Introduction to the Updates

In January of 2001, my life was seemingly idyllic. The previous autumn I had taken a new job as Executive Director of the non-profit ministry of famed evangelist and former-Clinton confidant Tony Campolo. I was charged with taking the ministry—which for nearly 30 years had created programs for “at-risk” youth in inner-cities and the third world—from being primarily “personality-driven” to being instead vision-driven—something that could survive Tony’s allegedly slowing schedule and lowered profile. I was in a position of influence and power and, most importantly, immense creativity.

After 13 years of work in various Christian “social justice” ministries, I was finally in charge—at least as much as you can be with a guy like Tony in the room. And because of this new position (along with a good history of writing for PRISM magazine and some seminars at Christian rock festivals) I was beginning to be frequently invited to speak around the States and Canada. I’d finally begun some sketches at my first book, and at 38, it felt like my professional life was coming to a peak.

The only wrinkle in my otherwise well-made bed was the word from my doctor, after my annual physical, that I needed to lose 45 pounds. No surprise there. My life as a desk-jockey had taken its toll. The regular basketball and squash games of my 20s and early-30s had given way to a few rounds of golf each month and, more often, 10-12 hour days of work. My once relatively slim 6’3” frame had ballooned to 255 pounds. Sheri was complaining that my girth was hurting our sex life, and I certainly felt the drag on my endurance, in and out of the bedroom.

And so, after suffering with a mild case of Shingles in January, I began an exercise routine early in February, hoping to lose some weight and get myself in shape. At first things were fine—I rode our exercise bike and used our apartment’s weight room, using the elliptical rider and rowing machines. It felt good to be exercising again, but noticed some slight pain in my lower back and left hip—a pain that was different than my “regular” chronic lower back pain. A few trips to my normally amazing chiropractor failed to make a dent in the pain, and he suggested I return to my GP for some further examination.

The doctor examined me and suggested a pinched nerve, gave me some anti-inflammatorys and Percoset to take the edge off, and told me to take a couple of days off. Two days on the couch left the pain even worse, so I just went back to work and hoped it would get better. After a grueling conference in Washington DC I could barely walk, so I cancelled a planned trip to join Sheri in New Orleans at the annual conference for the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) (with whom she had recently found a job managing their awards program) and instead returned to visit our GP for more tests.

On the morning of Wednesday, March 29, 2001 I had a CTscan, and that afternoon received a voice mail from the doctor who had initially examined me. The doctor and I played voice mail tag--just as I was doing with Sheri who was due to come home the next day--and I went to bed terrified, to be honest, fearful that I would need surgery for a herniated disc, the “worst-case” scenario that my doctor had presented me.

The next morning I was in my office at 7am and almost immediately started calling my GP. Around 9am he finally called back, sounding grim.

“You don’t have a herniated disc or pinched nerve,” he began, “but I have to be honest with you. The results of your CTscan suggest some lesions on your pelvis and hip consistent with Multiple Myeloma. I want you to come in after lunch and see me and talk about our options. In the meantime, I’m going to set up an appointment for you immediately with an oncologist.”

*******

Numbness. That’s all. No panic, no tears--just a terrifying lack of any extreme feelings. Later in my journey I’d have several instances where I felt overwhelming calm, but this was not that. This was a vacuum. It was entirely, utterly unknown, and felt endlessly unknowable.

With my office door shut, I called Sheri’s cell phone. She didn’t have it on.

Suddenly the numbness was abject fear. And breathtaking, shattering isolation.

OK, I can do this....

I called my parents in Canada; no answer--they were away at a funeral.

My best friend Bob--out of the office.

My mind raced, terrified. I looked down at my computer. Email.

Email would be the answer. Little did I know.

Two new email messages popped up from Canada--one from perhaps my oldest friend, a fellow PK that I went to kids camp with, now a pastor in Windsor, ON of a church in a bar with whom I was working to create a crusade for Tony; the other an old girlfriend who has become one of my best friends.

I needed, more than I knew, to vent--but knew I couldn't blather all over my office manager.

And so I wrote a note to back to my first pop ups of the morning, hoping they’d get it right away and tell me something kind or encouraging or helpful in return.

Like Dwight... wake up...

I wish I could tell you that I composed something like a message of calm faith and hope, simply re-capping the situation and asking for prayer.

Nope. Not even close.

What popped up on my friend's screens was a profanity-laced, fearful, screed, the kind of note you can only write to someone you trust. Lots of terror-laden cursing. Vile, fearful cursing. Lots and lots of it.

It was pure puking of emotion. No perspective, no grace and no filters.

And trust me, no filters is a good thing. It just might be the best gift of friendship.

And then I remembered what is often one of the best gifts of marriage. If I couldn't talk to my wife, I could at least talk to her family.

And so, with all that cursing out of my system, I called my in-laws.

The Blicks are sturdy, stoic and practical, but I knew I could call them with all my conflicted emotions. It wasn’t much of a conversation--just my fearful confession that the doctors didn’t really know what was going on but it didn’t look good. They listened attentively and patiently and promised to pray. What else could they do?

