If you are a cancer patient, primary caretaker, relative or friend of a cancer patient, or if you are concerned about cancer in your future, this is a must read book for you. Written in a humorous manner by a prostate cancer survivor, now undergoing chemo and radiation treatments for lung cancer, this book can give you a smile, provide you with a more positive attitude, and perhaps alleviate some of your fears. There are two ways you can face the words, "You have cancer." You can cry, moan, feel sorry for yourself, and blame everyone and everything for what is happening to you. Or you can get mad as hell and say you won’t be intimidated. You can kick butts, take names and refuse to let the disease control your life. The author chose to fight, and he doesn’t mean a political correctness slap on the wrist. He means a tooth and talon, claws and fangs, no-holds-barred battle. Join him in combat as he uses a sense of humor, a positive attitude and faith as his weapons.

Hot Flashes, Swollen Ankles and Sore Breasts. And I'm a Man

How One Man Used a Sense of Humor to Combat Cancer - TwiceBy Bob Vance Moulder

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2009 Bob Vance Moulder
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4490-0159-9

Chapter One

I have always had a weird sense of humor. I have also been blessed with a vivid imagination; the ability to find something unique, unusual and most of the time funny out of dire situations.

For me, imagination has meant the difference between following an ill-tempered mule up and down red clay cotton rows in south Mississippi where I was born and raised, or filming pretty girls on Brazil's Copacabana beach with the benefit of a liberal expense account.

It has meant the difference between writing my stories in an air-conditioned office, or crawling out of bed before daylight to feed the chickens, slop the hogs and milk uncooperative cows that never enjoyed the feel of my cold hands.

Imagination has made it possible for me to travel throughout much of the world rather than simply reading about far-off places in newspapers and magazines.

More importantly, since I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2004 and had to undergo radiation treatments every day for eight weeks, my imagination enabled me to survive in a fantasy world rather than dwelling on the reality of what was actually happening to my body.

Every day when I stretched out on a hard table and prepared myself for the "zapping" I knew was coming, I invented stories I knew were not true, but never-the-less stories that made the routine of my treatment far more bearable.

I pictured myself taking a twilight stroll in my nice middle-class neighborhood, enjoying the coolness of twilight, when suddenly garage doors started opening and closing with rapidity.

Microwave ovens turned on and off, porch lights blinked with the regularity of Christmas tree decorations, and irate neighbors screamed at me to go home and put on a protective lead overcoat so all the radiation in my body would not contaminate the neighborhood.

I imagined commercial and military jets cruising peacefully on auto-pilot at 38,000 feet until they passed directly over me and began performing uncontrollable barrel rolls, figure eights and loops.

I visualized the expressions of Shopping Mall security guards when anti-theft devices set off car horns all over the parking lot when I got out of my lead-lined vehicle to go inside to shop; and people wearing hearing aids grabbing their ears and screaming in agony when I moved within their range.

I'm sure many of you think a man of my age fantasizing about such things while undergoing a serious procedure like radiation for an even more serious disease like cancer is rather ridiculous - perhaps, even a bit silly.

But my imagination has been a salvation for me during hard and trying times since I was a small boy growing up on a 40-acre-and-a-mule farm during the Great Depression.

My fantasies were all I had to occupy my time.

I remember distinctly when I began creating the imaginary images that would later enable me to survive diversity when it would have been so easy to give in to the pressures and feel sorry for myself.

I sat cross-legged on the front porch of our faded, rough-lumber farm house and listened in total rapture as an old hobo reminisced about his life on the road.

Every gesture the tattered old man made with crusty, arthritic hands massaged my imagination. Each word he spoke nourished my dreams.

Fueled by his often exaggerated tales, my imagination took flight. It introduced me to a wondrous life that existed outside the red clay hills of south Mississippi.

While the old hobo sipped from a dipper of cool well water, I closed my eyes, trying to visualize all the exciting places he had talked about.

The old man patted me on the head. "You're alright, boy. You like hearing me talk about all the places I've been, don't you?"

"Yes, sir, and someday I'm gonna do the same thing."

"How old are you, boy?"

"Tomorrow's my birthday. I'll be ten-years-old."

"That's what I figured. Still, you're about the age I was when I caught my first freight out of Oklahoma." He paused a second. "I'll be leaving directly - if you want to tag along. We'll head down the road until we hit the big water. Then we'll flip a coin and put our trust in lady luck. Well, boy, you want to go with me?"

As young as I was, I knew the old man had no intentions of taking me with him. I also knew I wouldn't get ten feet from the house before my father grabbed me by the nape of the neck and turned me over his knee. But I wanted to go. I wanted to go so badly I could feel the bottoms of my bare feet tingling.

