I had a stable home life and I was solidly in the middle of
the bell curve throughout high school. Like most teenagers, I was not attentive
in class. I was a below grade reader as
a sophomore and had to take remedial reading classes. I joked around with
friends in class. We didn’t take anything
or anybody too seriously. High school was a requirement for growing up. I got
through it, but it was not something I relished. Maybe I had ADD or ADHD, but those
were not a common diagnosis in my day.
My friends and I had nicknames for our teachers. We dubbed my
English literature teacher “Rosebud” because of her tendency to use too much
rouge. My German teacher was “Frau Schmidt,” a heavy-set woman from Bavaria.
She had blonde braids on the side of her head and wore flowery embroidered
dresses. She looked like she could have been one of the Von Trapp children from
“The Sound of Music”.
My gym teacher and health instructor was Mr. Orr, a leathery
old man from Brooklyn. He was a former boxer
who sounded like he drank and smoked too much. He had a broken nose, and spoke
with a deep gravelly voice. When someone got out of line in class, he would
clench his fists and rasp, “Hey kid, how’d you like to eat a knuckle
sandwich?” It was hard to take Mr. Orr
seriously.
By far the worse teacher I ever had was my algebra teacher,
the tall, lanky and invariably grumpy Mr. Miller. I admit I was no angel in
class, but I’ll never forget the time I went to see him after school about a
“d” grade I had received. He responded to my inquiry by contemptuously saying
“Get out of my sight! You make me sick!” That one encounter ended any chance I
had of becoming an engineer or physicist. Math class for me was like being in a
foreign country where you don’t speak the language. I could not understand how the
letters “A” and “B” could add up to anything.
They aren’t numbers!
I liked English literature, history, and music and did
fairly well in those subjects. In my senior year I was a member of a barbershop
quartet, trained by a very popular music instructor, Tim Lutz. I was also involved in drama and became a
Thespian. It seems I was more attuned to
literature and the arts than I was to math and science.
I became a good student in college and something of a scholar
in graduate school. Entering grad school
at the age of twenty-seven, I had gotten a taste of the real world and was
motivated to learn. I actually enjoyed academia and was sorry when it ended. Funny
enough, I did my master’s thesis on a project that used a sophisticated statistical
technique, logit analysis, to predict certain outcomes. The same statistical technique
is used in medicine to predict the likelihood of someone developing a disease based
on lifestyle or environment factors.
When I learned I had lung cancer I knew enough about
statistics to ignore the depressing averages and instead focus on being the
outlier who did not fit the typical lung cancer patient profile. I had no
desire to just be average, with a 15% chance of five-year survival.
The lesson to be learned is that every cancer patient should
understand they are not a statistic; each individual is different. Outcomes
will vary widely. A good patient, like a
good student, needs to be his or her own best advocate. Educate yourself about your disease;
understand the biology of what is happening to you, evaluate your options, seek
advice, and don’t be afraid to ask questions or challenge your doctor.
Nothing is more important to living a happy life than your
physical and mental health. The key to your future good health is getting an education.
Welcome back to school!
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