ANN:
No, I can't say that I was particularly disturbed. I wasn't happy about it and I was a little bit worried about it.

GORDON:
It didn't shock you.

ANN:
But it didn't shock me, because I really on the whole felt pretty good. And by the way, you asked about the speech. We live in California. I was born on the Isle of Man and raised in Scotland. And I've got, I'm trying to think, five children. Ten grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

GORDON:
By the middle of all this, on the 24th of June, I had a triple heart bypass. So when she came home from the hospital, the hospital had not arranged for her to have any home help, and so we got hold of the discharge nurse and she hadn't realized we didn't have any home help. So we got home health through Medicare. They were supposed to give us home help for six weeks but we terminated after three weeks. We had a lady come in and give her a sponge bath and check her vital signs and so forth, every other day. And then a nurse came and then a social worker came, and at the end of three weeks we decided that I was strong enough and she was strong enough, that we could take care of things by ourselves, so we didn't do that. You don't have any feeling about it any more, do you?

ANN:
No. No I don't even think about it that much.

GORDON:
I volunteer at the Cancer Society, that's how I happened to find out about this, because our son had non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma back in 1990 and had to end up with a bone marrow transplant, which makes us very aware of cancer, and then last year, I had prostate cancer. And I went through hormone treatments and radiation and more hormone treatments, and right now my PSA is .1 so doctor says he thinks we got it all, so we're very aware of cancer in our family. But I volunteer at the Cancer Society one day a week just to kind of pay them back a little bit. Anything else you want to add to this, Ann?

ANN:
No, I can't say, what the doctor told me on the phone that I had cancer, I can't say it was too much of a surprise to me, because, well the first place she told me she had a little bad news for me. So I just knew then that I had cancer, but they were going to do something about it pretty soon so I didn't worry too much about it. And it wasn't too long after I had the surgery that I was up on my feet and able to walk around in the hospital and so forth, and I wasn't in the hospital too long.

Sailing on

GORDON:
Fortunately we caught it early, because the slight amount of vaginal bleeding led to the ultrasound, the ultrasound led to the D & C and the D & C led to the hysterectomy. So we were very fortunate it was caught early. And right now we seem to be sailing along fine. She doesn't have many problems with that, and my prostate cancer seems to be under control, and we're just sailing along.

ANN:
And our son up in Washington, he's doing fine also. By the way, the license plate of our car says "Fight cancer, be a bone marrow donor".

GORDON:
We try to recruit people to be bone marrow donors because our son needed bone marrow, one of his brothers was a match. He has four siblings and fortunately one of them was a match on all six factors, and was a bone marrow transplant donor. So that was really hell when he went through all that. But that's another subject. I don't have any more, do you?

ANN:
No, excepting I worried myself ten times more about Allen.

GORDON:
Yeah, we worried about that it might come back. Well, since the bone marrow transplant it's been nine years now, so we figure probably pretty safe.

ANN:
He goes for checkups. I think what gave us the strength was that we're a very close family and keep in touch with each other all the time; we're always on the phone to each other or e-mail.

GORDON:
Yeah, we have a very closely knit family with a lot of family support. Everybody supports everybody, which makes a big difference, to know that everybody is behind you.

Support network

GORDON:
We get calls from people. Some people just want to talk, they've never faced the "big C" word before, and sometimes you talk to them and it makes them feel better to know that there's other people out there. And also it's important to get into a support group. We have support groups for all kinds of cancers and especially here in Orange Country. I go to a prostate cancer support group. I'm going again tomorrow night. You just sit around and talk about stuff and kind of joke about it a little bit, and makes you feel better to see what other people have been through, and I think a support group is very important.

I can't think of anything else particularly, except the main thing is most of these things are curable. Some people just want to go to the doctor and say, "I don't know what it is, just fix it." And other people say, "I want to find out as much as possible about it". And they search the internet and they talk to the doctor and they get a second opinion and a third opinion and they just beat themselves to death trying to find out as much as possible. I'm sort of in the middle, I want to know but I don't worry myself to death about the internet. But one thing that comes out of the prostate cancer meeting is when you decide what you wanna do, you and the doctor agree on it say well, that's what we're gonna do, let's see what happens. Maybe I should have done this maybe I should have done that, don't be second guessing.

Love and war

ANN:
I was in Scotland and Gordon was in California, and two of my brothers were prisoners of war in Italy during the war. And one of them heard from the chief chemist in the lab where Gordon worked at Shell Oil Company, and he wanted to know if he could get some news about.

GORDON:
He wanted a postmark from a prisoner of war camp for his stamp collection. So he had gotten his name out of a British newspaper and care of the Red Cross in Rome and her brother got the letter.

ANN:
And then he couldn't fly directly so I wrote for him. And then after awhile Gordon and I got to writing to each other, and we wrote for a heck of a long time. Wrote often. Some of our letters were, censored, at that time they censored all mail, practically.

GORDON:
Some were in the bottom of the ocean. I wrote one proposing to her and she never got it, it's at the bottom of the ocean somewhere. The ship got sunk. She came over here, she got, didn't get transportation till right at the end of 1945, and went from Scotland by train to London. And had a harrowing flight from England over to New York, and my aunt met her and took her down to Washington. And my aunt put her on the train and she went by train all by herself, Washington to Chicago, changed trains in Chicago, and from there went all the way across the country to California.

ANN:
Didn't know the money.

GORDON:
Didn't know a lot of things. Anyway, I met her there and three weeks later we were married and that's it. Five kids and ten grandkids later. 54 1/2 years and we're still happily married.