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Cancer: A Thief in the Night

Cancer is a disease that takes years to develop, yet it can plunge you and your family into upheaval the instant it takes the doctor to deliver the news no one wants to hear: "What we've found is a malignancy."

At the time my cancer was discovered in 1991, I'd never been seriously ill in my life. By then I was six years removed from daily politics, busy running my own consulting firm in Washington. I'd entered government life back in 1970 as press secretary to the assistant U.S. Senate minority leader, Robert Griffin of Michigan, my home state. I went on to serve in the same capacity for Jacob Javits, helping to reelect him to his fourth and final term as senior U.S. senator from New York.

In 1976, I took a leave of absence from Senator Javits's office to handle press duties for President Gerald Ford's campaign committee. Coming on the heels of the Watergate scandal, the election was a debacle for the Republicans. Jimmy Carter edged out Ford for the White House, and the Democrats gained seats in both the House and the Senate. Not long afterward, I became communications director and chief spokesman for the Republican National Committee as the party set about rebuilding itself.

I'd been hooked by the excitement of a presidential race, though, and had the urge to do it again. To help shape a winning campaign and be part of moving the country in a direction you believe will benefit the American people is a dream that too few ever experience, especially someone like me--an immigrant who as a boy came to the United States from England on a battered troop-carrier ship following World War II.

George Bush, the former congressman from Texas, United Nations ambassador, and director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was gearing up for a presidential run in 1980. He was widely respected, but certainly considered a dark-horse candidate. Although I didn't know him well on a personal level, I'd admired him as a public official. So I was delighted to become his press secretary in 1979. The association was to last into his second term as vice president under Ronald Reagan.

In 1985, I decided to leave politics and launch my own business. As happens to many public servants, I was worn out from the eighteen-hour days and constant travel. It wasn't unusual for a foreign trip with the vice president to log twenty-five or thirty thousand miles over the course of three weeks as we leapfrogged from Alaska to Japan to Korea to Singapore to Australia to New Zealand to China to Hawaii before finally returning home. And the fall political campaigns frequently resembled a cross-country derby. We used to wring a few extra hours out of the day by opening with an early-morning campaign stop on the East Coast. Then we'd work our way west through the time zones, with stops in, say, Chicago, Kansas City, and Denver, before winding up in Los Angeles by nightfall.

Another reason for my departing the White House: I was newly married. While I was press secretary, I had hired Valerie Hodgson, a twenty-seven-year-old photographer for United Press International, to be the vice president's official photographer. The year was 1983.

The two of us nearly ended up being the proverbial ships that pass in the night. Valerie's first day on the job coincided with my leaving for a fellowship at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Then she left the White House to pursue a freelance career shortly before I came back to Washington. But during my sabbatical, I had accompanied the vice president on a trip to California. Valerie and I struck up a conversation aboard Air Force Two, went out for a late dinner that night in San Diego, and started dating. We were married on November 18, 1984, two weeks after the Reagan-Bush ticket's landslide victory for a second term.

Our daughter Randall was born in 1987, and Adrienne arrived three years later, on my fiftieth birthday. My two daughters from my first marriage were already in their twenties: Susan, a speech pathologist in Livonia, Michigan, and Laura, a communications major at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

In all, it was a happy time. I had a wonderful family, and a thriving business that allowed me to enjoy them. Then everything was abruptly put on hold.

The ordeal began innocently enough: I had a dull pain in my right side. Valerie and the kids had been suffering from the stomach flu since Labor Day, so I figured I'd picked up what they had and didn't pay much attention to it. But after it persisted for a few days, I went to our family doctor for an examination. She poked around a bit, told me not to worry, and sent me home. When the pain didn't subside, I saw her partner, with the same result.

Several days passed, and still I kept complaining--with little sympathy from Valerie, I might add. "Look," she said one night, "if you think there's something wrong, why don't you go down to the emergency room and have an X ray taken?" Which I did. My doctor read the films the next day and assured me she saw nothing unusual.

"But there's obviously something bothering you," she continued. "So I'm going to schedule you for an MRI scan tomorrow afternoon." No sooner did I return home from the imaging procedure than the phone rang. It was my doctor. "I want you to get over to the hospital," she said urgently, naming a nearby community hospital. "You've got an inflamed appendix, and you need to have it taken out now.

"I've checked you in. A surgeon will meet you there and remove it right away. I'll see you in the recovery room."

I tossed some clothes into an overnight bag, called a taxi, and went off to have an appendectomy, or so I thought.

The next thing I remembered was waking up in a darkened hospital room. Though still drowsy from the anesthesia, I knew it was late at night, perhaps 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. Three hospital attendants were hoisting me into a bed. I hurt badly all over and sensed something was seriously wrong. But I was too exhausted to pursue the thought. I just wanted to sleep.

At about 7:30 in the morning, the bedside phone rang, jarring me partially awake.

"Teeley! How ya feeling?"

It was George Bush calling.

"I really feel bad, I'm sorry, I can't talk now," I mumbled, and dropped the receiver back into the cradle.

Christ, I thought to myself, I just hung up on the president of the United States.