Frank L's Story: prostate cancer

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Frank Luton: a survivor of prostate cancer

My name is Frank. I am 57 years old and I am a prostate cancer survivor. I live in Stone Mountain, Georgia. I have been married to the same woman for thirty-three plus years. We have one child, a daughter, she just graduated from college. She's just got a job yesterday that we think is pretty good and she's gonna get married in about a year. So we are pretty normal family, except for me, of course. For the first 46 years of my life, I lived a real normal life. I was raised by my parents, and then I went to college and I was in the Navy for a spell, and then for about 25 years, I was a manager and an executive with a large corporation.

Then in the summer of 1989, my whole life changed. It was changed with a diagnosis of prostate cancer. I was 46 years old at the time, and let me assure you that cancer, or prostate cancer, was not in my plan. Because you see I had had a fairly successful life. The family was well, I was well, I had a nice job, we were doing quite well, and then I got this phone call. It was from a urologist who my doctor who I had a physical, had referred me to, and he told me that I in fact had prostate cancer and that we had several choices that we had to be making. Well, if you can just imagine and if you're listening to this my voice you probably have had the same experience before, when the doctor tells you the word "cancer" your mind goes blank, absolutely blank. At least, mine did. I mean, I didn't hear a thing he said after that. So the next day I trotted on down to his office, took my wife with me, because I still wasn't listening very well, course she says I don't listen very well at all anyway, but that's another story for another time. Anyway, he went on and on, and it was like I had landed on another planet. I was no longer on planet earth, this man was talking Greek to me, he was talking a language I did not understand, and I didn't really want to listen to him anyway, because I didn't want to be there. But there I was. I had lots of terms I had to decipher. I had procedures I had choices I had to make.

No quick fix

One of the first realizations that I had was that it was not like a broken bone, where they said, "Oh, we know what to do. We'll put it back in place. We'll put a cast on it, and in a couple months, you'll be fine and fit and fiddle." Well, it's not that way with cancer, I discovered. Cancer is something the doctors, they know what it is, and they know what will happen if they don't do something about it, but it's not often they know exactly what to do. So we had to make choices, and that was probably a very tough time in all of our lives. A lesson I learned during that period of time is that number one, cancer is just not a disease that's an individual disease. It's a family disease, because everybody in the family gets caught up and sucked up into trying to make decisions for you and with you. I had surgery, followed by forty days of radiation into the prostate bed, from which the prostate gland was removed, because it was said the prostate gland, or the tumor in the gland, was on the margin. So I had radiation. And then I was told "okay, go away, and we'll get you later". I mean, I was kind of secure when things were happening, but now nothing was going on. What was going to happen?

Well, what did happen was that ultimately in the PSA which is the test which they now use, was new in 1989 or by now it was early 1990, and they were looking at to see what happened with the tumor, and unfortunately my PSA began to rise. Not rapidly, but began to rise. And this pretty much got me to understand that there was still tumor material, prostate cancer material, still in my body, and again, if I didn't do anything about it, it would eventually not do much for me. It was going to be bad news. Well, up until that time, I had been pretty much in a state of depression. But you see, nothing bad had ever happened to me before. But here, I considered this pretty bad, and I just kind of went from pillow to post. I couldn't focus, I couldn't concentrate at my job, my work. I guess if you want to know the truth of the matter, especially when the PSA started rising after the surgery and radiation I was close to being a basket case.

Getting better

Fortunately I got some help, and one of the things that I did, I got mad. I really got mad. I am a people pleaser. I do not like confrontation, and although my doctor was highly skilled, highly educated, I just could not feel comfortable with him. And the first thing I did after I got mad, was, I changed doctors. And I found a doctor who told me that he would work with me so that I would be shot in the back in my mid-nineties by a jealous husband crawling down from the second-storey window. That's an old joke, but that's the kind of spirit I wanted in a doctor. I went on hormone therapy, and I stayed on hormone therapy and as soon as I went on hormone therapy, my PSA dropped to nothing, and it stayed there for the five years that I was on the therapy. Then about four years ago, he said, "let's get off the therapy", lets get off the lupron shots. It was all scary, because I thought keeping my tumor in check, if it in fact was there, went off the hormone therapy in 97. And now it's almost going on four years now where I have had no treatment whatsoever, PSA remains at nothing. And while we don't use the word "cured", we can certainly say that there is no clinical evidence of cancer nor is there any likelihood of clinical evidence of cancer coming back.

