6/1/97

Living while dying--Despite the inevitable, Chuck Snook is still preaching the warning signs of cancer

Although he may be dying from the effects of prostate cancer, Chuck Snook clings to certain notions like an owl clings to a screaming rabbit.

It is, he says, "the jock mentality."

Chuck is principal of Flanagan High School, but long ago he was a high school and college athlete, and then he was a high school coach. He knows how to play through pain.

But in his case, it appears, that business about "no pain, no gain" simply didn't hold true.

After he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1994, he adopted a new motto: "Better living through chemistry."

Now he has an even newer one: "No more pain with the drain."

Chuck learned the hard way.

Through March and half of April he had gotten only about an hour and a half of fitful sleep a night, interrupted every 15 minutes, he said, by the need to urinate. And then, he said, it was "just dribbling."

And painful, too.

"There were times when I didn't even want to sit at a computer," he said. "I didn't want to do anything. ...We would go home and I would immediately want to take a nap. ...I was just trying to refuel for the next day."

Chuck had 15 radiation treatments during the first three weeks of March with no problem except for feeling a little weak the last few days.

Prior to that he had been able to maintain a fairly satisfactory quality of life, although the pain in his pelvic area was increasing and the strength of those bones was decreasing. Radiation was prescribed to slow both of those rates.

Chuck's appetite was slipping, too, and his weight was dropping. He's down from 285 to 227. Eve told him he was beginning to eat like a normal person.

But weight for a prostate cancer patient is a concern. The cancer gets into the bones, weakens them and makes them brittle, easier to break. So, the less he weighs the less weight those bones have to support.

Yet, while he may have begun eating normally, he was doing something quite abnormal: He was preparing for another stage in his life--the last one.

He submitted his resignation from a job he loved and from a lifelong career in education; he arranged for hospice care with St. James Hospital in Pontiac; he held a conference with his wife and children on such topics as visitation, funeral and cremation; and he spoke with a couple of clergymen.

"I didn't want to start the next (school) year," he said, "and die in the middle of the year."

And as to hospice care and funeral arrangements, those were the last of his affairs he needed to tidy up while he was still in control.

On a rainy March 13 night Chuck and Eve attended the first Dr. Charles E. Snook Midstate Conference Music Festival at El Paso High School, a daylong event for the top music students in the high schools of Midstate Conference.

Chuck had started the festival a few years earlier, and when it was over last year it's sponsors named it in his honor.

Although the festival ended with a nighttime concert, after a long day at work and after spending too much time on his test, and although he had forgotten to bring along his pain pills, Chuck pulled himself up from his front-row seat and told the audience of families and friends that they were about to hear "a showcase of some of the best kids in the Midstate Conference."

The chances of him being around for the second annual Dr. Charles E. Snook Midstate Conference Music Festival are not goo, yet Chuck seemed unconcerned with his mortality when he told his audience to "never, never let the music die."

When the singers and players had taken their bows, Chuck stood around shaking hands, talking to friends and well-wishers, and remembering the times when he was a boy and life was forever and he sang the songs in the music festivals at Fort Dodge and Ames and Boone, back in Iowa where he grew up.

That, of course, was long ago, and on this Thursday night Chuck and Eve still had a drive home in the rain, Chuck had another radiation treatment in Bloomington the next day; and then there was this growing conflict between his bladder that would not drain and his need for sleep.

The routine, he said, was to start out in bed upstairs, then move to the couch downstairs and end his uneasy nights in the bit chair. "The problem with urination is all nocturnal," he said. During the day, he'd go to the restroom two to three times. but at night, it was "just a dribble" every 15 minutes, and "the pain," Chuck said, "was just unbelievable."

But he was determined to tough it out.

He continued working, but sometimes he had to leave, go home and grab a nap. He and Eve didn't go out much (wherever he went, he said, the first thing he wanted to know was the location of the men's room), and he gave up, at least temporarily, his only hobby, weaving baskets in his basement workshop.

Chuck and Eva's son and daughter-in-law, and daughters and sons-in-law visited for a weekend in March.

It was then, Chuck said, that during a family meeting he told them that when he dies he wants no formal visitation with a receiving line and an open coffin. He wants, rather, something like a reception, with some good jazz and good swing playing in the background, with friends and relatives visiting and remembering his life and their importance in it, and with a lot of picture. He hopes, he said, it will be much like the visitation for his friend, Tom Longergan, who died in Iowa on Aug. 13, the day after Chuck and Eve's 35th wedding anniversary.

He wants his funeral to be at St. John's Lutheran Church. He wants his friend, the Rev. Keith Anderson of Pontiac, and the Rev. Thomas Delk of St. John's, to officiate.

He wants them to play "You'll Never Walk Alone" and "No Man Is An Island" because he sang them in a capella choir back in high school.

He wants somebody to read a couple of poems he wrote, he said, to "kinda tell ya who the hell Snook was."

And he wants to be cremated. That way, he said, "I can sit out there at the farm house until she (Eve) decides she wants to move. She can stick me in the car and head on over to Cordova (they still own a house in Cordova, where they lived the longest during their careers in public schools). I'll probably be buried in Cordova."

For the present, though, he is feeling about as good as he has since his diagnosis, and this after a night of torture he'll never forget.

Chuck had spent the weekend of April 12 and 13 up and down, never more than a few seconds away from a toilet. But the pain was constant and by that Monday morning it was nearly unbearable, and this from a guy who lost his left eye to an errant firecracker when he was a boy.

"I was bawling," he said.

Eve asked him if he wanted her to call an ambulance, and now that it's over he can muster a smile at his refusal, but he can't muster a real answer. It was between 2 and 3 a.m., he said, and "I just didn't want to bother anybody."

But later in the morning his friend and former boss, Bill Braksick was at his house and on the telephone to Dr. Larry Stalter, who made a house call, and ordered Chuck to the emergency room St. James Hospital in nearby Pontiac.

There, he said, they inserted a catheter. "I proceeded to deliver a liter and a half" of urine, and the nurse said, "I think I just found your problem."

Indeed she had.

Chuck's diseased prostate had choked off his urethra, he was in agony, he fought the very idea of having a catheter inserted, and when it was, he said, it was "really no big deal," and it gave him instant relief.

That afternoon he napped like he hadn't napped in weeks, and that night he slept from 10:30 p.m. to 10:30 a.m. the next day.

Now, he said, "I sleep on my back. I sleep on my side. I don't get twisted up in this thing." And, he has no sensation of ever having to urinate. "That," he said, "is kinda cool."

Since he was diagnosed, Chuck Snook has developed a philosophy that a person can live with a terminal illness.

And so he is.

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