Cheating the Killer Cancer

Chris Beck was a typical 19-year-old college kid struggling to keep his grades up when he went to a doctor to have a couple of small bumps on his head examined.

The doctor told him they were impacted hair follicles, nothing to worry about. So on Jan. 23, he had them surgically removed.

The bumps turned out to be cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of the disease that causes cells in the immune system to spin out of control, create tumors and dispatch them throughout the body.

Suddenly, Beck went from being a young man with a promising future, a pitcher on the Loyola Marymount baseball team, to a cancer patient.

Then the news got worse.

Beck’s new doctor at the Hoag Cancer Center in Newport Beach told him that the disease would soon kill him.

“He told me I had about three weeks to live,” Beck said. “I had a tumor about twice the size of my heart in my chest, and my liver, my spleen and my kidneys had tumors in them.”

But Beck refused to die. Coupling a strong belief in the power of faith with massive doses of chemotherapy, the cancer that had wracked Beck’s body only months earlier is now almost gone.

On Sunday, Beck celebrated National Cancer Survivors Day with more than 100 other current and former Hoag patients who have successfully fought different forms of the disease that causes nearly one of every seven deaths in the United States.

At Hoag’s eighth survivors day festival, former patients and their families shared their success stories, reaffirming that with knowledge, early intervention and a little luck, it’s possible to cheat what was once a fearsome medical scourge.

Wearing a blue wool ski cap, Beck, of Huntington Beach, calmly recounted his experience from a hospital bed, where he is preparing for a bone marrow transplant of healthy cells--a just-to-make-sure final assault on the disease that his doctor tells him is now in 98% remission.

On the day he was told how far the disease had spread, Beck said, “I cried for about a minute. I was with my sisters. Then I thought, ‘Well OK, somebody has to be strong and handle this.’ ”

At first, his seemed a hopeless case. Nancy Hansen said the tests and CAT scan revealed tumors up and down her son’s body. When it was discovered, he was at Stage Four, the most lethal level of the disease.

Beck said his physician, Dr. Neil M. Barth, didn’t sugarcoat the truth. “He said, ‘I’m not going to lie to you, I’m not going to play God. I’m a doctor. I’m just trying to do my job. If you don’t do something about this, you have about three weeks to live.’ ”

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Being 19, Beck said the decision to undergo the often unpleasant treatment, or quietly accept fate, was his.

“I had developed a real close relationship with God so I wasn’t afraid of death,” he said. “Instead of thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to die,’ once I had made a decision to do the treatment, I knew I was going to be fine.”

Incredibly, Beck has suffered few side effects. His hair didn’t fall out; instead, he shaved it off. He didn’t develop the cold sores in the mouth that afflict others. In fact, his appetite increased so much that he has added 20 pounds.

And one drug, a form of steroid, gave him so much energy that after the first cycle of treatment he stayed up all night one night cleaning his house.

Throughout the treatment, Beck said, “I have felt healthy the whole time. I have been completely determined to beat this.”

His ordeal has changed him in other ways too. He plans to return to school in the fall with a renewed interest. And he plans to start pitching again, as he did in high school at Bishop Amat. He hopes to teach high school kids one day, and coach baseball.

Although Beck acknowledges how much modern medical science has helped him, he feels the strongest medicine has been his implacable belief system.

“I’m definitely a miracle because of my faith,” he said. “Medicine has an important role in this, but it doesn’t take nearly as much credit as having faith.

“When you know you’re going to die, that’s all you really have.”