The "C Word"

 The above is a digital image compiling my father's CT scans of the "mass" in his body.

The following are my father's words:

 

CANCER: SPEAKING FROM EXPERIENCE This is an account of my personal triumph over cancer which began nearly 20 years ago on October 30, 1994. Every 6 month follow up showed me in excellent health. My wife had our fourth and fifth children since then... I had no associated sympathy pains. Telling the tale after 6 months of Chemotherapy The following is transcribed from a video tape of an address I delivered to a youth group from my church one Sunday evening in April 1995. If you aren't familiar with the term, a fireside is a church group gathering with a guest speaker in the comfort of a home. The topic I am going to talk on is developing faith. The reason why I chose that topic is when I discovered that I had cancer, I surprised myself on how much faith I have because I'd never had it before and my parents had never had it. I hadn't had any great illness in my life, and so I was really surprised. I thought that to have faith you have to go through it before, and you don't. You don't have to go through something to discover that you have faith. Let me give you a little bit of background, on Sunday October thirtieth it was daylight savings so everybody in my family woke up early because we forgot to turn or clocks forward, or backward, or whichever. Everybody in my house had actually gotten up an hour early, and it was a good thing. Jana's sister and her husband, my brother-in-law, were visiting from Indiana. They stayed overnight and were going to join us for Halloween activities over the weekend. Well, I woke up that morning with a pain in my stomach that would not go away, and in fact it was a pain that I fell out of bed with. I tried to stand up, couldn't, and doubled over. It wasn't the very first time I felt that. I felt that probably once every month or two for the past six months. As you know Andrew, my son, is only eight months old so Jana was pregnant at the time I started feeling these pains, and I thought I was having sympathy pains for my wife. Have you noticed that little kids think they are pregnant when their mother is. They have stomach pains with their mom, and they tell their mom they're going to have a baby. I was having stomach pains too, and even though I understood it, I thought that maybe psychologically I was having sympathy pains. Now that sounds like a stupid thing to think, and it kind of was, but when Jana was pregnant with Joanna, I gained twenty pounds when she gained her weight so that was sympathy weight. I had gone through it before, and consequently that is why I ignored it. When it happened this time I thought "well it is just sympathy pains." But come the end of October, Jana had already given birth to Andrew back in August so when it happened I thought well hold on a second if she's had her baby, maybe the sympathy pains should have stopped. The pains didn't stop so I picked up the phone and I called my doctor. The doctor said, "well it sounds pretty suspicious, you'd better come in." As I was getting ready to come in, I went into the bathroom, and as I got ready and showered, and as I got through shaving, I started feeling my neck like I been feeling the last couple of weeks before then, and I realized that for the last couple weeks I was feeling my neck a lot because one side was actually swollen more than the other side. Just over this part there was actually a swelling. I looked in the mirror, and thought, "you know this is another thing that I been ignoring, another reason why this is serious." Well there is a swelling there so I went that morning into Covenant Hospital, and because everyone in my family had gotten up early in the morning, normally we would not of been out of bed yet, we were dressed and ready to go to the hospital. Jana was able to drive me by herself. She was able to leave the kids with her sister. She drove me, and we got to the hospital. They immediately took me serious. Which was unusual for me because doctors sometimes take you seriously, and sometimes they don't. You see last December, so December of 93, just about ten months before I went to the hospital for this cancer, I was in Utah. I had driven 1100 miles to Utah and after driving 1100 miles, and sleeping in my parents fold-out bed, I had severe pains around my abdomen area. I felt that maybe I had bruised my kidney or something like that. It hurt all over. I didn't know what it was. I thought that I just slept on a bad bed after a very long drive, and the doctor there just nodded his head and said, "humm, you've probably slept on a bad bed after a long drive you must be pretty tired." He asked, "what are you taking for it?" I said Advil so he said, "OK I'll prescribe some more Advil," prescription strength or whatever, but he didn't run any tests or anything so there is a good chance that way back when in December I had cancer, and we could have explored it maybe, but I don't know. All I know is that I wasn't sure that the medical profession would take me serious so I was surprised a little bit or I guess confident they were finally going to take me serious in the hospital because I had this swelling here that they could see, and I had these abdominal pains that wasn't accompanied by any nausea. It wasn't accompanied by the flu. I was very healthy I just had these tight abdominal pains. When I got in the hospital, among all the other tests, they took me for a chest x-ray and for a CAT scan. They got the chest x-ray results back first, and as they looked at the chest x-ray results, they saw a little bit of a shadow. Evidently when they see shadows on x-rays they get a little suspicious. They saw a little bit of a shadow