Dog Tags

Sometimes when I think back to during the time when my dad was sick, I remember a detail that I had forgotten or overlooked in my memories before.  

Today I remembered his dog tags.

When I was growing up, whenever I asked my dad about his experience serving in Vietnam, he always talked about how his job there was to guard a building with weapons in it, often on an overnight shift.  

My dad was never a "night owl;" as far back as I can remember, he was much more of a morning person, and I guess that was true when he was in the service, too, because he often commented when he talked about that time about how hard it was for him to stay awake on his overnight shifts.  He said he usually ran around and around the building he was assigned to guard so that he would stay awake and alert during those shifts.  The only problem with this plan, he reported, was that he had to wear his dog tags at all times and, as they hung from the chain around his neck, they drove him crazy bouncing against his chest as he ran.  Ever the improviser, though, he thought of a solution to this problem too: he took the dog tags off from around his neck and put them in his pants - in his jock strap, to be exact. 

It's kind of funny to think that a person can be proud of someone else before that person was even born or before they knew each other, but I know it's possible, because, picturing my dad as a young soldier in a foreign land, before I was born, doing what he had to do to get his job done and to defend our country, I feel such a sense of pride and respect, the same pride and respect that I have had for him throughout my life. 

But those dog tags from Dad's days in Vietnam aren't the ones I think about most often these days.  The dog tags on my mind are the ones that Dad wore on a chain around his neck as a 66 year-old man as he trained for the Ironman triathlon.  He tucked those into his shirt as he rode his bike or ran, and, the day before he became disoriented on a run and our campaign against his brain cancer began, the chain that held those dog tags broke.  And so, on that fateful day, he set out for the first time in many months without any form of identification at all.  

I think when most people think about dog tags, they think about toughness.  That's what I think about, too, because it was that, along with his strength and resilience that day that allowed Dad to dig deep enough so that, even in his state of confusion coming from the tumor the size of a racquetball in his brain, he could remember not just his home phone number (which was called first by the police but went unanswered because my mom was out of town) but also my aunt's cell phone number, which he also recalled and then gave to the police who had been called to the scene because he somehow also remembered that my mom was out of town that day and realized he needed to call someone local.

I have spent time, some while Dad was sick and even more since he went on ahead, thinking about how things would have likely gone had he not had the fortitude to pull out that information in those few moments before he was taken to the hospital by ambulance, before he had a couple of seizures, and before he quit breathing and had to be put on life support temporarily until he could be stabilized.  It is nothing short of terrifying to think that all of that would have been going on and no one in our family would have been able to be notified so that we could all get there to be with him.  It's horrifying to think about the fact that he would have been a Missing Person for an undetermined amount of time, because, with my mom out of town overnight that night, it is highly likely that no one would have realized that he didn't make it home after his run that afternoon.  We would not have known that anything out of the ordinary was going on.  Again and again, it hits me that, even with as bad as it was when he first got sick and throughout his illness, it could have been worse.  At least we knew where he was, and what was going on with him, and at least we were able to be with him. 

Dad, wearing the dog tags, competing in what ended up being his last race, one month prior to his diagnosis of brain cancer

In the days just before and just after his surgery, Dad worried a lot about what he called "loose ends."  As it would be for any of us whose life was put on hold in the blink of an eye, it was unnerving and extremely anxiety-causing for Dad that he had not been able to prepare for the time he was having to miss work and everything else for which he considered himself to be responsible.  In the midst of the constant stream of worries he had about his health and about needing to take care of the responsibilities in his personal and professional roles in life, he said he wanted to get the chain that had held his dog tags fixed, "so that I'll have it ready as soon as I can get back on the road."

And so, sitting in the hospital room with him in the Neuro-ICU, I searched on the Internet and found a company that sold replacement chains and ordered one for him; he was visibly relieved when I told him that a new chain was being sent to him in the mail.  And that's where the meaning of those dog tags deepens in our story; instead of standing only for toughness, Dad's dog tags also represented Hopefulness, and we desperately needed everything we could get to bolster both of those qualities as we entered into a more grueling battle than any of us could even imagine at that point.

Daughtering - Part 1 of the Behind the Scenes Story

The term parenting is technically defined as the act of being a mother or father to a child; it means to take care of the person or people to whom you serve as the parent.

So why isn’t there a parallel term for taking care of one’s parent – sonning, or, in my case, daughtering?

The way I can daughter my dad now is by telling his story.  Not just the one from the ten weeks when he was sick, but his whole story, or at least what I know of it. 

During the time my dad was sick, I posted updates regularly on CarePages for friends and family members to keep up with what was going on with Dad.   As I said here, for the first nine weeks after Dad was diagnosed with cancer, we chose to view his illness as a challenge instead of a catastrophe. The CarePages updates focused on what was going right and on the Hope for which we were so very desperate.   But there was lots going on behind the scenes and on the sidelines besides what was posted then, and I feel like this may be the time to begin to tell that part of the story.

