10/12/97

Winning the battle of the mind

The good days no longer outnumber the bad, and the cancer that has invaded Chuck Snook's body is growing noticeable stronger.

Even on a good day it takes an obvious effort for Chuck to get out of a chair in his living room and walk to the kitchen for a fresh cup of coffee because it hurts. His ankles hurt, his knees hurt, his hips hurt.

And he has very little strength.

"My arms don't work the way that they ought to work, and my legs don't work," he told a Flanagan High School English class a couple of weeks ago. Chuck was a guest lecturer at school where, until the effects of prostate cancer forced his retirement at the end of last term, he had been principal for six years.

In the '60's and the '70s and the '80s, when he was an English teacher himself and long before cancer took his strength, he would stand before his classes for hours each day and hold forth about the language he had come to love. This time he sat throughout the hour.

Being principal was a job he loved, he told the students, and one he hated to give up. But he still visits the school when he can, especially when he's invited to speak to students--because those 22 years he was a classroom teacher himself are the ones he now looks longingly back to as some of the best of his life.

Yet as loathe as he was to give up the school, the school, too, seems loathe to give up on him. to prove it, he was invited to climb into a convertible on a sunny autumn afternoon and ride in the high school's homecoming parade as its grand marshal. It was both an honor and a duty he could not refuse.

These days Chuck spends most of his time at "the farm," as he calls the home he and his wife Eve share southeast of Flanagan. He reads, although even that passion is abandoning him as is his energy flags, and he watches television. A telephone is always nearby as much for security in times of emergency now as it is for instant connection with friends who want to check in and hear how he's doing.

The answer is this: The cancer is now throughout his body. It is winning the battle of his flesh, but is not winning the battle of his mind, although one day recently it came close, and he is not certain it won't happen again.

Chuck found out he had prostate cancer on Nov. 10, 1994, that it had already spread beyond control, and that it was terminal probably within three years.

Now summer has unfolded into the autumn of his third year and winter is approaching, yet Chuck's thoughts remain in the spring.

On those nights when he awakens into the solitude of a country night, with little to dwell upon save, perhaps, the pain of the disease taking over his body, he often finds himself thinking of his friend Lowell Senko, who died about 10 years ago, also from cancer.

"He never wanted to stay in a dark room," Chuck said. "Maybe the connection of darkness and death played a role in it."

Those thoughts and fears have not plagued Chuck and clouded his mind, and maybe they won't. Ibuprofen eases the pain in the middle of the night, and as it does, he may read or he may just stare through the darkness across the crop gleaned prairie surrounding his home, taking comfort from other times in his life when he was young and healthy, times when death and loss did not intrude.

He remembers being a boy on the streets of Los Angeles, where, he says, he could often be found participating in "a five-fingered discount operation."

He remembers his grandmother rescuing him and bringing him back to live in Iowa. That was the best thing that ever happened to him, he told that high school class a couple of weeks ago. It was there that he first felt somebody actually cared about him and where he began to grow into the young man who would graduate from high school and even go off to college.

He remembers meeting Eve Kay Rutledge there, at the University of Dubuque. He remembers falling in love with her and getting married and starting a family.

He remembers driving back and forth to Iowa City practically every night after school for two years, studying for his doctorate. And then he remembers joining the administration and the disagreement with a superintendent that caused him to look around for another job, a search that brought him to Flanagan and what would become the last six years of his career. But it's been a great six years, he says.

Even now, four months into his retirement, as the pain grows and his strength diminishes and the cancer reaches deep inside him to steal not only his life but his enjoyment of it, he remembers the happiness of a life worth living, or the people and the good times with them that made it so, and he rallies, if only for a little while.

"I have now," he told the high school class, "more bad days than I have good days, but the time that I've got left, we're gonna try to make the best of it."

Chuck has lost 85 pounds since his diagnosis, and his belt size is down from 48 to 38 inches. He needs transfusions to make up for the red blood cells the cancer is preventing his own marrow from producing; and the pain, of course, is constant and growing.

A year ago he was managing it with 20 to 30 milligrams of the painkiller Oxycontin a day. Now he takes 180 milligrams in the morning, another 180 milligrams before he goes to bed, ibuprofen in the middle of the night, and all he knows for certain is that the pain will get worse, 10 times worse he believes.

Yet, except for that one day, he perseveres.

It happened easily enough. The day before he'd bumped his knee against his car. Even a simple bump causes him great pain. Then an insect stung his right eye and it was nearly swollen closed. He hurt like hell, he looked like hell, he felt like hell.

Things just kind of fell apart, and Chuck Snook cried.

Eve was off to work, he was alone, and he got to thinking about her and their children "and the realization that this is going to come to an end."

He sat in his big easy chair in the living room and he cried. It was the first time he had really cried since diagnosis. Then he called the school, where Even manages the learning center, and asked if she could come home for lunch, and when she did, he said, he had a hard time explaining what was going on.

"It was strange, because I'm not that way. But I'm human," he said.

Since the beginning of what he calls "this adventure," Chuck has managed to keep his thoughts and emotions separate from what is happening to his body. He has been open and public about his disease and its effects, and he has found humor in the irony that living with a terminal illness presents.

This, though, he wanted to emphasize to the students in that high school class: He is not alone in his life and he could not endure it if he were. "There is not way that I could handle this by myself," he said. "I'm not that strong."

His family and his friends, those people who call him and go out to dinner with him and Eve, the ones who drive him when he needs to go to the hospital or a doctor and Eve can't, and even the friends who smiled and waved and cheered as he went by in the Flanagan homecoming parade are the support that make his life worth living.

Sitting in front of that high school class, he held the palms of his hands up, as if to give a double high five.

One hand represented the physical side of his existence, he said, and the other was the psychological.

Slowly he moved them together. When they touched, he said, when the physical side of his illness comes together with the psychological, and he believes they will, he doesn't really know what he will do, how he will deal with his illness.

Continue reading the Chuck Snook Story: