The Cure Seekers

The ship sailed the South Pacific, a capsule of lights and gaiety bobbing in the empty night.

Aboard, tuxedoed musicians played for the chattering dinner crowd while Dave Musso yearned in anticipation. He was hungry. Beckoning from the buffet table before him were lobsters neon red, steaks sizzling in their juices, pastries delicately sweet.

At a plump 230 pounds, the 68-year-old relished a good meal. He relished much in life.

Little did Musso suspect that soon he would be unable to taste food ever again. Or savor more of life than simply clinging to it.

Instead, the cruise to Bora-Bora hurled Musso and his wife, Mary, into a nightmare; now it is as if the Northridge couple have been stuck in a lifeboat for seven years, chasing a dim chance of survival that drifts just ahead into the darkness.

The darkness scares the Mussos.

It frightens all the 1.2 million Americans afflicted with cancer each year. Rightly so. Nearly 565,000 of them die.

“We’ve been through an awful lot,” Mary grieved recently, facing another bout of Dave’s life-threatening disease. “It’s been so hard.”

Since 1991, Dave--now 75, quiet and usually serene--has been hit by cancer five times in three parts of his body: the tongue, larynx and lungs.

Mary, four years younger, has helplessly watched him lose his ability to taste, smell, swallow or speak without help from an artificial voice box. At night, she sleeps to the sound of his heavy lungs wheezing for air.

But the journey may finally be taking a turn for the better. New hope glimmers in the darkness. Not only for Dave Musso, but for all cancer patients.

Musso is one of those scouting the way, subjecting his mutilated body to sometimes painful and bloody trials of an experimental drug that has been hailed as a possible superweapon against cancer--but of which too little is yet known to release for general use. The tests, the hospital visits, the drug’s effects consume his days and nights.

Someday this class of cancer-fighting drugs, known as angiogenesis inhibitors (see accompanying story), may be recognized as one of history’s great medical advances.

Whether the retired aerospace designer will live long enough to reach that day is problematical.

What is certain is where it all started.

‘Just a Sore Throat’

On the last leg of a 35-day cruise to the sun-drenched islands of the South Pacific, Dave filled his dinner plate one night in the fall of 1991 and eagerly sat down next to his wife.

Gourmet meals had been ladled for decades into nearly every event the couple enjoyed. At home, weekly junkets to cheer on the Rams, Dodgers or Lakers were sandwiched between champagne brunches whipped up by Mary and long dinners out with friends. Birthdays, anniversaries and school outings for their only child, Sharon, were excuses to sample new restaurants in the San Fernando Valley.

It made perfect sense for the Mussos to blow $20,000 of their nest egg on a lengthy cruise, a floating buffet.

“On a cruise, you can eat yourself to death,” Mary exulted.

As Dave sat down next to his wife that night, before he could take his first mouthful, his throat felt constricted. It was hard for him to catch his breath. Coughing, he tried to clear what he thought must be something caught there. But it would not go away. Dave could not stop coughing.

He left the dining room and found a ship’s rail, which he clutched in the moonlight while allowing the coughing to take over. The coughing has continued almost constantly ever since.

The onset still amazes Dave. Mostly because he had quit smoking--which doctors blame for his illness--15 years before.

“I feel fine. I feel fine,” he kept thinking. “This is just a sore throat.”

Before they realized what was happening, the Mussos were sitting with a doctor in Los Angeles just days after the cruise ended.

On their 32nd wedding anniversary--Nov. 25, 1991--the doctor predicted that Dave had roughly six months to live. A tumor was spreading quickly on the back of his tongue.

“Oh, no,” Mary moaned to the doctor. “No.”

Dave’s calm brown eyes clouded with fear. But only briefly. He soon adopted the same outlook on his condition that he has had with all things distressful: Just get through it.

“This is the way it is,” he told himself, his wife and others around him. “It doesn’t do any good to dwell on the negative. I can lick this.”

After all, he had flown into the face of death before. He had even found it fascinating.

Perched in an egg-shaped blister of glass 30,000 feet above ground, Lt. David Musso had a bird’s-eye view of destruction when he was a B-17 bombardier in World War II. On 30 missions in 1945, German antiaircraft shells exploded nearby with a “Whoomph! Whoomph!” that blew a fiery stench into 22-year-old Dave’s nostrils as he dropped bombs on factories, fuel stations and food warehouses feeding the enemy war effort.

At times, he would just sit and watch the spectacle, an earnest observer moved by the poetry of massive forces colliding.

“The planes were so enormous,” he marveled. “I was fascinated by everything that went on.”

So fascinated that when a German fighter sailed just beneath his craft once, Dave stared in awe, tracking its path with his machine gun but never pulling the trigger. For one long second, Dave and the German pilot exchanged startled glances.

“Enemy plane!” sputtered the voice of another crewman into his radio headphones.

On several missions, Dave’s B-17 was hit, jolting him as wounded friends cried in agony amid the drone of aircraft. The war fostered in Dave a lifelong obsession with all things aeronautic. The stress turned him into a heavy smoker.

“I was scared,” he said, coughing. But “We couldn’t afford to think about that. All we could think about was our mission. We concentrated on making it through.”

