the long haul,” Raddle says, in a way that lets you know the haul can be long indeed, too long to go it alone.
Bob’s wife is state president for the Oregon chapter, perhaps the best in the nation. Clearly, Penny Kreinberg has been a significant contributor to that reputation.
Her daughter, Sarah, was diagnosed at the age of fifteen (15) months with an inoperable brain tumor. “Three or four times she was terminal,” Penny recalls. “Once the doctor gave her just hours.”
Sarah is eleven (11) now. Long blonde hair, full-faced, a vibrant normal little girl with a tumor in her head. “You have to decide to let the child live,” says Mrs. Kreinberg, “until they die.”
The Candlelighters is a one-hundred-percent (100%)-volunteer effort, where assistance is available twenty-four (24) hours every day. As difficult as it may seem, parents are encouraged to contact Candlelighters as soon as possible after the cancer is diagnosed.
Notes Penny Kreinberg, “Cancer often leads to an isolation, not only of the patient, but also of the parents and the siblings. Candlelighters is a door out of the darkness.”
The Candlelighters can be reached at https://www.candlelightersoregon.org/. It’s help and hope and people who know what you’re going through if your child has cancer.
Erma Bombeck’s book is for all of us. Not just the afflicted and those related, or even those who know someone with cancer. Because I Want To Grow Hair, I Want To Grow Up, I Want To Go To Boise is a book about ‘victims’ who refuse to be victimized.
Life, Bombeck notes, “has a way of going on… and dragging you with it whether you want to go or not.”
Most of us feel like we’re getting the short end of the stick at one time or another.
I Want To Grow Hair, I Want To Grow Up, I Want To Go To Boise tells us about people, sometimes real little, real young people, who not only get the short end of the stick, but also get hit over the head with it. Hard. Often.
And they don’t give up. Real life heroes and heroines involved in real life drama.
I Want To Grow Hair, I Want To Grow Up, I Want To Go To Boise has given my life a new perspective.
One teenager, a cancer patient, offered this thought: “You’ve got to be like me to really appreciate how silly it is to read a letter in Dear Abby’s column about a woman who’s upset because a neighbor hasn’t returned her salad bowls.
It’s like, “Oooooh, lady, how can you stand it?”
Now, when my normally sunny charming personality turns dark, I have only to ask myself, “What’s the matter? Didn’t you get your salad bowls back?”
Works every time.
