My mother, Helen Wagner, died of cancer three months after I turned 14. She lived long enough to see me graduate from eighth grade. She had spent the last few years keeping herself alive by holding out to attend the next big family event. But with my brother’s wedding in the rear-view mirror and my graduation over, there was nothing on the calendar for the next three years.
Mother was short of her 50th birthday when she died. I don’t remember anytime during my growing-up years that she was not suffering from lung cancer. But I do recall she suffered through numerous radiation treatments and at one time had been declared totally recovered.
But she continued to smoke two packs a day, and the cancer eventually got to her. Her death was devastating to me. My father, the only other still living at home, in his grief, all but disappeared from my day-to-day life. He left our small apartment for work long before I woke school mornings and spent most of his evenings at the Elks Club commiserating and playing cards with his friends. Like me, he was in pain.
I did not become healed until I married my wife, Connie, seven years later.
Connie and my younger son, Jason Peter Wagner — he used Jay P. Wagner for his newspaper byline — died of cancer mid-July 2009. He had suffered quietly with melanoma for months, hiding the ugly growth on his chest from everyone, even his wife. Like so many men, he thought if he didn’t acknowledge it, it would go away. But eventually, the cancer moved up through his body to his brain and bit by bit cancer won. Connie stayed with him 24/7 his last weeks in hospice and was with him alongside his wife, children, and a few close friends the afternoon he died.
I never thought he would die. Right up to that day he did, I somehow expected him to one day jump out of that deathbed and get back to writing, his favorite activity.
Jay was the consummate writer. His ability to share any story led him from a time as a reporter and then editor of The REVIEW to reporter positions with the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, SD, and The Des Moines Register as well as a stint as editor of The Iowan magazine.
Jay loved all things Iowa, especially rural Iowa, and for a time crisscrossed the back roads of the state writing three columns weekly for The Register on agriculture and small-town Iowa. One day his column might talk about the difference in Iowa and North Carolina hog operations and the next day where to find the best pork tenderloins.
He loved to cook, was attempting to write an all-Iowa ingredient cookbook when he died and was huge baseball fan. Most important to me, he could always make me laugh. I miss him every day.
A year ago January, I learned that I too, had cancer. Even though I had taken Connie to the clinic that morning, it was my pharmacist who noticed I was suspiciously yellow when next I stopped there to pick up my wife’s medicine. A lengthy meeting with my doctor the next day confirmed I had cancer on the neck of my pancreas,
Fortunately, it was Stage I, still only the size of a dime, and had not spread.
A meeting was scheduled with Dr. Heidi McKean at Avera McKennan Hospital’s Prairie Center in Sioux Falls, and a plan was put in place to defeat the disease.
First, there would be 12 rounds or chemotherapy, one every other week for 24 weeks. That would be followed by something called a Whipple surgery — one of the most difficult, I was told.
But God is good. The chemo infusions each lasted three days. They would start Monday mornings with a five-hour treatment while sitting in one of the recliners at the Prairie Center. Then I’d head home with a black canvas bag that contained additional chemo and a small pump to continue the injection until Wednesday afternoon. I was later told it was the strongest chemo treatment in an arsenal of drugs.
The Mondays at the Prairie Center went well for me. I’d fall asleep soon after settling into the recliner. It was my wife-turned-personal-nurse, Connie, who had to sit in the corner, in a much harder chair, trying to find ways to pass the time each visit.
At one point, I had to stop the procedure for five weeks while my foot doctor did surgery twice on my left big toe. It wasn’t possible to do both because the chemo and antibiotics canceled each other. It was determined by my foot and cancer doctors that the best action was to first heal the foot and then the cancer, But, in the process, I found myself spending most of July at Osceola Regional Health Center in Sibley where I regularly received two infusions of antibiotics a day to route the infection around the surgery of the toe.
But when we were able to schedule them, the chemo treatments went smoothly, and I had few side effects, except perhaps for a slight loss of appetite. The treatments did not destroy the cancer, but they did shrink the dime-size spot a little and kept the disease from spreading.
Early in November I had my final meeting with Dr. Michael Person, my cancer surgeon. He told me everything was “go” for the Whipple procedure, but that only one out of four individuals my age are positive prospects.
“We thought you’d shout stop after two or three of the strong chemo treatments,” he said. “Because you stuck in there, we believe you are strong enough for the surgery.”
But since it was so close to Christmas, it was decided to schedule the operation for Jan. 6.
The procedure went smoothly for the most part, although the surgical team had to go back the following day to reconnect a leak in one of the many small veins.
I never had any pain and recovery has been good.
My most difficult issues have been regaining my appetite and that I want to sleep all the time. My prognosis is that the cancer has been eradicated, and I am — for an 85-year-old — good to go. Connie, as my caregiver, has had to go through much more the last few weeks than I have.
Considering my experiences with my mother and son, I feel blessed. But I also am experiencing survivor’s guilt. I know that 41 percent of Americans — including numerous N’West Iowans — have or have suffered from cancer.
I do not want to seem to brag about my condition. I simply believe that there are many in our REVIEW readership base who are interested in my condition and are praying for Connie and me. I wanted them to know, that for the moment, “all is well!”
Peter W. Wagner is the founder/publisher of The N’West Iowa REVIEW. He lives in Sibley and may be reached at pww@iowainformation.com.