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JUST KEEP GOING. My journey through cancer. by Noah Stanzione Faculty Member, World Language and Religion Departments There is a famous scene in Homer’s Iliad wherein Achilles’ mother Thetis offers him a choice of two fates: to die young but be remembered or to have a long life and be forgotten. Achilles chooses the former, which in the afterlife he famously comes to regret. In Vergil’s correction of the story, his hero Aeneas thinks he wants Achilles’ fate—on the night Troy is sacked, he keeps trying to run into battle to die with glory—but the gods will not let him. Instead, Aeneas learns that his mission is to survive so that he can serve and guide the Trojan refugees to a new home. Six years on and seemingly no closer to the new home promised him, he still longs to have stayed at Troy with his fallen friends, but his mother appears to him in disguise and gives him the seemingly simple advice to perge modo: just keep going. It has 10
LEGACY Magazine | FAll 2020
been six years since I left a place I thought was home. This is the story of me “just keeping going” to get here. For the school year of 2014-15, I had landed a job in Scottsdale, Arizona that felt like a perfect fit. I would be one of seven classical-language faculty (teaching latin and Greek!) and an assistant coach to a robust speech and debate program. Alas, it was not meant to be. Almost immediately upon beginning work, I started having intense flank pain and finding blood in my urine on top of rapid weight gain. Not wanting them to mean anything, I ignored the symptoms until I couldn’t. On the Thursday after labor Day, I awoke with significant edema only to vomit blood. The next afternoon I checked myself into the local E.R. in acute renal failure. A healthy creatinine level (a measure of kidney
function) is 1. Mine was 11. Saturday afternoon I was taken for emergency surgery to install nephrostomy tubes, thin plastic tubes that enter the kidneys through an incision in the back and end in external collection bags to avoid an internal blockage. During the procedure, doctors found the cause of the obstruction: a mass growing out of my bladder. Three days later, on September 9, 2014, it was confirmed that I had an aggressive, metastatic cancer with a poor prognosis: about a one-in-three chance of survival for five years. Doctors never tell you the stats, though. Thank God for the internet, right? Before starting chemotherapy the following week, it was advised because of my age that I cryopreserve my sperm. As a Catholic, I thought and prayed hard