This is a sad story, to be sure, but it is also one of Hope and Spirit.  It’s about tenacity and courage and toughness, not just tragedy.  It’s about Love and, of course, Perspective.  It’s about what we learned, not just about cancer but about my dad, about each other, and about ourselves.  It’s about how cancer sucks – it really, really SUCKS! – but WAY more than that, it’s about the strength of a man who wants to protect his family and of a family that wants to protect that man.

 On October 23, 2010, my 66 year-old dad was out on an eight-mile run.  About halfway through the run, he became disoriented.  He stopped at a traffic light but was unsure of which way to go to get home from there.   Fast-forward through a helpful couple who noticed Dad’s distress and called an ambulance, to a transport to a small hospital where a “mass” was detected during an emergency CT scan in his brain, and then to another ambulance ride to a large hospital that was equipped with a Neuro-ICU.   During that flurry of activity, our lives changed forever, and we didn’t even know it was happening. 

My mom was out of town, but luckily her two sisters were contacted and were nearby, and they raced to the hospital to be with Dad while Mom scrambled over the next few hours to get there.  When Dad arrived at the second hospital, he was fast-tracked for an MRI.  Once inside the MRI tube, Dad had an extended grand mal seizure.  The medical team got him out of the tube and performed CPR for several minutes before Dad was intubated and hooked up to a ventilator.  He was transported to the Neuro-ICU, which is where he was when my mom and my youngest sister arrived.  He was sedated and stayed hooked up to lots of IV’s, monitors, and machines overnight, and they stayed by his side, in shock, watching and waiting, a rough beginning of the uphill battle to come.

I think a lot about what went on inside that MRI tube that day.  I’m not sure why; I feel like thinking about that is something I should be moving past by now in the grief process.  But it was such a turning point for Dad, and for all of us who love him, like a Time Machine of sorts.  He went in looking like, acting like, and living like a person many years younger than he was, with a little numbness and confusion, and came out decades older, with a malignant brain tumor and many problems with motor skills, sensation, visual-perception, and memory and reasoning.  On one side of the tube he was a competitive athlete, working full-time, traveling and enjoying his life; on the other side he needed assistance to walk and was unable to perform the tasks necessary to work, drive a car, or live independently. 

Maybe those deficits were already bubbling at the surface and Cancer was like a bandit in the night that just uncovered them all at the same time.  Maybe the changes weren’t as defined as I remember them being at that point in time; perhaps they came in a few days later when he had brain surgery or over the upcoming weeks when the tumor was continuing to grow.  From my perspective, it just seems like a watershed moment, a time when we learned that a hurricane was coming but we couldn’t evacuate, a time when the future was being written, a time when things began to spin out of control, a time when Daughtering took on a whole new meaning.

Next ... Part 2, I Don't Know What's Happening

The Icing on the Cake

For the last ten years or so, I've watched a good portion of the Tour de France on TV every summer.  In general, biking isn’t on my list of favorite sports to spectate, but I’ve always been impressed by the extreme sportsmanship and the endurance, tenacity, and just downright toughness displayed during this event in which participants cover 2,200 miles of very challenging terrain over three weeks.

But the real reason I’ve watched is for the annual Tour-related camaraderie that I’ve enjoyed with my dad.  Betting and bantering about whether or not Lance would “pull it off again,” as Dad termed it, waiting and watching for the wrecks, and of course discussing and debating about the politics of the race, which mostly boiled down to talking about all the drug-testing drama.

Dad was a big Lance fan.  When Dad talked about the reasons why Lance should be admired, he said, “His Cancer Story was just the icing on the cake."  Dad and I agreed that, whether or not the famous athlete “doped,” he was a Machine, full of toughness and grit, “not to mention,” Dad said, “a marketing master!”

Dad in 2003 with Lance Armstrong's second book, "Every Second Counts"

Dad was always so impressed by the guys in the Tour who wrecked and then got back up and continued riding.  "Now that's Tough!" he would say admiringly when we were watching on TV and saw one of the many spills and recoveries. 

It was funny to me that Dad never saw his own extraordinariness.  For example, once when I was about eight years old, I was playing in the front yard of our house when an unfamiliar vehicle pulled up in our driveway.  Dad got out of the car, thanked the driver, and turned around to face me.  He had blood dripping down the side of his head. 

"What happened?"  I asked.

"I was running across a 2-lane bridge and an RV that didn't have enough room to get over side-swiped me," he said.  I didn't even know what side-swiped meant, but I figured it wasn't anything good based on the blood that kept coming and coming. 

"I was going to keep running, but I knew your mom would be upset if I didn't come straight home to get this cleaned up," he said, as he headed into the house. 

When I was in the seventh grade, my dad was running a marathon and, in third place 18 miles into the race, he was hit by an old lady driving a car who hadn't seen him because the sun was shining in her eyes.  She hit him from behind, and he flew up over her windshield and landed in the road.  She was screaming so much that he, while lying in the street with a broken leg, had to try to calm her down until the police got there a few minutes later.

