Getting Bad News

Friday, September 20, 2018

​A few weeks ago — but about twenty days past — I turned yellow, most jaundiced in eye and skin. Damning whatever gods may be, convinced I had somehow contracted infectious hepatitis, I went to see a general practitioner. I did tests, ultra-soundings, CT scans, and ERCP (during which Bismarck physician Dr. Atam Mehtiratta most kindly put a stint in my bile ducts which has since returned me to a more natural color), and a week in the Mayo Clinics of Rochester where I had a test not done in North Dakota, an endoscopic ultrasound (EUS). I also had a little camera inserted into my stomach by a gifted surgeon who looked around. After all this I know what a young general physician trained at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine suspected from the moment he lay eyes on me — I have a malignant tumor on my pancreas that is too large to remove right now — or, as the curious language of pancreatic cancer goes, I’m not a candidate for a whipple at the moment. So, it’s on to a five- to six-week course of radiation/chemotherapy beginning next week with the hope that the tumor can be reduced enough so I can go back and get a whipple — but I have to wait for a month after the end of the treatment before a CT scan to have another look at the size of the tumor, etc.

All of this is offered, my friends, as background to any mood changes and lack of productivity you may notice from me. After sitting around a week in Rochester, spending money at gloomy motels, I’m really ready to get some work done — and to bring my life in the humanities to this little problem before me. Therefore, for what it’s worth, I will be posting some of my meanderings while I continue to do my job as executive director of the North Dakota Humanities Council and executive president of the Great Plains Chautauqua Society — and pay much more attention than I ever have to my wife, children, family and friends — so even this curse is a great blessing.

Among the first thoughts I had after a long weekend last 14-15 September, waiting to hear on Monday afternoon whether or not I was a candidate for the old whipple, were snatches of poetry I thought I had long forgot. When I was growing up in Oliver County, we memorized poetry — some of it pretty damned awful — through high school. Any of you remember William Cullen Bryant’s “Thantatopsis”?

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Tell you what, ‘tis easier saying than doing, I suspect. And I thought of Pliny the Younger and those letters from the first century about what makes life worth living. Finally, I thought about North Dakota’s gift to the millennia, Thomas Matthew McGrath, and that extraordinary short poem so loved by Media Mike Hazard 

How could I have come so far?
(And always on such dark trails!)
I must have travelled by the light
Shining from the faces of all those I have loved. 

As I travel from this place on — and I have no intention of quietly shuffling off to Buffalo in the near future without a considerable fight — I hope for the courage of Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” — especially the fourth stanza:

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night. 

Thank all of you out there for your kind encouragement — McGrath was right about one thing — “North Dakota is Everywhere” — and since we all know that all North Dakotans know each other, there are folks who seemed to have known what was happening to me almost before I did — especially after word was passed along at a certain cultural bastion in Dickinson, North Dakota, the Shamrock. 

I want to talk about the humanities with you from the perspective of someone who has been forced by circumstances to reconsider values and what is really important. Nothing is more important than the extraordinary people I have known. 

The last thing any of us need is any maudlin meanderings or premature eulogies (ad hominem attacks are welcome, however).
​
The Lakota have a great word for the friends I know — I would talk with my kola.