Sunday, December 24, 2000
A lesson in living life
What do you think about when you think you could die?
The thought will occur. The time will come. You'll discover a lesion or notice a limp. There will be a pain, a cough, a spot on the X-ray. A lump. We don't think much about this, until we do. Then it's all we think about.
Matt Besier was 19 years old and a freshman at the University of Findlay, practicing football on a fine day in October when a teammate said to him, “What's that thing on your head?”
What thing?
“The bump, man. That thing behind your ear.”
Matt Besier with dad Jim and mom Jan.
(Ernest Coleman photo)
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It so happens that Matt Besier, outside linebacker, Oak Hills Class of '00, had a shaved head. Otherwise, nobody would have noticed the 3-inch long, oval-shaped hump on the mastoid bone behind his right ear. Matt had no reason to notice it. One, he couldn't see it. Two, it didn't hurt, and three, he was a 6-foot-3, 225-pound football player.
If strength and size make you a football player — and if strength, size and toughness make you a linebacker, an all-city-two-years-in-a-row stud — well, is there a person alive with a greater faith in his own immortality?
As a senior at Oak Hills, Matt busted his nose on a tackle against Zanesville. It was the second quarter. Blood ran everywhere. “It was so swollen, it looked like a glob of hamburger on his face,” recalls Matt's former position coach, Chris Willertz.
In the fourth quarter, playing tight end, Matt made a game-tying touchdown catch. On the last play of the game, he saved the win by
breaking up a pass intended for a 6-foot-9 tight end, at the Oak Hills 1-yard line.
To train for such heroics, Matt took part in Willertz's “Braveheart” training sessions. Once a month at 5:30 on Saturday mornings between April and July, he'd do insane, football things such as run up hills carrying 75-pound bags of sand, or push cars up hilly, empty streets.
“He was a tough, hard-nosed kid,” Willertz says.
What lump?
Six weeks later, when Dr. Charles Myer took Matt and his parents into Examining Room 12 in the Same Day Surgery wing at Children's Hospital and mentioned the words “radiation” and “chemotherapy”, he took careful notice of Matt's reaction.
“Like a football player,” Dr. Myer says. “Stoic. Tough. "Let's get it taken care of.'”
We will tell you Matt's story now. In good time, we will tell you how it turns out. For the moment, grab some holiday spirit and let it move you. Be glad for your life, and if you know anything, know something written by Anna Quindlen and lived by untold others:
The knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift of all.
When Matt Besier was 15, his 10-year-old brother Chris started limping. He said his leg hurt, and he didn't know why. His parents thought Chris might have fallen on the playground, but the hurt didn't go away.
They took Chris for X-rays, which showed a lesion on his leg. A week later, doctors removed a non-malignant bone tumor. This is what that experience was like for the Besiers:
They stopped breathing for a week. Their lives became neatly packaged into one tight box that contained the life of their middle son. When he was fixed for good, they exhaled and saw life with a clarity they'd never experienced.
So on that day Matt came home from college and said, “Mom, take a look at this thing on my head,” there wasn't alarm so much as a familiar dread.
“I felt it. It didn't move. It was hard. Those are bad signs,” said Jan Besier. For 25 years, she has been a pediatric nurse at Children's Hospital. She sees miracles and tragedies every day.
They made an appointment for Matt with the family doctor. Dr. Michael Jennings thought the lump was an infected cyst. He prescribed antibiotics. Matt returned to school.
A week later, nothing had changed. On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, the Besiers took Matt to Dr. Myer. “They'll probably just drain the cyst now,” Matt thought.
Dr. Myer looked at it, felt it, and the room slumped. Doctors can sugarcoat things to most patients. They can present the sunny side of the thunderstorm. But Jan was a nurse. Her husband, Jim, was a pharmacist. They harbored optimism but no illusions.
“I don't know of anything in that area that would be benign” was how Dr. Myer put it.
Matt slumped so far down in his chair, he nearly fell out. “I'm thinking I'm going to die. This is going to kill me.”
Dr. Myer summoned his resident, Dr. Manny Lopez, for a second look. It was no better. “The look on his face about made me drop dead,” Matt said. They scheduled surgery for Tuesday, three days later, two days before Thanksgiving. “I couldn't feel myself walking out of that place,” Matt said.
What do you think about when you think you could die?
“I thought about how different my life might be,” Matt said. “I wanted to say hi to my friends.”
