Geoff Eaton stands 6 foot 5, has a mischievous smile and a twinkle in his eye. At age 22, St. John’s Newfoundland was his home. Geoff was studying business full-time in university and running his own marketing company. He also played an intense game of hockey and partied often with his friends. Almost overnight, Geoff seemed to lose his energy. His buddies blew past him on the ice. He chalked this up to his weight, then 225 pounds. One night, turning to place his drink down at a business reception, he fellover backwards and woke up staring at the ceiling. Intuitively he knew his life was about to change dramatically.
The doctors found Geoff had acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a rare and very serious blood cancer. The cancer cells were crowding out the normal blood cells, putting him at risk for severe infections, bleeding, and sapping his life energy. Geoff was given six hours to leave the hospital to prepare for a prolonged hospital admission. Facing six hours that could be his last out in the world, he went to his apartment to get music, gym pants, and his pillow. Twice he went to Signal Hill, the local mountain, overlooking his coastal city. From these heights, a fierce determination was arising. Geoff wanted to do everything possible to watch these sunsets and to drive his motorcycle till age 95. He choked up at the thought of not having an opportunity to breathe life into his dreams. He asked himself over and over what he needed to do to stay alive.
Back in his apartment his roommate cornered him, demanding to know why Geoff looked so upset. Geoff knew the one-word answer to his friend’s question but it wouldn’t come out. He kept trying to say it. Finally Geoff said clearly “Leukemia, they think it’s leukemia.” Geoff thinks that this moment of acknowledging the diagnosis directly was a turning point for him. “It was as if this major weight was taken off my shoulders, the knife taken out of my back. Literally, in that instant, my whole perspective switched and I started to say to my inner self ‘Yeah, they think I have leukemia and I can f ’ing tackle that!’”
He remembers walking into the hospital elevator for the very first course of chemotherapy. His face was expressionless but the eyes were intense—this was his “game face”—the feeling he got as he walked to the arena before a big hockey game. He would get ‘aggressive’ with his cancer. He created a virtual play-off hockey series in his head, ‘Geoff versus cancer’. Each round of chemotherapy would represent a game in his series. Geoff ’s family and friends bought into his strategy completely. His Dad brought him his official Mario Lemieux stick; a buddy who works for the St. John’s Maple Leafs gave him the official puck; and he wore the same jersey he wore when he captained his high school team. The puck soon became the symbol of his soul energy and stayed with him throughout his hospitalization.
Before every new round of chemotherapy, nurses would set up the IV pole opposite Geoff. Hunched over at the faceoff, stick crossing over the lines of chemotherapy, the puck was dropped. When Geoff played hockey he played to win. He told his physicians that it was his game—not theirs.He was the player and they were the coaches. His family and friends would have to watch from the stands.
Geoff interpreted every symptom as if it arose during a hockey game. If he got a headache from a blood transfusion, he understood that he had taken a hit to the head from his opponent. When his energy levels sagged, he knew he had to get off the ice for a quick rest on the bench. “For me, in some strange way, I felt when I was having pain and discomfort that Iwas really ‘playing hard’, competing if you will, and I took comfort from that. It was part of the game.”
Geoff brought this same fiery intensity to his interactions with the medical team. Whether the person was a physician, nurse, therapist or cleaning person, if anyone tried to talk down to him, he would ‘slam them shut.’
“I’m a ‘Proactive Patient’, which basically means sometimes I’m a big pain in the ass for docs and nurses, but I always qualified that with ‘Hopefully, I’ll be equally rewarding.’ I wanted to know what the drug side-effects might be and specifically when and how long I would take the drugs.” As Geoff ’s reputation grew, his physicians began to send in medical students to learn from this master in self-advocacy.
Geoff reflects back to this time and says “I had this feeling in my gut that I was going to experience some amazing things, both ‘good’ and ‘not so good’. And I felt I wanted to share those experiences and the lessons I learned as a result. I was eager to talk to anyone who would listen, and that included medical students. I also started an e-mail group the first week I was in hospital to keep friends and family up to date on my progress. To share my story was one of the most significant decisions I made.”