underneath or behind my spine. Now a CAT scan is CT, it stands for Computer Aided Tomography which basically means they stick you in this tunnel. They have your body on this little tray and they wheel you into this tunnel and this camera, I don't know, but I imagine that it spins around and it takes a picture, a cross section of you body. So it is as if you took a human body and you cut me up into fifty pieces and looked at those pieces separately. So that's what they did they took fifty X-Rays across here. And as they looked at them (we could see them through the door) we noticed that on certain of those cross sections there was something that was showing up like a shadow that didn't have veins and arteries in it. You see they inject you with something, or they make you drink something, so that anywhere that your blood would go naturally shows up, and they could look at it and understand it. Like they could see your veins and they could see the little veins in your kidney. Well with me they saw a whole lot of stuff that they couldn't understand, or it wasn't part of my body. In fact, they couldn't see one of my kidneys which I didn't find out until later, I'd just seen the CAT scans so I knew it was pretty serious. It turns out, my doctor told me later that I had five pounds of cancer in my abdomen. Now if you think about it that's twenty quarter pounders right, or five pounds of ground beef. That's hard to fit in your body, your abdomen. The nurses were amazed. They said, "doesn't it feel tight there," and I said, "it does, but I thought that's what it felt like to be fat." I'd brushed all this stuff off. I'd look in the mirror and say, "gosh I've really got to loose weight." I was bothered about being fat [I was 165 lb.], and I'd sing certain songs about fat people. They'd keep going though my mind. I guess I'd just ignore it. At Covenant Hospital, like any hospital around here, they have a lot of residents that go around. If you have a good attitude you realize that the residents are just there for fun. They poke you, and they prod you, but they have absolute nothing to do with you. They want to feel a cancer in your neck just to say they that they have felt a cancer in my neck, and that maybe it would help them diagnosis somebody else later down the line. So they were doing the exact same thing the doctor was doing so everything, every poking or prodding, I ever felt was done three times by the doctor and by two residents. This is when I began to realize my faith because I looked in the mirror that morning, and I saw the CAT scan on the wall, and I didn't break out in tears, and I didn't break out crying. I was just peaceful. Maybe I was in complete denial, or in limbo or what, but I was very, very calm. I'd sit down and wait for the doctor to come back again. Jana was there, and Jana was the same way. At the same time we'd have thoughts going through our heads like, "this is cancer," and we saw the CAT scan, and, "there's a lot of cancer." In fact that day, and probably for the next two days, I was thinking I would die. I wasn't thinking that I would beat this. I wasn't thinking about that at all. I just saw that there was a lot there, and I was not thinking that I was going to beat it. I was thinking that I was going to probably die, and Jana was thinking probably the same thing for those first few days. They checked me in the hospital that night. I have a very good friend who is a resident there. She wasn't in charge of my case, but she'd looked at the CAT scans. She'd made it a point to be involved in it. I was checked in on Sunday. I don't know who taught my class that morning. I even took my lesson manual with me to the hospital. I thought maybe if I am over here for a couple of hours at least I'll be prepared for my lesson in case I didn't have time on my way to church. So I checked in that night and the next morning I was talking to this resident friend of mine who was very helpful and very concerned. At a particular moment she said, "I think you waited too long." That was a good friend of mine who was a senior resident and was going to be a doctor this fall. She said, "I think you waited too long." So that was another confirmation I thought, "well I'm going to die,", and Jana thought, "he's probably going to die." When we moved from the emergency room to be wheeled up stairs, one of the, I don't know what you call them here, a technical assistant, who brought us a wheel chair, complimented us and said, "I want to just tell you I admire you two so much with how you are handling this." Jana and I just smiled and talked about it later, and thought wow people are complimenting us on how we are handling this. The same thing happened when we were upstairs the next day. One of the nurses complimented us on how well we were doing with this. We were just very calm, and I was surprised that we could have that faith take hold of us. In a day or two, we had to tell a few people, and it was pretty traumatic. We called back to Utah to tell our folks, and unfortunately Jana had to leave a message her relative's machine. She called my mom, and my dad was out of town, and she just had to hear my mom just crying. My mom just lost it. She was crying that her son had cancer. I wasn't even thirty years old. My birthday was just in March when I turned thirty. So I was just twenty-nine. We had to tell a few people, and my little sister was very concerned. In fact my little sister was so concerned she called up all my old friends from high school, and so it was if the secret was out. For that first week it was very strange. The whole ward knew because you'd been told in church that day, and all my old friend knew, and all our family knew, and so it was very strange for us. I almost felt a little