I envied the free-wheeling hobos. But I didn't envy them enough, or want to go badly enough, to accept the hunger, the deprivation or the loss of pride they endured to maintain their chosen lifestyle.

The Depression had taught me what doing without was like. It also taught me how to recognize God-given talents - my imagination, sense of humor and a positive attitude - that would in the future make my life bearable; both emotionally and financially.

When my parents decided to bring me into their world, they earned a respectable living teaching at eighth grade rural schools during the winter and working a 40-acre farm during the summer.

The three-room house, where we camped during the summer between school sessions, had no insulation in the walls or flooring. Where there should have been a ceiling, 2"x4" rafters spaced 24 inches apart crossed each room eight feet above the floor.

The last thing I saw every night before turning out the lamp, and the first thing I saw every morning when I opened my eyes, were those bare rafters above my head.

With one exception.

Early one spring morning during my sixth year, I awoke staring into the slitted eyes of a five-foot-long rattlesnake coiled around a rafter directly above my head.

Its triangular head hung down about six inches.

Its forked tongue flitted in and out so rapidly each movement blurred into the other.

I was hypnotized, unable to move.

Screams built inside my chest, but I heard no sound. When a mournful whimper finally broke through my terror, it led the way for screams that literally blasted my parents up from the breakfast table.

Seeing me sitting up in bed with my eyes locked on the rattlesnake slowly descending from the rafter, my father reacted without thinking.

He grabbed a single-barrel, .410 gauge shotgun he kept beside his bed, pointed at the snake and pulled the trigger.

The load of birdshot blasted a hole in the cedar-shingle roof the size of a basketball.

Wood splinters, accumulated dirt dauber nests and several bloody pieces of a still-writhing rattlesnake splattered the clean, sun-dried sheets mother had put on the bed the night before.

Pieces of the rattler's body barely touched me before she jerked me out of bed like a field worker handling a 100-pound sack of fertilizer.

The next morning, dad rewarded me with a rare 5-cent candy bar for my bravery by taking me to Mr. George's Store, the one-and-only shopping emporium in the tiny rural community of Lorena where we lived.

In fact, you might say the store was Lorena if you discounted the gristmill, a dilapidated wooden building slowly settling under its own weight, and my preacher grandfather's house, a six-room dogtrot structure located diagonally across the narrow dirt road from the store.

Yet it was around Mr. George's store that life revolved in the community.

The narrow, ship-lap, frame building with its doublewide, unscreened front door, potbelly stove, manually operated gasoline pump, and outdoor ice box large as a bathroom in many of today's homes, was also Lorena's town hall.

It was a meeting place where farmers, loafers, and unemployed farm hands gathered to sit around the stove and swap stories. Since television did not exist and there were few battery radios in the community in the early 1930's, the store was also a place to hear travelers relate news of the world outside the borders of our tiny community.

Everybody in a ten-mile circle bought, sold, or traded with Mr. George at one time or the other. So he knew most of their secrets. But the regular loafers at the store knew that whatever secrets Mr. George knew, he would never reveal to anyone else. They just pointed at a sign hanging over the door: "Keep Your Mouth Shut, Your Bowels Open, and Believe in Jesus."

Before my father and I arrived at the store that morning, I agonized over what I would buy with my nickel. Would I buy a Baby Ruth candy bar, or perhaps twenty-five foil-wrapped chocolate kisses? Or would I buy a Coca-Cola or a peach soda? Maybe I would torture myself by buying an Orange Crush in a brown bottle that didn't allow me to see how much was left until the last drop was gone.

Between the kidding I received from the store loafers who wanted to advise me how to spend my nickel, and the indecision I went through staring into showcases and drink boxes, it took a long ten minutes to decide on my special treat.

After joking with me for several minutes, and making suggestions as to what I should buy, the loafers became so interested in their argument over what I should buy, they forgot I was there.

I was pleased. I could take all the time I needed to make up my mind.

Eating only a nibble of candy at a time, or sipping just enough of my drink to wet the inside of my mouth, I managed to extend my pleasures.

Sitting cross-legged on the counter where Mr. George measured yards of cloth from colorful bolts Mother could rarely afford, I drank in their yarns with every sip of soda and with every bite of already melting candy that clung to the roof of my mouth like sweet glue.

Even though there was little I enjoyed more than listening while a group of old men sat around a pot-bellied stove in the store and told stories, I was never allowed to participate. But on that never-to-be-forgotten Saturday, my Uncle "Cutthroat" Jim surprised me by saying, "Take the floor, boy. It's all yours. Let's hear about your snake."