He wondered who might be at his funeral. He wondered what they might say. He suddenly missed his younger brothers. What should have been a cyst was now something that might kill him. He wanted to go home.
“You think, "What if?'” Matt said. “What if?”
Jan spent the next few days in a frenzy. “You put your life on high speed,” she said. They were having family in for Thanksgiving. There were Christmas gifts to buy the other two boys. “You think, "What do I need to do?' You think, "I have to prepare as best I can, because there's a good chance that on Tuesday, my life is going to stop.'”
They got to Children's Tuesday at 2:30. Hospitals are strange, contradictory places. In the surgical wing at Children's, sick kids on gurneys, hidden in a nest of tubes, are wheeled past wallpaper dressed in clowns and balloons.
Matt Besier, all 6-foot-3 and 225 pounds of him, sat in a tiny examining room meant for little kids, waiting for the rest of his life.
“Look at me, Mom,” he said. “Do I look like a kid with cancer?”
Nurses came in and out, friends of Jan's, people so familiar with this sort of anxiety in families yet this time so unable to deal with it. They wished Matt well. They did their best to be cheerful. Jan's best friend, Robin Lambert, stopped by. They hugged. Jan and Robin had known each other for 25 years. Jan couldn't recall them ever hugging.
The pastor from their church came. They prayed.
The Besiers didn't talk much. At 4:45, it was time for the surgery. They walked down the hall and punched the metal disk on the wall that opened the double doors to the operating room. They said their goodbyes and good lucks.
Matt said: “It's nothing. Don't worry about it. If it is something, I'll beat it.”
Jan said, “Your dad and God and I are with you.”
“I do this so often,” Jan said this week, while making that same walk, “with other people's children.”
The surgery took an hour. When it was done, the receptionist in the waiting room told the Besiers that Dr. Myer wanted to meet with them in Consultation Room1. In the hour they waited, Jan and Jim had seen doctors come into the waiting area to speak with visitors. This usually meant good news. Being summoned to a private room did not.
“My heart sunk,” Jan said.
She didn't have time to think about her son then. The details of her oldest boy's life eluded her. Matt liked the boy band 'N Sync. He watched the soap opera Days of Our Lives. When he was 12, he held Lambert's 5-year-old daughter on his lap through an entire Cincinnati Pops concert at Riverbend. What kind of rough, tough linebacker was that?
“Matt was a real gentleman off the field,” the coach, Willertz, had recalled, “and tough as they come on it. That's very rare, that combination.”
Nobody had time to think about that, not in the seconds it took to walk to Room1.
Then the damnedest thing happened. A life-affirming, soul-soaring, what-a-wonderful-world moment. Dr. Myer walked in. He said nothing for a few, eternal seconds. For dramatic effect, perhaps.
Then he raised both of his thumbs.
“We screwed up,” Dr. Myer said. “There's no mass there.”
He started cutting into the lump. As he continued, nothing showed up. The skin just got thicker and thicker. By the time the doctor had cut two inches, the skin was four times normal thickness.
Scar tissue.
From ... Matt's football helmet.
Dr. Myer was so incredulous, he ordered a second X-ray. “I thought maybe we were cutting in the wrong place.”
They weren't. Thumbs up.
“The world lifted up with those thumbs,” Jim said.
The doctors called it “an internal callous.” Matt has a small head for his size. Maybe his helmet was too big. It rubbed against his head. Scar tissue. Thumbs up.
“There is,” said Dr. Patty Gibbons, a pediatrician at Children's, “a fairy godmother in this business.” She was among the first to see the Besiers after the happy verdict. “We're still in the business of miracles. And miracles are cool.” An hour after the surgery, Matt Besier went home.
The Besiers had 15 people at their house for Thanksgiving, all family. Jim Besier said the grace. Something about the blessing of good health.
“Five years ago, when Chris was diagnosed, we got the realization that you don't take things for granted,” Jim said. “Matt is now a reminder of that.”
We can't completely understand pleasure without occasionally realizing pain. Sadness may not be a prerequisite for happiness. But it certainly deepens the experience. Often, the beauty of life becomes evident only when we think we might lose it.
What a Thanksgiving it was for the Besiers. What a Christmas it will be.
And this is the end of our story.
Anna Quindlen, again:
“Think of life as a terminal illness, because, if you do, you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.”
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