cheated, or worried that my relationship wouldn't be the same with people, they wouldn't see Kingsley Allan anymore, or Brother Allan anymore, they'd see Kingsley with cancer, or Brother Allan with cancer. I was a little worried. I thought it would ruin my relationship with my friends, or tarnish it so I was a little worried, but I got over it. If you go through you're own feelings when you heard about it, probably the first week or so it was a little surprising. You didn't know how you'd deal with it, or how you can relate to the Allans, "do I say I'm sorry," or do you just ignore it? You had that basic question, do I ignore it, or do I say something about it. Well after about a month at work, a few weeks to a month, people had seen me so much that they didn't worry about that question anymore, and it became natural so after about a month, I felt like I got my life back. I felt like I was no longer Brother Allan with cancer, or Kingsley Allan with cancer. I was just Brother Allan, and by the way if he looses his hair we all know why. You know it was kind of that weird feeling I went through. Now back to a couple days after. We were thinking about it, and Jana immediately pulled out my patriarchal blessings, and was reading through it. She read through my Patriarchal Blessing, and brought it to me, let me read it, and left me alone a while. She came back and said, "Well what do you think?" As we thought about it, and talked about it we decided that it just really didn't seem that I was supposed to die yet because I had so many things that I was still supposed to do. Another comfort that we had was priesthood blessings. Remember we had Jana's brother-in-law out. He was able to give a priesthood blessing with Brad Weber. That was able to add some comfort. We had the prayers of people of the ward. Both this ward and my ward at home, and people of the community started praying for us. It seemed like everybody I met said, "well can I mention you in my prayers?" At work they said that they were mentioning me in their prayers. I had Catholics, Lutheran, and Baptists, I had all these people praying for me. I work in a multi-cultural agency so I may have had a few Moslems and Hindus, and other religions praying for me too. Another thing is the weekend after, I had a business trip scheduled in Chicago. It was at a conference that just so happened to be in Northbrook so it was five minutes away from the temple. So I took my clothes with me, my temple clothes, and after going to the conference I went to the temple. In the temple I was able to renew some of the covenants that you go through, and after renewing that covenant, I really came away really confident that my body had been blessed, and that maybe if this cancer is over here, maybe it won't attack my organs and my kidneys, and my liver won't fail. I could get rid of it and it won't affect my organs. The neat thing is I went back for a CAT scan three months later. I told you that in the first CAT scan they couldn't find one of my kidneys so it either had been destroyed, or maybe the cancer had started in my kidney, but they couldn't see it. But after three months going back, they saw some of these dyes that they inject into you going through my other kidney so it was evidently pinched off, so I got my kidney back. So I have been trying to get my body back from this cancer, and sort of isolate it. So we went to the temple, and realized that that was another promise that I felt that the Lord was with me on. Also as everyone here was reminded in Anna's talk, the Bible says, "honor thy father and thy mother that the promise might be yours," or something to that effect. But the idea is in the scriptures that your days will be long in the land if you obey your parents. Whether that means your parents won't kill you or throw you out of the house, or something like that. But in this particular case I was blessed that my Patriarchal Blessing echoed that same line at the bottom of a paragraph. It said honor thy father and thy mother and the great blessing promised will be yours. So Patriarchs that echo scriptures in your blessings are doing you a favor. You could read it in the scriptures, but they are doing you a favor because they are making that promise seem more like yours personally. So after a couple of days I added up all these promises. Through our own prayers and blessings that we have, we realized that I wasn't going to die, and it was a matter of, "we're going to live, we're just going to have to put up with this like I have a bad back or something, or if you break you leg you just have to put up with it. So the support of the ward in fasting for me, and the blessings helped me build my faith. Now I was surprised at how much faith I had, but I still had to grow; Jana still had to grow. I was still hard headed. Some of you have the same feelings as me. I feel like to get a priesthood blessing, you have to be sick, you have to have cancer or something dramatic because that is the stories you hear. You try to do it on your own without getting a Priesthood Blessing. I had that mentality in my head so the week after. I had to go get my bone marrow tested to see if the cancer was in the bone marrow which it turned out it wasn't which was a great sign. As many of you know Howard W. Hunter died of cancer. As I read in the church news that the cancer had gone to his bones, I knew it was just a matter of time because when it gets to the bones they can still do treatment, but it is worse than it not being there. Anyway my brother-in-law was in town, all of our family came and visited. Jana's brother flew out. He had cancer before twice so he was able to empathize, and to help us go through this time of waiting, and his new wife came out so we could