Late that afternoon, I went to the Philly airport to pick up Sheri. I was not prepared for how hard it would be to not tell her immediately. I’d planned on getting to the parking garage. I made it, instead, from the gate to the escalator leading down to the baggage claim before I blathered out the confusion of the past 24 hours.

After a grueling nine days away, Sheri deserved a rest. She wouldn’t get one for nearly a year. Instead, she endured my blustering and fear, held me close in the car and again when we got home, then poured me a stiff drink, opened the take out and sat with me. It was only when we tried to say grace that I finally broke down. There, with the Chinese food getting cold, we both had a good cry.

The next morning, before our appointment with the oncologist, I went to my office early thinking that work might take my mind off of things. (The road to hell is paved with what?)

And so I stared at my computer for what seemed like hours, until finally gave up, and started to write a simple note, short and to the point, essentially just a summary of the medical news and a basic request:

Help!

There was just one problem. This email, as short and simple a note as I've written, before or since, was as yet not addressed. It was another moment of paralysis.

To what extent I should tell people about this process Sheri and I were about to go through?

I knew all about the typical cover your ass (CYA) business experts who would tell me to keep any needs and weaknesses as close to my chest as possible. Alone and terrified in my basement office at Eastern University, I was actually having one of those John Belushi "Animal House" moments, with myself, with two versions of John Belushi over my shoulders giving me conflicting advice.

I remember thinking to myself:

Y'know, I am tempted to not tell anyone or ask for prayer. Let's just ride this madness out until we know better what's going on.

It was a critical moment. I said it again to myself:

I am tempted....

No sooner had the words been formed when I realized the theological content of those words, and at that moment I knew what I had to do. The "run and hide and keep things to yourself" Belushi vanished.

If I was being tempted to not ask for prayer, I knew two things had to be true:

Because the idea to not pray is certainly not a fruit of the Spirit or anything good or wise or true in the universe, I knew the source of that temptation could be only one thing,

and

if that was the case, I knew only one way to combat it, and I'd make a deliberate decision to resist it in the most literal way imaginable: I'd invite everyone I trusted to pray for and with us.

Whatever commitment to theological purity that might have remained in my life was jettisoned that morning. And so I quickly compiled a list of my most trusted friends from around the country with email addresses, and asked them to pray--regardless of how religious or irreligious they might be. I didn't care to whom or how they might normally pray, if at all. Just that I trusted them enough to ask seemed sufficient.

That, and grace.

Grace is always just enough.

And so, that first email from my basement office finally addressed, I did it:

I hit send.

*********

So it began, a deliberate attempt to include any and all comers in this journey with, and battle against Multiple Myeloma.

I had no idea what I was getting into.

What emerged from that commitment was a series of letters, essays and notes that chronical my ongoing relationship with an awful, stupid, terrifying disease and treatments for it that too often seem equally awful, stupid and terrifying.

And tho' I didn't mean for it to happen, the updates quickly evolved into longer, more complex and, to me at least, surprisingly intimate narratives.

My original distribution list for his "updates" included about 90 people. But somehow these intimate prayer requests and musings began to take on a life of their own, as several friends and aquaintences began passing them to various friends and acquaintences around the world. After just a month of treatmentments (and letter/email writing) I had added 200 more names to his list, and in turn several other friends were copying the "Ozard updates" to their own email lists. By the end of that first summer with cancer, we estimated that within a day of sending them out into cyberspace, they were being sent directly to more than 2500 people.

I began writing them for deeply, overtly selfish reasons (pray for me!), but as I began to see their effect, I changed my focus and started writing to an audience of sorts. But even as I focused on meeting the needs and challenging the assumptions of my readers, the writing itself became a way to keep me grounded.

With cancer, it's easy to become immensely, inappropriately self-involed and self-centered. But in the more than three years since my diagnosis--through intense chemotherapy, a stem cell transplant, several new drug therapies, more than a couple of relapses and recoveries, and now a clinical study of a new drug--these updates have reminded me of my commitment to not only share this journey, but to ensure that that journey reached beyond my own narrow experience and become in some manner always about "the other."

On the surface it's pretty basic: A note here, an update there, a bored sleepless night in the hospital on chemo filled with long meditations on life, love, missed rock concerts, detailed descriptions of vomiting, an on-going prayer that God might make beauty out of ugly things, celebrations in the odd and delicious irony that my 70 year old mother was quoting U2 to her friends and my 73 year old preacher father was quoting them from the pulpit.

But very early on, a kind of revelation that transformed these notes and update from a simple attempt to include my friends in my journey into an ongoing prayer for those whose disease and suffering bring judgment, and for those who suffer alone, those without email lists or prayer chains or family to care for them or spouses to hold them or friends to trust them, those who have no one--no one--to breathe their name in prayer.

As I said on 100 Huntley Street last Christmas:

I can't control the way life goes, but I can make sure that I try and make life an opportunity for grace and goodness.

Indeed, if there is a theme that has emerged from these "Updates," it is this:

When and if you pray for me, pray too for those who have no one to pray for them, those who have no name, no voice, no advocate. If you remember to say my name to God, ask God to remember those who have no names as well, to take pity on those whose names have never been said aloud to anyone, including their Creator.

The most of the "Updates" follow.

- Dwight

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