One Tough Woman – A Love Story

• Posted on 13th November 2018
• in entertainment books, Love Story
• by Ben

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Well, she’s been married to me since 1967 (more or less*) so that is a love story that proves the title.

No, seriously now, folks. I’ve played college football, served in the military, operated a jackhammer on a line gang and worked in film as First AD for over twenty years so I’ve known a lot of tough people. My beautiful, smart, gifted, slender, very feminine, athletic and gentle wife, Elizabeth Hepburn, is one of the toughest humans with whom I have ever been acquainted.

One hears a lot about “karma” both seriously from some and jokingly from others but the concept of comeuppance is part of our culture. Okay, fine. But what about reverse-karma?

I have never known a more loving and compassionate person. I’m tempted to list the scores of selfless acts of support, encouragement, physical assistance and spiritual uplift supplied by this wonderful woman I have witnessed (and in which I occasionally participated).

So where do toughness and reverse-karma enter into this profile? Stay tuned.

We had been married twenty-five days short of three years when Elizabeth (EH) awoke in great pain. Her doctor – who in those less regimented days had given us a personal phone number – opined that it sounded like kidney stones and should see her the next day. By dawn the pain had increased and there was blood. Another call to Dr. Trudy sent us to meet her at the hospital. The problem was not kidney stones but a malignant tumor that had destroyed one of EH’s kidneys.

After the surgery to remove the kidney she was in a lot of pain. Here’s how much; one of her favorite movies, the hilarious Court Jester was on TV and she couldn’t watch it because it hurt so much when she laughed. And as a comforter and caregiver I was useless. Clueless. Inept. Bungling. I had no idea what to do for the light of my life but fidget and feel uncomfortable. Once she was home my abilities improved but they had no where to go but up.

JUMP CUT: Forty Years Later – to the Month

In November 2010 we were driving back home from Marblehead, MA after spending Thanksgiving with friends when Elizabeth noticed blood in her urine. Seven weeks later she had surgery to remove a malignant tumor in her lady parts which was followed by chemotherapy that almost killed her. But, as I said, she is a tough woman and by the time her hair and body weight returned one would never have suspected that she’d been sick.

JUMP CUT: Five Years Later – November for the Third Time

In November 2015 EH had been experiencing some discomfort in her belly for a couple of weeks and several doctors were unable to determine the cause. In December the pain grew so intense that we went to the Mt. Sinai ER where a cat-scan discovered a tumor in her abdomen. A week later a biopsy revealed, you guessed it, malignancy yet again. And because of the location and the fact that it encircled her aorta, it was inoperable.

Then began the search for healing.

A friend sent us to a Nigerian doctor who specialized in parasitology. In retrospect I cannot imagine why, but he was a trusted friend who knew a lot about healing yet the results of this doc’s treatments, while expensive, (no Medicare) had zero effect on the tumor.

Next we saw a highly rated oncologist at Mt. Sinai who essentially waved “bye-bye” to Elizabeth: a course of heavy-duty chemo might give her five years. Not acceptable!

Our friend (producer of the Better & Better Series) Eric Brown who had a connection arranged for us to see the head of oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK). She was a lovely woman who thought the only way to save Elizabeth (again for five years) was more or less conventional chemo but given our experience with that, it was still out of the question. She prescribed some hormone medication and after a couple of months and a couple of scans the tumor was still getting bigger.

The friend who had sent EH to the Nigerian had another brainstorm and sent her to a German doctor who ran a bunch of tests and set up a treatment regimen that ran for about six weeks and the tumor kept growing.

These treatments, Nigerian, German (and many colonics plus several acupunctures) had cost over $25,000 by now and the results were nonexistent. The only good thing about MSK was that it was covered by Medicare and they had great coffee in the waiting room. Fortunately EH has a wealthy friend who paid for almost all of this.

In early September Elizabeth spoke with her GP about her frustration and learned of a doc on Long Island who had been getting excellent results with “hopeless” patients so we drove to Smithtown and met Doctor Richard Sollazzo.

This was the trip we should have made nine months sooner. I’ll condense the very long story of this wonderful genius and his rescue of my sweetheart. After spending over two hours with us explaining his methods, Dr. Sollazzo ordered extensive tests of blood, hair, tissue, her biopsy sample and several other items. The lab results enabled him to pinpoint the exact strain of cancer that was in the tumor and armed with this knowledge to design a very specific and highly targeted chemical treatment to eliminate the disease from her body. (One of the other things he told us was that one of his patients had been the CEO of MSK!)