meet them. My family came out, my brother, mother, and father. While Jana's brother was out, I woke up that morning to go get the bone marrow test. I didn't ask for a blessing, and he said, "you are getting a blessing." Whether he collaborated with Jana I don't know so I sat down in the chair and he gave me a blessing. Not a blessing of healing, but a blessing of comfort He was by himself so he didn't have any one to anoint. He blessed me with comfort that things would go well and things like that. Well I went in that day, and bone marrow is a little bit painful. They basically stick a needle into your bone and take a little sample out of you bone by twisting it and pulling it out. Now I didn't see any equipment, but I sure felt it. You know it was like he was saying, "gosh I hate these young guys bones because they just don't crumble like the old peoples bones." Well I got through it, and that blessing helped, but I guess somehow I doubted whether that blessing helped a lot or not. I doubted until the Lord taught me a lesson. I go in for once a month for chemotherapy, and basically what that is they put an IV in my arm and I get dripped in for an hour and a half then the drugs time release through out the month. I start at a pretty high immunity. I am at my strongest the last week of the month, or the first week of the month, like this week then they give me my chemo, and I slowly get worse and worse and worse until about the middle of month. In the middle of the month my immunity is at its absolute lowest so I am going to catch everything that is around. This month I was in the doctor's getting antibiotics Thursday because I caught this sore throat. I catch anything that is around and I catch it from my son because he is the one that brings it to me. Two months ago I went in and my doctor said I have pneumonia. Evidently I had caught this flu and it had turned into pneumonia. They checked me into the hospital, and I had to have IVs in my arms. And I had to get out of there. You know I wasn't getting any rest. I was roommate with this TV junkie who left the TV on until one in the morning, turned it on at eight in the morning, and all he watched was talk show after talk show. After one talk show I was going, "AHH!" You know turn your volume all the way down pull out this nice thick book (I checked out a very thick book by the way just two months prior to that. I checked out War and Peace. I don't know if you have ever seen that one. It is fourteen hundred pages) So I had War and Peace which he was watching these sit-coms. I begged to get out, and in order to get out my doctor put me on home care which meant I would get IVs at home. They have these IVs that don't hang in the air when you get them at home. They are these little rubber balls that squeeze themselves until they put everything into you and then your treatment is done for that day. I had to have that twice a day. Anyway the nurse came home and she taught us how to use the IV. To get the IVs at home they had to put in a (I can't pronounce it right) Grashong pict (I'll show you where the scar is; that little dot there). What they do is run a tube through your vein to about here in your chest cavity so it is really stable. A little plastic tube. When I got pneumonia, I didn't have any blessings. We were in the hospital, we didn't tell anyone, and ask for any priesthood blessing. Now when I went down stairs to the procedure center, which is the same place where they did the bone marrow, they had to put the pict in, and I didn't get a blessing before it. Well they tried this vein and they got stuck on a valve so they tried this vein and they got stuck on a valve. This was traumatic for me because I don't like needles. So whether it was painful or not, the point is it was bothering me, and so when the nurse said, "Uh, we're going to have to try the other side so you are going to have to scoot over to the other side of the bed," I said, "that will be fine because I already drenched the sheets with my sweat on this side so I need to sit on the other side because the sheets are dry." After two times in, this is when I had my repentance. This is when I prayed for forgiveness for not having a blessing, and having the priesthood by me and certainly all around me. This is when I begged and pleaded to the Lord that they would be able to get this thing in, and get it in soon. So after that begging and pleading it went in this arm. OK, it went in all the way up my arm and I couldn't feel it. I had it in for a month and a half. I just kept it in just in case I got sick afterwards because I was getting sick a lot at least once a month. So I kept it in, and I learned my lesson: get Priesthood Blessings especially when the priesthood is all around you. Get priesthood blessings. Jackie and Susan might realize that I went through this repentance because after I got home and started my IV care, I called my home teacher and had him give me a blessing, and then I had a priesthood blessing at the beginning of the next month when I got sick again because I was getting sick about once a month and it would knock me out for a few days. So I leaned heavily on them now. I went through my repentance, and I have learned. That is another reason why I asked for this second fast because I have learned that fasting worked. When the priesthood approached me that asked, "well can we clean your yard? Can we clean you yard? Can we clean your yard?" And finally after the eighth time I said, "yea you can clean my yard." They said, "can we do anything else for you?" I said, "yes can you have a special quorum fast?" because I knew I couldn't do that myself, and I knew that a fast had helped me before. So I asked for the quorum fast, and I understand that they even announced