Geoff ’s treatment plan included a bone marrow transplant with marrow from his Dad. This occurred at a major cancer centre 2000 miles from his home, and required high-dose chemotherapy designed primarily to destroy the leukemia in his body. It would also destroy many healthy cells, including his entire immune system. As a result of this intense treatment, Geoff had to spend forty days of harrowing isolation in a psychological desert—a minor infection could be deadly.
With stick and puck in hand, he began days of chemotherapy. One night, weakened to the point of despair, he slumped over on the toilet. To his left hung his chemotherapy medication dripping in from a big brown bag. On his right hung a bag of red blood cells which flowed in smoothly. He began to think about never being able to play hockey again. Suddenly he felt a presence in the room and a tap on his head. A voice from beyond seemed to say, “You are going to have to choose one or the other”—the brown bag of chemotherapy or the red bag of blood. At that moment he resolved to choose the vibrant red blood…to choose life.
Thus began a slow and painful recovery. The days ticked by. Geoff befriended one of the Jamaican nurses on the unit—Rose. She was boisterous, fun, and full of life. He wanted some independence, and Rose understood this. He asked her to teach him how to unhook the lines and feeding tubes because there was a rock concert in town he wanted to attend. Geoff knew he would expose himself to a sea of germs among the thousands of fans, but he reasoned life is meant to be lived and every decision is a balance of risk and benefit. He loved the concert and, as it turns out, he didn’t get sick.
His blood counts continued to improve. After two months cooped up in a hospital room, far from his Newfoundland home, Geoff longed for a view of the ocean. When the doctors gave him the green light, he literally took the next flight home. Puck in hand, donning his hockey jersey, he decided to send his winning stick home by car, worried the airline would break it.
A week after Geoff got home, the party came to a crashing stop. At 3:00 AM, fevers, chills, and a bad set of shakes signalled an infection in the IV line in his upper chest. Back into hospital for high dose antibiotics. Geoff was sick. Deathly sick. Each day the frown on his doctor’s face deepened. A second infection. Plummeting blood counts. Geoff wrote his will and planned his funeral. One organ after another began to shut down—and he became agitated and scared. He was spending what little life energy he had thrashing about.
The doctors wanted to put a tube down his throat, put him on life support, to try to paralyze his muscles in a last effort to save his life. But in Geoff ’s mind he was still skating hard. He couldn’t think clearly. He refused to let the doctors get close enough to place the tube down his throat. He began to lash out at them. His father and brother were pleading with him to let them do it, each holding down a shoulder—a father’s nightmare, fighting against a dying son.
The tube went in but Geoff was still punching out, exhausted but not willing to let go of the hockey game. Geoff ’s dad yelled at him, “Have you had enough?” With a tube finally down his throat, Geoff scrawled a note: “Not yet.”
The medication took effect. It required ten times the normal dosage to put down this raging elephant. Geoff was suspended in a deep sleep, barely holding on to life. The next 48 hours were agony for his family. Each hour the update was worse than the one before.
His father arrived at 7:00 AM to disastrous news. Geoff’s lungs had begun to bleed. Two respiratory therapists focused on his every breath, suctioning out the pink froth. The team was working wildly around him.
Geoff was dying. The chance of recovery was less than one percent. Meanwhile, Geoff was dreaming he was an infantryman at war, separated from his fellow soldiers, staggering through the deep brush. If only he could find the troops. He stood up in an opening to get a better view of the facing hill. Suddenly enemy fighters jumped up and stitched him with machine gun fire in the chest. He was bleeding into his lungs.
Hour after hour Geoff dangled limp on the brink of death. Nightfall. Darkness everywhere. Waiting. Praying. Clutched in the palm of Geoff ’s hand was his hockey puck. Holding. Holding. Even when the nurses adjusted the IVs, they knew not to disturb the puck in his hand. The physiotherapists turned him and stretched him out without displacing his puck. Everyone knew that Geoff wanted to keep playing in this series.
Suddenly someone asked “Where is Geoff ’s hockey stick?” Someone rushed home to bring it in.
Slowly the numbers on the monitors began to climb upwards, step by step, flashing hope and possibility.
Geoff opened his eyes three weeks later. His family was at his bedside holding their collective breath. He wanted to give his mother a hug, but he was too weak to even lift his arms. They wanted to know if he’d seen the light—gone