I'd like to introduce you to Dave Schott.
He's about 60 years old, weighs about 140 pounds, soaking wet, and speaks with a cadence and home-spun confidence that smacks of Down East -- about anything and everything that enters his mind.
I met him last week over at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth. As in my case, Dave was there to get chemo treatments for his form of lymphoma -- which I might say, for the record, appear to be infinitely more serious, and therefore more complicated, than my brand of NHL.
Before I delve any further into those particular matters, let's dwell on the fact that Dave, from the Portsmouth, NH area, was told by his doctors there that he had three months to live.
That very sobering tid-bit of news was delivered to him by his doctors in Portsmouth twenty-two months ago.
So Dave did what any true-blooded New England Yankee would do: he decided to get a second medical opinion.
He could have gone down to Boston. Instead, Dave opted to see the medical geniuses, who practice and teach at the Dartmouth Medical Center.
Dave's odyssey through the labyrinth of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma began, as it usually does: innocuously.
He didn't think too much about the night sweats. When you age out, he figured, you sweat more.
And then there was the matter of that little pimple on his neck, the one that seemed to get larger and redder with the passage of time.
He said he didn't think too much about that, either. Probably an in-grown hair that would work itself up and out, through the skin, one day.
Problem was: it didn't.
And the blotch on his neck started to hurt. The night sweats became relentless -- in the New Hampshire winter months no less -- plus Dave felt tired most of the time.
Matters were adding up to something no good, so he made the call to his doctor.
Lab tests and body scans painted a dismal picture. He had NHL -- an advanced stage -- and since the disease is systemic, it migrated, like African Army Ants, upward into his brain.
The NHL also spread down his torso into the lungs and appeared to be heading yet further down, into the small intestines.
To borrow Dave's metaphor, and it is a brilliant one, it was like he was going to have to fight terrorist cells in every major city east of the Mississippi.
Dave's Portsmouth oncologists mapped out the attack: multiple surgeries to excise tumors and cut off the lymph nodes; followed by chemo to (a) shrink tumors and (b) to destroy cancerous lymph cells; followed by radiation treatments to mop up what the surgeons either (a) couldn't get to, or (b) missed.
Faced with the prospect of undergoing all of the above, the Portsmouth doctors gave him a 50-50 chance of pulling through.
And so it transpired that, twenty-three months later, the docs in Portsmouth admitted they had ran the table for Dave's treatments, and, thus, delivered the "three-months-to-live" news.
His weight had dropped to 120 pounds.
By the time he arrived at the Norris Cotton Center twenty-two months ago, and at this darkest of hours in Dave's journey, he also exuded the pallor of a quahog.
At this point of the tale, I was compelled to ask Dave a very important, yet self-centered question.
"What's the name of the Dartmouth doctor who's treating you?"
"Doctor Liz Bengston. Have you heard of her?," he answered.
Indeed.
Dave and I now shared more in common than our cancers.
In the many months Liz has been treating him, Dave has regained a healthy skin color.
He has also gained about 20 pounds of lost weight.
Dave says he has "turned the corner." He also has faith that Liz will use her vast arsenal of medical arts and sciences to whip his lymphoma into full remission.
As he explained this, and more, I glanced over towards Dave's IV rack.
A pair of 1000 CC bags containing concoctions of clear chemo hung on the hooks and channeled, through tubes, whatever the Hell was in there into a port some surgeon had embedded into the wall of Dave's chest.
I took a few second to explain that I was getting IVIG, and asked him what chemo he was receiving.
"I don't have a clue what they call it."
"I only know that it's working."
Indeed.
Of course, the time we shared together consumed more than five hours and I would love to have been able to report to you each and every topic we discussed, but we'll let it go at what you have seen above, plus this:
In between our "cancer chat," we were able to work in our opinions about the Red Sox, politics, literature and a wide range of other Bull-Shit, guy-type of stuff that really, really seemed to be insignificant and inconsequential under the circumstances.
I also wish to report that there isn't one femta-gram of self-pity in Dave. There is only hope.
And trust.
I finished my session long before Dave's IV drips had done their thing, so I took my leave by saying: "Hope to meet you again one of these days."
To which Dave responded: "That would be great! Maybe we can go out, and have a few beers."
Let me tell you: Dave is My Kind of Guy!
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