In late 1991, he adopted the same attitude to his tongue cancer. Doctors at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center informed Dave that he stood at least a fighting chance if he underwent a combination of radiation treatment and chemotherapy.

“Like a slab of roast beef,” as Dave saw it, surgeons wrapped his tongue in strings of radioactive capsules designed to kill the tumor. For days, he could not say a word.

The treatment forced him to take all nourishment through a tube in his stomach. Not that it mattered. The radiation destroyed his ability to smell, taste and swallow.

“My nose is just a decoration,” Dave said matter-of-factly. “I don’t crave a thing.”

The chemotherapy left him weak and tired. Hair fell out in fat clumps whenever he showered.

Within weeks, Dave’s weight sank to 155 pounds. Mary saw the man she loves deteriorating, wasting away. She wanted to cry. But Dave would not allow it. She had to keep smiling. That was Dave’s demand.

“He doesn’t like me showing my emotions about this,” she said. “He gets angry.”

The anxiety eventually cut into Mary’s usually sturdy 5-foot-10 frame, causing her to drop 30 pounds. “It’s no fun eating alone,” she said.

Even so, during the first weeks of the illness, she quickly had to get used to the idea of doing many things by herself.

Still working as a finance officer for a Los Angeles optics distributor, Mary fell into a routine of dropping off her husband at the UCLA cancer center in the morning and picking him up in the evening.

Every other week for six months, Dave underwent daily chemotherapy and radiation treatment for about eight hours.

Flying Through Life

All day at the office, Mary would wonder how Dave was doing.

The two had begun dating while working for the same aerospace engineering firm almost 40 years before.

Back then, Dave was nurturing his wartime fascination with airplanes by designing pipes, tubes and equipment for the Whittaker Corp. For the first Apollo mission to the moon, Dave designed a small portion of the ship’s docking mechanism, he says.

It was just a pipe, but “it worked great,” he said, beaming in a rare display of animation.

Mary was a secretary in the Whittaker finance department whose easy charm and finesse with figures skyrocketed her into management. She laughed heartily at most of Dave’s jokes.

“He comes up with some real zingers from time to time,” she said. “He was the most handsome guy in the office.”

About Mary, Dave said: “I get a kick out of her.”

Die-hard sports fans, the two went religiously to football, basketball and baseball games. After they married and had a daughter, the Mussos traveled frequently. The beauty of last-second buzzer-beaters, the sun dipping into the ocean and an ice-cold beer was never lost on them.

“We’ve had a good life,” Dave said.

Now, when Mary retrieved Dave from his treatment at UCLA, he was usually weak, tired and nauseated. He barely noticed when their daughter, Sharon, brought their newborn grandson, Brian, to see his weary grandfather.

Many nights, Dave was too exhausted even to watch the Dodgers on TV. Or he stayed at the clinic overnight. On those occasions, Mary would throw together a quick meal, crack open a beer or soda and stare at the flickering television screen alone.

One day, with Mary at work and Dave in the hospital, his tongue began spurting mouthfuls of blood. The darkness pulled at him.

But a doctor yanked him back, thrusting a gloved hand in Dave’s mouth to control the bleeding. He stood over Dave in that position for 45 minutes until the bleeding stopped. Sweat streamed down the doctor’s forehead.

Dave stared up at his savior and had the urge to wipe the sweat away.

“I felt sorry for the guy,” he said afterward.

Mary showed up later, mortified to find her life with Dave had almost ended without her even knowing it.

“I had no idea what had just happened,” she complained. She is now retired and spends all of her time with Dave.

When the radiation and chemotherapy treatment was over in the summer of 1992, doctors found it had not killed all the cancer. The best chance of getting the remainder, they determined, lay in surgically removing his tongue.

Dave felt queasy about the operation and was unsure about going through with it. To help him decide, Dr. Thomas Calcaterra--one of Dave’s doctors at UCLA--suggested he meet another cancer patient who had undergone identical surgery.

“He’s right in the next room,” the doctor said.

Dave stepped in and met an elderly man named Tom. Hooked up to an IV bottle that fed him chemotherapy chemicals, Tom greeted Dave with a scowl. Or so Dave thought.

It turned out the man was missing part of his jaw--a necessary result of the tongue operation that gnarled his expression permanently.

Tom moved his lips at Dave without a sound. After a few seconds, the man gave up trying to communicate. All he could do was flash him the “thumbs up.”

Dave returned the gesture and walked out, determined he would keep his tongue, no matter the cost.

“I don’t want to live like that,” he told the doctor.

Calcaterra offered Dave some support. “You may pick up the newspaper tomorrow and find there is a cure for cancer,” he said. Yes, one could live to regret such surgery. Always a tiny chance of that.

That night, Dave and his wife celebrated the decision. Mary made herself a fast meal. Dave had his pumped into his stomach through a tube.

However, Dave would soon be forced to adopt a lifestyle that resembled Tom’s--a lifestyle that simultaneously led to deeper peril and caused Calcaterra’s talk of cures and regrets to resonate in the couple’s ears.

Not long after, similar discussions echoed throughout the Jonsson Cancer Center.

Like soft waves, they slapped against the walls of the nurses’ stations, the laboratories, and the cafeteria--murmurs of a phrase that simmered with hope and skepticism: “Kabbinavar’s mice.”