it in Sacrament Meeting. We were tired that morning so we didn't make it until Sunday School. That was an interesting day because Jana had about six people ask her, "how's Kingsley?" We realized afterwards when we compared notes that a lot of people were asking how's Kingsley because we missed Sacrament Meeting. They thought I was ill or something like that, but I was actually having one of my better weeks. I asked for the blessing at the end of this trial period. Now why did I ask for another fast? I went through six months of the therapy, and the therapy was designed to get rid of five pounds of cancer. Chemotherapy was the best thing because it was all over. They couldn't radiate anything because they'd be shooting everywhere so that was the best. Now that we are done with the six months the doctor is making the decision to change the therapy. In all likelihood they will try to finish things off with about three weeks of radiation. Once every weekday for three weeks, not much longer than fifteen minutes. I don't know what it is like. I haven't experienced it. My opinion is that they will draw targets on my body and they'll cover up everything but those targets then they'll expose me to x-rays that are about ten- thousand times the normal dosage of x-rays once a day all over my body, or all over my abdomen. Oh by the way, this part in my neck probably went away with the chemotherapy. That's what they cut out a couple of days after to see what kind of cancer it was. I am seeing all these faces saying, "why is Brother Allan telling us all these things tonight?" Well because I had a half hour here tonight. I had to fill up time so I thought I would throw it in. Now here's the sad thing, I have all my notes and this isn't on any of my notes. I was going to tell you completely different things. I just didn't know this story would take so long or be so enthralling or therapeutic. I wanted a fast to bless this next part of my treatment. In fact Jana is so bold that Jana would like all the cancer to be gone. She wants that CAT scan to look completely clean. Sounds like a great idea to me. I had a CAT scan in between. I started at what, five pounds. I had another CAT scan, the cancer had been reduced by about half so she's saying, "well half each three months so it should be gone." She's hoping, and I am hoping too. I am also grateful for this fast because it can give me the strength if I have to go another six months because it wears you out, makes you tired. You miss work, you lose you sick days, and your vacation days. This was getting me a bit worried, but I had everybody fasting for me the first time around, and if you've ever heard any cancer stories; for the amount of cancer I had, I think I haven't heard a story of anyone who's had it as well as I have. I don't know of anybody who's had it as easy as I have. To have gone through each month of chemotherapy, and to have had that much cancer to start with. For the first three months, I only missed work for the doctor's appointments. I wasn't sick for the first three months. I could ignore it. I could jump around, and I was upset at my family for telling me to cut back on my activities. They wouldn't let me ride the bus to work in the morning because they thought there were too many germs on the bus. I thought, "boy that's a prejudice statement isn't it." So Dave Pike has had to drive me to work every day. He's my next door neighbor, and goes there anyway. Here it is, I've had cancer for six months, and I still have vacation days left at work. I still have time, and I'm able to walk around, and I feel very good and healthy. I have a few things that tell me I'm not healthy. Yesterday we were planting seed in the plots that people came over and dug up for us last week. I was planting seed, and I had to just crumple the dirt a little bit more. I noticed that I could only go about six feet, and then I had to take a rest. Then I'd go another six feet and take a rest, and finally Jana came out, and I rested while she did the rest. It was nice to watch her do it because I was appreciative that she'd do that. So other than a few hints like that, I feel as healthy as can be, and I really attribute it to the faith and prayers of so many around us, and of my parents and relatives. I'm going to conclude my talk by saying that you'll probably surprise yourself if you are in a similar situation with the faith you have because the faith that we have, Jana and myself, comes from other people. They support you and pray for you, and the faith that we also have comes from the fact that we've been pretty good church members. Have you ever heard the term "faithful member of the church?" You think that that means they do things. That they are faithful so they go to church, and they teach Sunday School or whatever. If you do those things and you are just doing what the Lord wants you to most of the time (you can't do it all the time your not perfect), I think you'll have that faith inside you so you shouldn't worry if you are in a similar situation. That is my testimony, and that is my story. I appreciate you prayers, and your concerns. I am not so prideful to think that I can do it without your prayers. I do appreciate your prayers, and the prayers for my family, wife, children, and extended family. My mother worried a lot, that is why I had to bring her into town to see that my hair hadn't fallen out. There's another thing that tells you. Jana actually prayed that when I had to speak in Sacrament that not all my hair would fall out by then, and my hair just never really fell out all the way. My hair line just receded back a few inches, but I still have a lot more hair than we would have expected. Anyway, I say these things in Jesus Christ's name, Amen.