I had the
pleasure of reading twice recently with author Tim Wendel and hearing about his
new book, Cancer Crossings: A Brother, His Doctors, and the Quest for a Cure to
Childhood Leukemia. Tim has a wonderful way of speaking about his
work, and I was fascinated to learn more about early cancer research and the
controversy surrounding medical practices now taken for granted. Naturally, I wanted to
hear more! So I’m pleased to present this interview with Tim conducted by
author Mary Kay Zuravleff:
*****
Tim
is the author of THIRTEEN books, which include novels inspired by Cuba,
baseball, Cuban baseball, and World War II, nonfiction books, and even young
adult books. He’s an incredibly versatile writer, who’s been a celebrated journalist
as well as a beloved writing professor in the Johns Hopkins M.A. program. His
latest book, Cancer Crossings: A Brother, His Doctors, and the Quest for a Cure to
Childhood Leukemia is an amazing,
sad, uplifting tale of his family’s loss to leukemia of his brother, Eric, back
in the late 60s. He was the fourth of six kids, and Tim is the oldest, the
first-born. From the book cover: “Part family memoir and part medical
narrative, Cancer Crossings explores
how the Wendel family found the courage to move ahead with their lives.”
David Maraniss has called your work
“a winning mix of science, biography
and mythology,” which aptly describes this book. How did you weave together the science,
biography, and mythology? (For example, you brought back the memory of when
people wouldn’t even say the word “cancer,” which was part of its mythology.)
First, David is being very kind. He’s been a great friend of my work,
along with Ken Burns, David Granger, Frank Deford, Cathy Alter and so many
others over the years. Always great to have folks like that in your camp.
As a writer, I dislike being pigeon-holed. For example, some say I’m just
a baseball writer. OK, I do enjoy the game and it plays well on the page, but
I’ve done a nonfiction book (Summer of
’68) and a novel (Castro’s Curveball)
with the sport as the backdrop and they play out very differently. In the case
of Summer of ’68, I moved sports to
the foreground during one of the most tumultuous periods in our nation’s
history. With Curveball, the conceit was what if Fidel Castro had pursued
baseball more seriously? If so, the world as we know it would have been much
different.
So, I think you’re keeping an eye out for those connections, places where
different elements come into contact. In my new book, Cancer Crossings: A Brother, His Doctors and the Quest to Cure
Childhood Leukemia, I needed to find the places where the treatment of my
brother Eric for leukemia intersected with the procedures and new philosophy of
the so-called “cancer cowboys” – the doctors who took this form of cancer from
a death sentence to a 90 percent cure rate. Once you open yourself up to such
possibilities, there are many more than you realize at first.
Your brother Eric was first
diagnosed with leukemia in 1966, when he was three years old. And his story is
a tale of miracles and also just-missed opportunities. Because his diagnosis
came at the turning point from doctors seeing their duty as offering palliative
care and aggressively experimenting with drug combinations to put leukemia into
remission. Tell us about the prognosis then and what it would be like now for a
child with his diagnosis?
The odds
of a child surviving acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which is the form of cancer
my brother had, have been greatly improved. My daughter Sarah was at Georgetown
Medical School when I began Cancer
Crossings. She’s the one who pointed out that the survival rate went from
10 percent to 90 percent during the 1970s. That really turned my head and I
went in search of this small group of doctors who did it. Many were in their
mid to late 80s by then. And when they told me how much opposition they faced
from the medical community, how they were called killers, poison pushers,
misfits and, yes, cancer cowboys because they dared to try something different
when it came to leukemia, well, I was hooked. I had the elements of a family
memoir and a medical detective story. And with the latter, there was fierce
opposition to what the cancer cowboys were trying to do. Until this point, many
in the medical community refused to take on cancer. It was that daunting. But
the cancer cowboys pushed ahead and many of the advances we take for granted
today – chemotherapy cocktails, the blood centrifuge machine, etc. – are a
result of their work.