For close to an hour, surrounded by masters of the storytelling art, I stretched, grimaced and enlarged on a tale destined to become a classic whenever and wherever men gathered to chew, spit and swap tall tales. And my father earned the dubious reputation as being the only man in south Mississippi to blow a hole in the ceiling of his house while in the process of killing a rattlesnake.

I realized that day if I could make a living telling stories, if I could utilize my sense of humor and could allow the fantasies created by my imagination to be released unabated, my life would be far more enjoyable than following an ill-tempered mule up and down a cotton row.

That is what I have done for more than fifty years. My life has not only been enjoyable, but my stories have also been profitable enough for me to support my family in a much better manner than if I had I remained at home and became a farmer.

Many people, even some of my close friends, cannot understand how I can make jokes when I am drowning in sorrow or worries. But those are the times when humor tosses me a life preserver and brings me back to solid ground.

While sitting in a cancer center lobby with nearly a dozen other patients waiting my turn to be treated with radiation, I jokingly told a man sitting beside me that so many members of my family had suffered from cancer that when we planned a family reunion the first invitations we mailed went to various cancer societies and foundations.

The majority, who overheard my statement, understood and apparently appreciated my sense of humor. But one woman, unattractive at her best, apparently was in the minority.

Sitting across from me with her hands gripping the chair handles as if she unclenched them God would surely snatch her away in a cloud of radioactive dust, she obviously took umbrage at my discussing cancer in such a lighthearted manner.

"You should be ashamed making jokes about something as terrible as," and she whispered the word, "cancer. Don't you realize all these people are terrified of dying from," and again she whispered, "cancer" almost as if she said the word aloud the angel of death would strike her down without the opportunity to make even one last wish.

I thought of many ways to answer her question - and some would have filled me with a perverse satisfaction. But none were befitting of the training I had received from a doting mother and grandmother about how to conduct myself as a true southern gentleman.

Fortunately, I was saved from what could have been an embarrassing altercation when her name was called. She paused a moment at the doorway to the radiation chamber to glare at me one last time as if confirming her opinion of me was lower than dirt.

I'm not sure what I would have said to her if she had remained, but I like to think I would have told her more people have survived cancer with faith, humor and a positive attitude than have ever been cured by burying their heads in the sand.

Chapter Two

After my wife of more than four decades was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1987, I went through all the feelings that go with such a diagnosis; disbelief, anger, and finally just plain numbness.

When her oncologist told her she had a maximum of six months to live, she bowed her back and said, "No way will I die before my grandson is born."

She went through two painful surgeries, a long bout with chemo and eight weeks of radiation, yet she lived not six months as predicted, but six years. And she flew from Mississippi to Minnesota and held her grandson in her arms only minutes after he was born.

During those six years, I retired early and we did all the things we had dreamed of doing after I retired.

We spent almost a month with our daughter, an army officer and helicopter pilot stationed in the Bavarian part of Germany. During that Christmas month, we traveled over much of snow-covered Germany, Austria and Switzerland. We spent two weeks in the Caribbean on the beautiful island of St. John, and finally we took a two-month driving tour through the American West.

Those are the beautiful memories I have retained, not the painful ones. There were other memories that will always be with me and are helping me to endure my own cancer treatment; her strength, her sense of humor, her faith and her positive attitude.

When she died six years after her original diagnosis, two months before my 65th birthday, I was lost.

It would have taken so little effort for me to lean back in my rocking chair and succumb to the slow, boring existence that befalls many people after retirement - especially after the loss of a spouse.

But I didn't.

I fought with everything I had not to give in either to age or to my grief. I was resolved not to sit at home and feel sorry for myself.

I was equally determined to find the will and the strength to abandon my fears, to find out the difference between just surviving and really living during my so-called golden years.

Still, my fight was not easy. I went through many trying times, many painful times, and many long days and even longer nights.

Then I remembered something my wife said to me not long before she died. "I want your promise that you won't give up when I'm gone," she said. "I want your word you won't waste your life sitting at home grieving. I want you to live, to see this country as we have planned for so many years." I nodded, but I promptly erased the idea from my mind. Traveling alone was a problem I didn't want to face, to even think about. Yet in my grief, I finally realized with a clarity I had not experienced since her death she was right as usual, that perhaps traveling alone was something I should consider.

Since I had traveled throughout this country and much of the world during my work years, and since those years had been spent as a writer, I asked myself - what better way than travel and writing about my travels to ease my pain and to find myself again?

I had to create a new life, and exercising the vagabond dreams of my childhood to follow the sun was the most logical solution I had yet found.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Hot Flashes, Swollen Ankles and Sore Breasts. And I'm a Manby Bob Vance Moulder Copyright © 2009 by Bob Vance Moulder. Excerpted by permission.
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