All of this happened over a period now of about ten years. And it has changed my life, and changed it dramatically. Still married to the same woman, we still have a nice family, but we enjoy life more than we ever have. I finally realized, and this got me to realize it, that life is not about your job. Life and job are not synonymous with each other. So, in 1995, I figured out a way to retire from my corporate job with benefits and a pension, and am now out on my own, partnering with friends who I have linked up with, and we are running our own business. I work out of my home, I've never been happier in my life, and I'm doing things I have never done before, including taking work trips to South Africa, to Belgium, to Mexico. I've also started doing hobbies I never thought I'd be doing, in 1996 I took up rock climbing, mountain climbing. I work with a group of people in my neighborhood and we have gone to police and built a dental clinic, I'm doing things that I really, really enjoy doing and I'm around people and I allow myself to be around people whom I really, really like.

Climbing the mountain

So, that's pretty much my cancer story, but it's not finished. Because I have learned an awful lot about life, through this process of having to deal with my mortality. What I really learned, and it came to me when I was doing some mountain climbing in 1997 and I had gotten to the top of this mountain that I never in my wildest dreams thought I could reach: that fighting cancer and climbing a difficult mountain have a lot of similarities. Let me just kind of tell you some of the things I think about that. First of all: carry only essentials. Figure out what you need, figure out what you don't need, and remove the rest. Get rid of the trivia and unnecessaries from your life. And sometimes I discovered this even includes people that are unnecessary to your success. Have a plan: be proactive. Don't just allow things to happen to you, go out and make things happen. In mountain climbing, there's an old saying that the way you climb a big mountain is to eat, eat, eat and drink, drink, drink. So, going into areas we've never been before, I have discovered expends an enormous amount of energy, and that includes going into areas that you've never been before, like fighting cancer. Not only physical, but mental, emotional, and spiritual, and you've got to replenish and keep replenishing those energy sources.

I guess when I talk to people that have been diagnosed with cancer, the first word that comes up, either I bring it up or they bring it up, is the word "fear". Fear paralyzed me and put me into a state of depression. There's nothing wrong with fear. There's nothing wrong with being scared, but you cannot allow it to control your life, and you have to move on in spite of that fear. Now fear is commonplace in climbing mountains, I discovered, and paralyzing fear is the number one reason why climbers fail to reach a summit. Courage is not the absence of fear, it's the ability to move forward in spite of fear. I've also taken to writing journals. Journals are not diaries. Journals are powerful climbing tools because it leads to your reflecting what is going on around you and what is changing. People who make big mountain climbs keep journals. They make big changes and they need to be able to think private and personal thoughts to record them and to reflect upon them.

The cancer mountain

Fighting the cancer mountain is a big climb. You need to be able to think private and personal thoughts. You're making big changes. You need to record them. You need to reflect on them. You also need to have a place that you can put those fears so that they don't paralyze you. A journal is a good place to do that. Also I discovered that humor is so very, very important. Seeing what's happening in perspective and being able to figure out what's really important, or separating the unimportant from the important, like I mentioned before, is crucial. Perspective allows you not to take yourself so seriously and be able to laugh at yourself, especially when the going gets tough, or obstacles get in the way. And I've discovered when you have cancer, there's so many things happening to you that you better have a good sense of humor. I even decided about seven years ago, that I wanted to be a standup comedian. Talk about my cancer experience. Of course, the only audience that thinks that's funny is cancer survivors. But Gilda Radner, who's one of my favorite people, the Saturday Night Live comedienne who fought courageously in her climb and her fight against cancer, that humor is truth, only a lot quicker.

You also need support. If you're gonna climb a mountain, you don't do it alone, and you don't climb the cancer mountain alone, either. You need support and encouragement from friends, families, doctors, those people that make successful climbs before you. I joined a cancer support group that meets weekly in 1991. I still go to those meetings. I think that I'm there because I need to help other people that have just begun their climb. And also, you need cheerleaders, people helping you, supporting you, cheering your way all the time. I also know that when you look at a big mountain and you've got to climb it, it looks impossible. And cancer sometimes looks impossible. But what you do, you take one step at a time. And sometimes those steps may be to the side, sometimes those steps may be to the back, but you keep moving forward, and ultimately you get there. And you climb with your mind, not your body. You throw your mind up that mountain, and keep on climbing. You don't climb a mountain in one fell swoop. You climb in small chunks, where you can get safety and support and people. You take well-researched calculated risks, and if you choose to experiment, you only do it at the four-foot level, not at the 30-foot level. So that was the most powerful thing that I got out of one of my new hobbies, which is the combination of rock climbing, hiking, and mountain climbing, and it's a good metaphor for life, it's a good metaphor for climbing mountains.

So, one of the things that I tell people who have been diagnosed with cancer is, "Your life is gonna change, and don't think that you can just get this behind you and go back to your old life. Your life will never be the same again, and everybody who I've talked to tells me after a time, that it's the most powerful, refreshing change they've ever made, and it has freed them to do so many things they never thought they would do. And that's all I have to say.