No Such Thing as a Bad Day: A Memoir

Book by Hamilton Jordan

Chapter One: Part One

FIRST TIME AROUND

I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was lying in my hospital bed. My doctor had just left to review the tissue report with the pathologist...he promised to come back within the hour. I had been in the hospital now for five days and had had every test in the book. And it all came down to a person sitting in a laboratory somewhere peering into a microscope at my cells and deciding what kind of cancer I had...and whether I would live or die. Would it be curable, or even treatable? Would I have a fighting chance, or be left to hope for a miracle, racing around the world to off-beat clinics searching for a cure?

My dear mother and sister made small talk to pass time. A nurse's aide brought in a form for me to fill out evaluating the hospital services.

"Have you enjoyed your stay, Mr. Jordan?" she asked.

"I'll tell you in an hour," I joked. She didn't understand.

I found myself knotting up the bed sheet in my hand. The emotional mask that I had been wearing for my family's sake was close to being shattered. Just to escape, I turned on the television and surfed from channel to channel, hoping to be distracted, and was startled to see a picture of myself on the local CBS affiliate. I turned the volume up in time to hear, "CBS has learned that former Carter aide Hamilton Jordan is in an Atlanta hospital and has been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer."

Panic gripped my body as I looked at an old photo of myself on the television screen and these strange words sunk in.

My mother's face dropped and my sister watched me closely for a reaction. Then logic returned. If my doctor, who just left my room, didn't know what I had, how in the hell did CBS News know? Like so many other times, the media had only half the story right.

The panic caused by the news report subsided as we continued to wait. Suddenly, my room was flooded with doctors: the oncologists, my pulmonary specialist, the radiologist. I tried to read them like a jury...one was smiling slightly, the others were not. What did it all mean?

The radiologist broke the ice. "Hamilton, when more than one doctor comes into your room, it is usually pretty good news."

"All I ever wanted was a fighting chance."

"Well, Mr. Jordan," my lead doctor said, "you certainly have that." He paused, glanced down at a written report and looked up. "You have diffuse histiocytic lymphoma. Ten years ago, this would have been a death sentence, but this is an area where we have made progress...there are a number of treatments that are reasonably effective in dealing with this disease."

I stuck on one word. "Reasonably, doctor? What does that mean?"

"This is one of those 'good news, bad news' situations. The bad news is that you have a very aggressive cancer. The good news is that aggressive cancers divide rapidly, which means that they are particularly vulnerable to chemotherapy and radiation at the time of cell division. We've got to find a treatment your cancer will respond to."

He went on to tell me that I would need to undergo further tests, but that the evidence at this point was that the cancer was confined to my chest area. "We plan to radiate your chest. The bottom line is that we have a good shot at curing this."

That was too vague, and I learned for the first of many times that cancer patients should only ask questions if they are prepared to hear the answer. "What is a 'good shot,' doctor?"

"Well, every patient is different...."

"Just quantify it for me!" I interrupted.

"I don't like to use numbers, Mr. Jordan, but if you insist...."

"I do," I said firmly.

"About half of the patients who have non-Hodgkins lymphoma would achieve a remission with the therapy we will give you. Half of those will be free of disease five years out."

I was doing the math in my head. "So overall, I have about a 25 percent chance of being in the group that obtains a remission AND is cancer-free five years later?"

"That's about right, Mr. Jordan."

I was devastated to hear my chances of being alive reduced to statistics, but I had asked for it. And from that point on, I insisted that doctors avoid vague terms and quantify my situation. When the stats were favorable, I believed them and clung to them. When they were discouraging, I either tossed them aside or made up my mind to be one of those who beat the odds.

But when the doctors left my room that afternoon, I was faced with the cold, harsh fact that the odds greatly favored the cancer winning this battle, not me.

I didn't sleep much that night.

The story had actually begun on August 24, 1985, a day frozen forever in my memory.

I knew something was wrong when my family doctor sent me to the hospital for my annual chest X ray, which he had routinely taken in his office for fifteen years. A couple of hours later as we sat in his office, he talked quietly on the phone to the radiologist. I strained to hear, but all I could make out was, "I understand, yes...I understand."

