By Claudia Nelson

            Cancer is not a laughing matter.  However, even a life-threatening affliction can be approached with humor.  A guest speaker at the American Cancer Society banquet last Thursday at the OH’s Townhouse in Eureka revealed how he has managed to assess negative experience in a positive light, his message being that if one is to enjoy better health, physically, mentally and emotionally, mind over matter — well, matter.
            Seven year cancer survivor Ric Masten author, poet/philosopher and roguish raconteur, found a way to poke fun at medical personnel, at himself, and at the disease.  In a talk peppered with dry wit, occasional salty humor and a wry look at what life hands out.  Masten recounted to a large audience made up of cancer survivors and other guests about the highs and lows in an adventure he refers to as his “Prostate Cancer Odyssey.”
            A resident of Carmel, California, Masten, who bills himself as a “speaking poet” and is also a Unitarian minister is a welcome speaker at numerous organizations and on college campuses.
            Throughout his presentation his remarks punctuated by appreciative bursts of laughter,  Masten, 75, took his listeners into doctor’s offices and hospitals, entered the domain of urologists, oncologists and surgeons and brought his audience along to share his excursions as he searched for answers on the Internet.  He recited poetry he had written and talked of “building word corrals” around the prostate cancer to help him deal with emotions, the anger and fright that “troubled and puzzled me” as well at the pain to which he was subjected.
            “I should have been dead four years ago,” he said.  Men have long been influenced by something that Masten called “the Wagon Master Syndrome,” referring to the fact that some men suffer in silence, reluctant to seek medical attention.
            “What kind of man still adheres to the Wagon Master Syndrome?” he said “a dead one”
           There was a time when Masten would have preferred death, he said, rather than see a doctor for some suspected ailment.  Then came the medical tests, a mis-diagnosis, a bone scan and biopsy revealing that he had advanced prostate cancer leading to surgery.
              He recalled that in high school he was required to describe himself in an essay.  “Scribbled in the margin, the teacher’s comment fairly chortled ‘You are a unique person not a eunuch.’  How could he have known that one day  I would actually be come a misspelling?” Masten intoned.
            Likening his current condition to that of an uncompleted jigsaw puzzle he commented, that “Psychologically, I’m the same person but physically, pieces are missing.”
           He received help from an on-line source, the Prostate Cancer Research Institute, and from this experience made a new friend, a fellow survivor, who told him that no matter what, “You are the captain of the ship,” words that became significant as Masten continued to fight for survival.
            While encountering “metastatic mine fields and malignant mortar attacks,”  Masten was fortunate in finding an oncologist whom he described as an “eighteenth century throwback, a hands on, horse and buggy physician with all the time in the world,” the only cause for pause was being that the doctor was a kid, “half my age.”
            With his on-line friend’s encouragement and that of a PC specialist, Masten took an active role in his treatment, “determined to be a pro-active patient.”
            The doctor told him that he had “a disease that there was no right way to treat.”  The prostate cancer, he said, had morphed into the very aggressive de-differenchiated neuroendocrine carcinoma.
            “Prostate cancer is a nasty disease, as it can figure out what you are doing to kill it and learns how to get around that treatment so you are constantly trying to block it off in different ways,” he explained.
            Having advanced prostate cancer puts the patient on death row in the minds of most physicians he said “The good hearted doctors watch us come and go, doing what they can, like kindly prison guards attempting to make the life we have left as pleasant as possible.
            To do otherwise a physician would have to be a bit delusional, even evangelical, to work so diligently for and believe so fervently in the concept of the last minute reprieve.”
            However, he said, “for those of us confined on cell block PC with an executioner stalking it is exhilarating to find a oncologist willing to fly in the face of history, refusing to refer to the likes of me as ‘Dead Man Walking.’”
            For two years Masten reported weekly for hour-and-a-half chemo sessions during which he came up with axioms like “A watched plastic bag never empties.” And to keep from being bored he entertained himself creating poetry from the viewpoint of an irrepressible wag.
            Still, by November 2001 he was suffering from severe sciatic back pain and went to a pain specialist but to no avail. Then he discovered that the head of his femur bone had completely disintegrated twisting his spine causing the pain making his right leg two inches shorter than his left.   This was due to the radiation and high doses of steroids he had been taking.
            “On top of all this,” Masten said, “I went into “steroid frenzy” and became super depressed and suicidal.”  He warned his listeners to be careful about steroids, which he said “almost pushed me over the edge.”
            Yet in spite of all his travail, he said, “I wouldn’t give up the seven years I’ve spent dealing with cancer for anything.  It has been the richest part of my entire life.”
            Advising others as he has been advised, to “elevate yourself in the chain of command, above the physician and homeopath especially when trying to treat ‘a disease that there is no right way to treat’,”    He advised cancer patients to “take over the helm.”
            He said that “in the mid-1800s, clipper ship captains gathered in waterfront taverns to discuss the safest rout around Cape Horn and where to hide out in the Straits of Magellan to ride out a storm.”
            “Just so in prostate cancer circles, navigation still rules.  The topic of conversation is always the latest treatment and promising trial. Holding tight to the rigging,” he said, “together we scan the horizon, hoping to see where some medical genius has begun digging the Panama Canal.”
            In old John Wayne movies some guy always got an arrow in the back and the sergeant says, (related Masten) “’Poor Devil’  He never knew what hit him!”
            Drawing an analogy from that as he does from nautical sources, Masten said that the idea of not knowing what hit him appealed to him when he was a younger man, but not any more.
            “The only thing that the sergeant got right was the ‘poor devil’ part.  (the victim of the arrow) never used an opening to tell loved ones he loved them.  Never seized the opportunity to appreciate the sunrise or drink in the sunset.  He marched through his life staring straight ahead, believing in tomorrow — poor devil.”
            “How much fuller, richer and pleasing life becomes when you are lucky enough to see the arrow coming.”