The only negative about Dr. Sollazzo is that due to his unorthodox techniques his treatments – costing about $1,500 each – were not covered by Medicare. This gave us an opportunity to experience the generosity of many friends. Unbeknownst to Elizabeth, one of her closest confidantes sent out an email to Elizabeth’s friends requesting financial support. In amounts from $10 to $5,000 checks started showing up in our mail. By the time the last one arrived we had enough money to cover about half the costs and EH’s aforementioned wealthy friend and a well heeled niece covered the rest.

We went to Sollazzo’s office every Friday for the next sixteen weeks for the three to four hour treatments. The side effects were minimal, a loss of maybe 25% of her hair but very little (sometimes no) nausea or other typical chemo related problems. After the first five sessions he ordered a sonogram to measure their effect.

The tumor has shrunk by about 20%.

Five more treatments and it was half its original size, six more and Elizabeth had a Pet-scan. By then the tumor was so small it was barely detectable. Chemo was finished. Dr. Sollazzo recommended radiation to polish it off and EH balked. She has seen too many people for whom the radiation treatment was “worse than the disease”.

Once again, Eric’s connections took us to Dr. Michael Buckstein at Mt. Sinai who is to radiation what Dr. Sollazzo is to chemo: very advanced and highly focused. With some trepidation EH went in for a fitting of the radiation “bed” (form fitted to hold her body in the exactly correct position) and looking up she saw on the ceiling a sky filled with apple blossoms. Her trepidation vanished and she went ahead with the process.

The last of five radiation treatments was on 27 March 2017. Again, the follow-up scan showed a dot of “something” in a lymph node which was surgically removed in a ten minute out-patient procedure. (Don’t you love that euphemism – procedure – for cutting a hole in a living human body?)

So as of June 2017 Elizabeth was finally cancer free … for the third time.

That summer she began to regain her normal strength and vitality and all was becoming well. We went swimming and did other normal summer stuff and life was good.

But the cursed month of November (except for our joyful marriage celebration on the 25th) was on it’s way and it arrived, if not with a bang, with a CRACK.

On the first day of that wretched month I was at my faithful Mac writing and Elizabeth was in the bedroom switching her summer/winter wardrobe in a storage box. Suddenly I heard a loud “SHIT!” from her usually non-scatological voice. When I sprang from my chair and ran into the bedroom she was sitting on a chest rubbing her lower back with both hands.

As I discussed in the opening paragraphs, this is a very tough lady but this pain was in a class by itself. Helping her up onto our bed produced a level of screaming I’d never heard. As a trained opera singer she has a voice nearly as powerful as mine and I feared for my hearing. This here was some amazingly excruciating pain. And nothing, even oxy, touched it.

Now began a search for what was wrong. Amazingly, in this day of medical technology, it took several weeks/tests before we learned that EH had fractured three of her lower vertebrae. The good news was that we now knew what was wrong. The bad news was that there didn’t seem to be any reasonable treatments for the condition. This situation brought to mind Mel Brooks’ 2,000 Year Old Man description of medical treatment: “You laid there ’til you got better.” Oy Veh!

There were chiropractic treatments, there were acupuncture treatments, there was massage, there were ointments, there were two back braces, there were ice treatments, there were heat treatments and there was almost constant pain. The only thing that would allow Elizabeth to get to sleep in bed was mouth-to-mouth delivery of the smoke from the burning cannabis plant which I dutifully applied each night. I called this treatment the healing kiss.

Even with the healing kiss she rarely got through the night in bed. Most nights the pain would awaken her after three or four hours and she’d have to move to her leather chair in the living room.

After seven months on this excruciating (not so)-merry-go-round of treatments and practitioners of every stripe Elizabeth decided to go radical. By that I mean a treatment that had been suggested by one of these docs a while back. We didn’t opt for it at the time but by June it seemed the only option. Kyphoplasty. A hollow needle is passed through the skin of the back into the fractured vertebra. Bone cement (called polymethylmethacrylate) is injected through the needle into the fractured bone. This stabilizes the fracture and is supposed to relieve the pain.

Guess why those two words are in italics. Right. The pain, just like Elizabeth Warren, persisted.

After the kyphoplasty EH began physical therapy sessions. That was over four months ago (July) and her strength and ability to get through the day without intense pain is (very) slowly improving. She now sleeps through the night in bed but after walking or standing for even brief periods varying degrees of pain return. The snail’s pace of the recovery is frustrating but at least some surcease from the pain is finally evident. We approach Thanksgiving day (and the fifty-first anniversary of our first wedding) with hope for a pain-free New Year.

13 November 2018

 

•  See Waiting for Elizabeth, for tales of divorce and remarriage

Tags: Elizabeth Hepburn