Alan's Story: Bring It On Cancer, I Am David To Your Goliath
(C) Julie Melka Photography
When cancer comes knocking three times, what do you do?
Pack it up? Bow out? Quit?
My friend, Alan Zaben, three-time cancer survivor and a 2014 Hero of Hope with the American Cancer Society did none of those things.
As part of his email signature Alan writes, Bring it on cancer, I am the David to your Goliath.
I am David to your Goliath. A very appropriate story choice for my friend, Alan.
In the story, David, a young shepherd boy, takes on the giant Goliath. Not only takes him on, but kills him.
With what?
Not a spear. Not a sword.
With a stone from a slingshot.
One stone.
In the story, there is an interesting detail hidden in the pages: [David] took his stick in his hand and chose for himself five smooth stones from the brook, and put them in a shepherd’s bag which he had, even in his pouch, and his sling was in his hand; and he approached [Goliath]. 1 Samuel 17:40
If David only needed one stone to fell the giant, why did he pick up five stones?
Did David not trust God?
Was he filled with doubt?
Was he simply being prepared? Was it a matter of habit?
Nobody knows for sure, but I like this addition, a few more years into the story. Apparently Goliath wasn’t the only giant. He had relatives. In 2 Samuel 21 we find the following, after David was advanced in years and was King of Israel:
A giant named Isbi-benob wielding a spear with a bronze spearhead weighing over seven pounds
A giant named Saph.
Another Goliath, Goliath the Gittite, who had a spear shaft like a weaver’s beam.
A nameless giant with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot.
These four were born to the giant [Goliath], and they fell by the hand of David and by the hand of his servants (verse 22).
David and his men had to kill four more giants, all born of Goliath.
Why did David choose five smooth stones? Could it be because David knew Goliath wasn't the only giant hanging around?
This is exactly why the story of David and Goliath is perfect for my friend, Alan.
Twenty-seven years ago, Alan picked up five smooth stones.
With a diagnosis of metastatic, stage 4, diffuse, large cell, non-Hodgkins Lymphoma that started in his spinal cord, fracturing his spine in two places, destroying a disc and then spreading into his chest and spleen, he underwent twenty-eight chemo treatments and twelve radiation treatments to his spine. He spent almost twenty-three hours a day in bed for almost a year waiting for his spine to heal. When he was out of bed he wore a steel brace. The two fractured vertebrae, with no disc between them, collapsed on each other and fused together so surgery wasn’t necessary.
Alan learned to walk with two canes, his “walking lumber.” Alan chose one stone from his arsenal and flung it at cancer. The disease went into remission.
In February 2012, after being diagnosed with bone marrow cancer, Alan began five chemo treatments a month, a regime he will follow for the rest of his life, in the hopes of keeping leukemia at bay. Having completed 135 chemo treatments (to date), Alan picked up another smooth stone, put it in his sling and flung it at the giant.
In August 2014 Alan was diagnosed with a third cancer – Squamous Cell Carcinoma.
Out came a third stone.
You would think with all that stone-throwing, Alan would be hiding out under the bushes, waiting for the projectiles to quit flying through the air. (Somewhere through the years he also developed diabetes and ruptured six more discs.) But that is not the case.
Recently, Alan learned to drive again after getting hand-controls installed in his vehicle. He is the online chair for Chandler Relay for Life, a nationally awarded fundraising team of the American Cancer Society and serves on a regional team for The Southern Arizona Leadership Council.
He considers himself “the luckiest man alive” because of his loving friends and family, especially his wife and son, and because of the medical staff who has fought so tenaciously beside him.
Ultimately, he has learned to appreciate a second chance at life.T
hat email signature of his? It also includes these words:
Cancer may have robbed me of that blissful ignorance that once led me to believe that tomorrow stretched forever. In exchange I've been granted the wisdom to see each today as something special, a gift to be used wisely and fully. Nothing can take that away.
It should be noted in case any of Goliath’s relations are still lurking around, that Alan still has two more stones.
And he knows how to use them.