He hung up the phone, turned away as if to avoid contact, slid the X rays out of the large brown envelope, turned them upright one by one and lined them up on the illuminated viewer. What had taken him seconds seemed like hours. He took a deep breath, pointed with his finger to a smoky area on one film and said slowly, "Hamilton, I hate to tell you this, but you have an abnormal chest film."

He paused to watch me as his words sank in. "This spot here is some kind of mass...some kind of growth."

"Could it be a cancerous growth?" I asked quietly.

"Yes," he said slowly, picking his words carefully, "and most likely it is a cancerous growth, but we will not know for sure until we take a biopsy."

I was stunned and just sat there, staring at the film. I felt like someone had suddenly pulled a plug and all the energy and feeling were flowing from my body. I had a surreal sense of standing apart from this bizarre scene and watching myself sitting in the examination room, talking with my doctor friend, asking the predictable questions:

"Do we know for sure it is cancer?"

"What kind of cancers would grow in that area?"

"What can I do?"

"Will I live?"

After he had repeated six or eight times, "We won't know any more until we do the biopsy," I stopped asking questions and was ready to go home.

My doctor kindly offered to drive me home so that he could tell Dorothy, my wife. I thanked him but said that I wanted to be alone.

I was barely out of the parking lot when Dorothy called on the car phone to report something cute our eighteen-month-old son, Hamilton Jr., had said. Later, she would tell me that she had sensed something different in my voice. "What's wrong?" she asked.

This was not the way to tell her, I thought. I needed to be able to hold her in my arms, comfort her and be comforted, but I couldn't hold back. I needed her to know and simply blurted it out: "Richard found a mass in my chest and thinks it's cancer!"

Dorothy was shattered. She tried to be strong and brave for me, but I could feel the fear oozing out of her every pore. For the first of many times, I realized that it is often more difficult to be the loved one than the cancer patient.

I will never forget taking Hamilton Jr. for a walk in his stroller that same afternoon. I welcomed getting away from the house and from Dorothy and having time to think...but I could only think about him. I stopped, picked him up, and hugged him as I cried softly so as to not scare him. Would I live to see his second birthday? Or his third? I fought back tears every time I looked at him and was thankful he did not understand that something bad was going on with his "da-da."

Dorothy and I spent the evening on the phone alerting family and friends...these were terrible calls to make. Everyone tried to be optimistic and struggled to say the right thing.

"Maybe it is just a virus you caught in Vietnam," offered my mother, who was battling lung cancer herself.

"It could be benign," my sister suggested.

"You hear about mistaken X rays all the time," a close friend said.

While my family was filled with wishful thinking, I chose to look at it differently. This was definitely serious, probably cancerous, and the big question was whether or not it was curable. I started off thinking that my chances were not very good while my family was hoping and praying for tropical diseases and mistaken readings of my film.

I checked into the hospital the next morning for a complete battery of tests. It would take a couple of days. I resolved to be brave for my family. If I fell apart, I would be no good for myself or for them. I hid my very real fears and spent the next several days cracking jokes and trying to make the best of a miserable situation.

While I was waiting for the report from the biopsy, a friend who happened to be a professional counselor stuck her head through the door. "In the mood for some company?"

"You bet...am I glad to see you," I replied.

She sat down on the side of the bed, grasped my hand, and -- fighting back tears -- said, "I have been thinking about you and praying for you."

My first thought was that she was going to have to pull herself together before she could help me. "I appreciate your prayers but right now I would gladly trade them for some advice on how to get my head straight. We've been on a roller coaster, and I have to settle down and live with this thing, whatever it is."

"Hamilton, the best thing you can do is to understand the various stages people go through when confronting a serious illness."

I nodded. That made sense.

She continued: "Most people deny their illness initially. They hope that they will wake up the next morning from a bad dream. They refuse to face reality by denying reality.

"The second stage is usually anger," she continued. "People get mad at the world, at their family members, themselves and at God. They ask, 'Why me? What have I done to deserve this?'

"Next, people usually bargain with God by making a promise that they will do something worthwhile with their lives if they are allowed to live."

"Finally, patients become depressed, but out of that feeling of despair, people ultimately face their reality. This is acceptance -- when a person puts aside his anger and denial, looks squarely at his problem, accepts and deals with it."