Your parents’ response to his first
remission was to buy a big old sailboat for their family of six children and to
not only go for sails but to sail all the way across Lake Ontario, from Buffalo
to Toronto, an a Saturday and sail back home on Sunday. You wrote in Psychology
Today that “We coped with my brother's
struggle against leukemia by doing instead of talking.” Tell us how that
seemed then and how it seems now, as a parent, looking back on your family’s
response?
Few things make you feel as vulnerable as becoming a parent. The core
emotion is you want to protect this new being you’ve brought into the world. To
realize, decades later, that my parents also dared to have family adventures,
even with a kid with leukemia in tow, kind of blew my mind. My parents taught
us to really live in the present. We jammed as much as we could into every day.
We sailed to the far horizon on Lake Ontario, which is a huge body of water, in
the summers, and skated and played hockey in the winters. They let their son
with ALL play hockey? Kind of crazy isn’t it? But it all kind of worked and us
kids learned so much in the process. For example, my father made sure we knew
how to read the wind, to realize that it’s always changing direction and
velocity. Of course, that makes you a better sailor, but it’s also a great way
to look at life. In a way, Cancer Crossings
focuses on my parents when they were at their best, and that’s a good thing for
any kid to be reminded of.
I always tell my students to be
mindful of having a clock in their book, and you have many ticking time bombs
in yours. Of course, there’s Eric’s illness. On the other end, a kinder clock,
is your own daughter in medical school
learning about those pivotal years that changed the outcome for leukemia
patients. What was that like, her bringing you that discovery?
I knew I
needed to do right by this request. My daughter genuinely wanted to know more
about my brother, his doctors, this quest to cure childhood leukemia. I guess
it’s another example of how being a parent opens you. I mean I couldn’t really
shrug this off. My daughter wanted to know something important about my past
and it was up to me to find some of those answers. Would I have written such a
personal story, with a steep learning curve for me about medical procedures and
meds, without her request? Probably not. But the fact my daughter wanted to
know made it very important from the get-go.
Another clock is ticking with the
doctors—they were racing to find treatments or even a cure and then when you
decided to write the book, there’s your race to find them and interview them
because they’re getting on in years. Can you talk about those two clocks—the
doctors early careers and talking to them now?
Time
running out or running down in any work creates urgency, heightens things
across the board. I hadn’t planned to have two clocks ticking, they were there,
right in front of me. One was the race to cure a deadly disease before more
kids died. But I soon realized that many of the cancer doctors and nurses were
getting on in years, too. How much longer would they be with us? All of them
were very forthcoming in our conversations because I think they knew when they
passed on much of this incredible success story, the details about a modern
medical miracle, would go with them. Indeed, several of the cancer cowboys died
in the weeks leading up to the book’s release. My hope is some of their message
lives on in these pages.
Early on in the
book, you mention that Cancer Crossings
is a departure for you, being a book that’s focused on medicine instead of
sports. But you have written about teams overcoming obstacles and great odds.
The doctors at Roswell Park certainly qualify as a group of people trying to do
something that nobody thinks they can. What do you think draws you to such
stories?
I’ve
always been intrigued by how successful groups and teams work, especially when
they are made up of different personalities and viewpoints. I think it was F.
Scott Fitzgerald who said writers and artists are drawn to particular stories
or themes. How they are part of our DNA and we have no choice but to keep
returning to them. Early on in writing Cancer
Crossings, a good friend pointed out that I was doing it again. That the
only real difference this time was I focusing on an elite group of doctors
instead of a memorable team of ballplayers or hockey stars. Either way it was a
group of underdogs, only this time they were daring to take on this
shapeshifter of a disease. When he told me that I remember thinking to myself,
“OK, I can do this.”
***
Buy
Cancer Crossings:
****
ABOUT MARY KAY
ZURAVLEFF
Mary
Kay Zuravleff’s latest novel, Man Alive!, was named a 2013
Notable Book by The Washington Post. Her essays and
short fiction have appeared in The Atlantic, Los Angeles
Review of Books, American Short Fiction, and The Washington
Post. She is the founder of NoveltyDC, which offers master classes on the
novel and manuscript consultation.
