PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE

By Susan Gaide

     Steven was like a bull in a china shop.  That much was true from the day he took his first steps.  Actually, he never really learned to walk – one day, he just got up and ran right across his grandmother’s lawn!  Instinctively, we all knew that it was going to be that way for the rest of his life.  Steven’s problem was that he was always in a hurry.  And, he had little patience for anyone or anything -- especially himself. 

     Life took an unexpected turn on November 22, 1991 when Steven was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease, a type of lymphoma.  It became a seven and a half year battle that included intensive chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, and a double bone marrow transplant (two back-to-back bone marrow transplants), followed by more intensive chemotherapy, more surgery and then, finally, alternative treatments.

     During all but the last nine months of his illness, Steven maintained a full work schedule.  He would go from his chemotherapy treatments straight to the courthouse, where he worked tirelessly on a case that he had begun litigating at about the same time he was diagnosed with cancer.  No matter how hard we tried to get him to slow down, his stock answer was “Don’t bother me with this now – I’m in a hurry.” 

     1998 came and brought with it the beginning of the end.  Tests confirmed our worst fear – the cancer had metastasized into Steven’s right lung. His breathing became increasingly labored, requiring an ungodly amount of effort.  His weight dropped from one hundred eighty five pounds to one hundred fifty pounds in a matter of just three weeks in the hospital.  As the last nine months of his life went by, he lost more and more weight until he carried only 115 pounds on his five-foot-ten-inch frame.  Walking was but a mere memory.  We had to do everything for him. 

     The cancer was quickly consuming what little was left of his life, yet, Steven’s will to survive remained strong.  No matter how grim the doctors’ prognosis, Steven still believed that he could regain enough strength to withstand surgery to remove the masses from his lung and “beat the cancer back to a manageable level.”  After all, there was so much left to do – so many court cases to be won for the downtrodden.  

   With that focus in mind, he ate all the fattening foods we cooked for him, including vats of rice pudding (his favorite).  He worked with a physical therapist, vowing to walk again. 

     Week after week, we watched him eat, yet lose weight.  We watched him struggle to breathe, then succumb to coughing fits that lasted for hours at time.  We helped him do his physical therapy exercises and then watched as he tried and tried in vain to get up and walk.  Hurriedness had no home here.

     To everyone’s surprise, on Tuesday, February 23, 1999, just four days before Steven passed away, the therapist got him up on the walker.  He stood there, tall and pale – thin as a rail.  His sweats hung down, draping around him like the wilted branches of a weeping willow tree.   With that familiar look of determination in his eyes, he painstakingly put one foot in front of the other until he had walked all the way around the ground floor of our house.  What would normally have taken him less than ten seconds to do (don’t forget – Steven never really walked – not unless it was at a very hurried pace!) took him more than twenty minutes.  When Steven reached the spot in which he had started what would turn out to be the final walk of his life, he collapsed, exhausted in his bed. 

     “I did it,” he said in a tone that was barely audible.   We all thought he meant that he had finally walked again. 

     “No,” he said.  “I finally learned to have patience.”

© 2002 by Susan G. Gaide.  All rights reserved.  To be reprinted by permission in Chicken Soup™ For a Guy’s Soul (publication date:  2004).