"Look," I said, "I'm not trying to be different and maybe I am just hiding my real feelings, but what you describe is not the way I feel. Denial? Deny what? I've got a mass in my chest the size of an apple. I have seen it on the X ray, know it's there...so there's no use in denying it. Angry? At whom? I have lived a great life and have been blessed with much more than I deserve. I don't want to die, but if I died tomorrow, I wouldn't have much room to complain. I don't know 'Why me?' but 'Why not me?' Maybe God gave me this disease because he thinks that I am strong enough to handle it."

"Bargaining with God?" I continued. "The God that I believe in has all the cards....I don't think that God has to sit down and negotiate with His creations. What am I supposed to do, say that I will be a television evangelist if I am cured?"

She smiled.

"I don't know if I want to be cured that badly," I added with a grin.

"Hamilton, you have totally blown my theory and obviously you have already accepted the reality of your disease."

"Is that okay?" I asked.

"It is terrific!" she said as she bent over and gave me a big hug. "It's terrific!"

LEARNING ABOUT CANCER...THE HARD WAY

Unfortunately, I know a hell of a lot about cancer.

Back in 1975, on a beach vacation with my parents, my father had complained of sharp pain in his hip, which he dismissed as "arthritis." Weeks later, my mother called to report that my father had been hospitalized with something she would only describe on the phone as "serious." I rushed home and went directly to the doctor's office. He held my father's bone scan against a light, revealing a perfect outline of his skeleton with what looked like twenty or thirty spots sprinkled across his frame. His body looked like a Christmas tree strung with white lights.

"Those are 'hot spots,'" the doctor explained. "Each of them is a cancerous growth in the bone. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but your dad has metastatic prostate cancer."

I bombarded him with questions....How did this happen? What was his prognosis? Was it curable? Would my father die?

"Sometimes we find a lump in a man's prostate gland during a physical. We do a biopsy. If it's cancer and there's no evidence of spread, we take the prostate out. If we are lucky, that's the end of it. The poor patient is impotent and incontinent as a result of the surgery, but he has a chance for a full life. Often, by the time we feel the lump in the prostate the horse is already out of the barn in many patients; the cancer has spread, and -- like with your dad -- it is already in the bones. Once the cancer escapes the prostate, it is incurable."

Soon afterwards, my father began his treatment, had his testicles removed and began taking female hormones, a course of treatment that usually puts prostate cancer into remission for a period of time. His was a textbook case as he enjoyed two years of quality living, learning even to joke about the enlarged breasts that resulted from the female hormones. Then, as they almost always do, the hormones lost their effect and the cancer came roaring back in his bones. He died within the year.

CAMP SUNSHINE

But it was at Camp Sunshine that I really learned about cancer and the enduring lessons of life.

Shortly after we married and several years before my first bout with cancer, Dorothy -- a pediatric oncology nurse -- organized Camp Sunshine, one of the first non-profit camps in the country for children with cancer. New to Atlanta, Dorothy was a dynamo: raising money; recruiting campers from reluctant parents not inclined to give up their sick children for even a week; recruiting volunteer counselors; organizing a sophisticated medical clinic fully staffed by pediatric oncologists and nurses from Emory; and organizing an outstanding camp program for these special children.

It was a major undertaking. Early on, I tried to help a little too much, second guessing some decisions she had made. Dorothy told me in no uncertain terms to back off, that this was not a political campaign but her project. I did, and ever since, Camp Sunshine has been Dorothy's volunteer project with my playing a minor, supportive role. (I am the perennial MC for Talent Night...one year I was M.C. Hammer-ton and another time, Judge Ito.)

We started with only thirty-eight campers and twenty-five volunteers. Today, Camp Sunshine has a year-round program for over four hundred children and their families: two weeks of summer camp, a family weekend that addresses the problems that affect the siblings and parents, a ski trip to Colorado for amputees and the physically challenged, a trip to Washington for our teenagers, an "Outward Bound" program and many other activities. Camp Sunshine has had a major impact on our lives, especially by giving us the opportunity to witness time and time again dramatic demonstrations of the power of the mind and attitude to alter the course of disease.

My favorite memory is of Corey Grier, a good-looking black teenager. A natural leader with a ready wit and generous spirit, Corey drew boys and girls of all ages to him like a magnet. He also had a tough cancer in his colo...