He was taken by ambulance to the hospital, where we met him after the police found us on the course, waiting at the 20-mile mark, where Dad had told us to wait to cheer for him.  When we got to the hospital, he wasn't at all focused on the pain from the bone sticking out of his leg but instead was concerned because the force of being hit by the car had knocked off one of his running shoes, which he wanted back, and because he wouldn't be able to finish the race. 

The orthopedic surgeon told him that he would be in a cast for several months and would not be able to run again for at least six months.  Four weeks later, Dad used a kitchen knife to cut the cast off his leg and was out on the road again, training for his next race.

"Get this thing off me!" - Dad with his cast after being hit by the car in the marathon

In the 1990's, Dad finished several ultra-marathons, including a 48-hour race that he did on an indoor track, and a 24-hour race, after which he jumped into the car, drove several hours to help me load up my stuff to move out of my dorm, and drove three hours home.

Dad with his cheerleader Mom at the 46-hour point of the 48-hour ultra

Dad with one of his Support Crew members (me) putting ice packs on his legs at the halfway point of his first 24-hour ultra

A couple of years ago, Dad entered an off-road triathlon near my house.  He left early in the morning, and when he got back, his elbow and his knee were both bloody.  He said on the mountain biking portion of the race the biker in front of him wrecked, which caused Dad to wreck into him with so much force that it bent the seat of the bike into a 90 degree angle.  Since the bike was then unrideable, Dad picked it up and carried it, running more than a mile to the transition point, where he ditched the bike and took off on the trail run part of the event.  He said, "Don't worry, though, I'll get the bike fixed, and, best of all, I still won my age division."

A few days after that race, he said he was having some trouble breathing and so he went to the doctor, who had a chest x-ray done.  Evidently, in the bike wreck, in addition to breaking the seat of the bike and scraping his elbow and knee, Dad had broken two ribs.

Dad, at the start of the "bike leg" of the triathlon in which he qualified for the National Masters in 2009

Then there was the Big Bike Wreck three years ago.  Dad was on a long training ride, probably 75 miles or more, and was riding by himself on country roads in Missouri.  He usually didn't take his cell phone with him on bike rides, but for some reason he had brought it along on this one, even using it to call Mom right before he left to tell her he would be gone for a few hours.

At some point on the ride, a guy driving a pick-up truck with several children in the truck bed wasn't paying attention and didn't see Dad on his bike in the road in front of him.  The driver hit Dad from behind, and, again, Dad flew over the top of the vehicle and landed in the road, this time with his feet still clipped to the pedals of the bike.  He landed very hard on his back and immediately found that he couldn't move his arms or legs at all.  The driver had stopped but hadn't gotten out of the truck yet, and Dad said he was screaming at the guy to call 9-1-1.

Here's the really crazy part of the story:  apparently, when Dad was thrown to the ground by the impact, his cell phone got bumped and the redial button was hit.  Mom thought it was odd when she saw on her phone's Caller I.D. that Dad was calling back so soon after he'd started his bike ride, and when she answered, all she could hear was Dad screaming for someone to call 9-1-1 and saying that he couldn't move.  She kept him on the line and then used another phone to call 9-1-1.  She made it to the scene of the accident just as Dad was being loaded into the ambulance, and, by the time they made it to the hospital, Dad was moving his extremities again, although he had a major case of Road Rash and was understandably sore.  He didn't even spend the night in the hospital that night, and - you guessed it - he was back out on the road within a couple of weeks.

When Dad found out he had brain cancer, one thing that kept him going was the fact that Lance Armstrong had had cancer in his brain too.  Lance had not only survived the cancer and the treatment, but he had gone on to win the Tour de France a record-setting seven times after that.  We held that up for inspiration and, for awhile, really believed that Dad would beat the odds and get back to biking like Lance had as well as running and swimming, too.  

Not long after Dad was diagnosed, we started talking about how when he was cured we would write a book to tell about what he had been through.  "I'm not famous like Lance," he said, "but maybe if I can beat brain cancer that would be a good story!"

During Dad's illness, I saw him get proverbially knocked off the bike many times, and, each time, just like those guys in the Tour, he got right up and kept on going.  When he was first told he had cancer, he said, "Well, at least I've got good insurance and great family support."  He never complained that virtually overnight he had gone from being in Ironman-triathlete shape to having to use a walker to get around his room in the hospital and then in rehab.  When the therapists at rehab showed him exercises to do during therapy sessions, he gave it his all, often doing extra reps in his room after therapy was over for the day.  When he had to be stuck repeatedly with needles for blood draws and I.V.'s, he told the techs and the nurses, "That's ok; I know you're doing the best you can."  Time and time again, as many times as his body would let him, he got back on the bike.

I value every second of the time I got to spend with Dad during the ten weeks he was sick.  I got to see the depths of his courage, humility, love, and determination.  But actually, though, his Cancer Story was just the Icing on the Cake.

           Lance Armstrong was said to have this song, "My Father's Eyes," on his pre-workout Playlist last summer.