Whatif... A Few Days to Live

It’s nothIng to worry about, Joe Fornear’s doctor told him before prescribing antibiotics for a weird and uncomfortable lump under his arm. when it didn’t go away, Joe dutifully reported for an ultrasound, but days later he had received no follow-up report — which meant everything was oK, right? he remembers that when he eventually phoned in for results, a staffer mentioned lymph nodes. “I didn’t really understand, but it did not come across as anything serious,” he recalls. weeks later, back in front of the family doctor with his sick daughter, Joe mentioned the test.

“‘something about lymph nodes,’ I told him, and he looked at me and then left the room. that was the first time he actually had looked at my results,” Joe says. Immediately the physician sent the 44-year-old father of two for a biopsy.

at the time, Joe was the pastor of a small Lake highlands church. the Pittsburgh native considered himself fit, spiritually strong and, he concedes, “invincible.”

“I have played sports, worked construction and I am from the steel City, where tough men are even tougher.” on Christmas Day 2003, the same doctor called to deliver to Joe a grim diagnosis: stage III metastatic melanoma.

Despite the lump, his confidence was high. after all, on more than one occasion, his doctor had told him decidedly that the thing was not cancer.

“I was all over the place. First I think I thought about my family and what it would do to them.” the family — children Jesse and amy, and wife terri — remained upbeat. terri says she really didn’t get it at first. that is, until her husband’s life began to resemble that of Job, the biblical figure beset with one incomprehensible disaster after another.

“then it all was a blur, and I got by on adrenaline and with help from the church and family friends who cared for our children ... teenagers, basically on their own a lot of the time, for the first time.” the lump grew so large, Joe couldn’t place his arm at his side. his father died of cancer — the same type with which Joe was dealing. Joe was too sick from chemotherapy to attend his father’s funeral.

Doctors hospital-based surgeon Dr. James Khon recalls the battles waged against Joe’s out-of-control tumors and the increasing hopelessness. “Joe is just a great guy, and when he came to me he seemed so young and robust like a young Michael Landon. this tumor, I whacked it off and it grew back bigger and I cut it out again, but by then it had spread to his stomach. I removed half of his stomach, but it was still growing like wildfire.” after consulting another doctor, Khon determined Joe’s cancer was too aggressive to be treated surgically. there was a new systemic treatment he could try, but it was a long shot. It would make Joe extremely sick, might kill him, and it likely wouldn’t help. Khon expected Joe to die soon. the hospital that offered the recommended IL-2 therapy was in Pittsburgh (ironically, the city to which Joe would have traveled for his father’s funeral), and he would need to remain hospitalized because of the drugs' severe side effects. his Pittsburgh-based siblings were by his side around the clock, which was nice, Joe says, but the treatments caused swift and intense misery.

“when I sent him off, I didn’t expect to ever see him again,” the doctor says.

“I felt like the treatments were killing me. I was very ill. I felt my heart pounding, like a heart attack. I shook so bad, they had to lock down the bed.” when he left the hospital after 11 treatments, tests showed the cancer still was spreading rampantly. when Joe returned to Lake highlands, he snapped his pelvis bone while climbing his porch steps.

“the cancer, now spread to at least 13 sites throughout my body, had caused a crack in the bone. the sitting bone.” almost immediately, he was back in a Dallas hospital, in excruciating pain, down 63 pounds, praying for death, he says, as the doctors prescribed more powerful and frequent narcotic pain medicine.

“I told the doctors I was worried about getting addicted to the pain meds, and they said they only cared about keeping me comfortable. that is when I knew they had given up on me.” as the days wore on, and Joe held on, more chemo and radiation became an option, though, again, a potentially fatal one, doctors told Joe. this time in a houston hospital, intense treatments targeted the masses under Joe’s collarbone, on either side of his pancreas, and in his abdomen, pelvis and elsewhere.

“this round was especially sickening — I vomited every 15 minutes for days,” Joe recalls.

“In 2003 I was given nine more months to live.” but then, the tumors started to shrink and Joe was able to eat again. his bones healed. his strength increased.

Today Joe is alive and healthy. He has written four books. He and Terri have formed a nonprofit called My Stronghold, which provides emotional support to people with cancer.

When Dr. Khon heard a few years ago that Joe was still alive, he says he could not believe it. “It is nothing short of a miracle.”

No one involved claims to understand the exact reason Joe is still alive, while others who receive the same treatment and pray just as hard don’t make it. Terri says that, spiritually, dealing with mortality is a matter of acquiring a “more eternal perspective.” None of us will be around in 100 years, so the reason is not as relevant as what you do with the opportunity, she says. She adds that before Joe’s illness, she had a weird concept of God. She learned to listen more and be open to new ideas. “I had to ask God how I was supposed to pray for Joe,” she says.

Dr. Khon, too, gained wisdom from Joe’s unlikely survival. “Never count anybody out, and never give anyone a death sentence," he says. "I can offer statistics, but I can’t say for sure what might or might not be possible.”

Joe doesn’t focus on the fact that death eventually will return for him — as it does for every man — but on what he can do with the days that remain. “I don’t know why I made it, and I don’t know when it will come back for me,” he says. “But since I am alive right now against all odds, I am going to make it count.”

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