Transcript: Surviving Cancer and Finding New Purpose // Alec Hill, President Emeritus, InterVarsity

The Flourishing Culture Podcast Series

“Surviving Cancer and Finding New Purpose“

February 17, 2020

Alec Hill

Intro: Today's podcast is about one of the most compelling life experiences a faith leader will ever face. Hear how one of our favorite leaders faced his own dark night and came out with a fresh, new perspective that he calls bonus time.

Female: This is the Flourishing Culture Podcast. Here’s your host, president of the Best Christian Workplaces Institute, Al Lopus.

Al Lopus: Welcome to another episode of the Flourishing Culture Podcast, where our goal is to equip and inspire you to build a flourishing workplace. We are here to help you eliminate workplace distrust, improve your employees’ experience, and grow your organization's impact. And before we meet our special guest today, I urge you to subscribe to this podcast. As a result, you’ll receive our action guide. It’s our gift to help you lead your organization’s culture to the next level. To subscribe, simply go to bcwinstitute.org/podcast. Hit the Subscribe button, and receive our free action guide.

Also, if you could share this podcast with others, and rate it, it would really mean a lot to me. Thank you.

And now, let's meet today's special guest.

All of us are familiar with the phrase “moment of truth.” It's that moment when life seems to come to a standstill and you come face to face with reality. And my guest today has a remarkable story to tell about how he faced his own moment of truth, and what he learned through it all speaks to what matters most in life. My guest today is a longtime friend, Alec Hill. And Alec is the president emeritus of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and he's the author of a new book, Living in Bonus Time: Surviving Cancer, Finding New Purpose. Alec, welcome to the Flourishing Culture Podcast.

Alec Hill: Well, it's great to be with you again, Al.

Al: Great to have you with us. There's so much I'm looking forward to talking about, Alec. You served as president of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship for 14 years. And when you reflect on how your gifts merged with InterVarsity’s mission and work with university students, what were one or two of your greatest satisfactions at InterVarsity?

Alec: Well, I look back and my whole life has been a mission towards students and faculty. And I fell in love with InterVarsity’s staff. Most of them are under 30, and they just give life and are wonderful people. For me, the satisfaction of moving the mission forward, going on new campuses, we have about 1,000 chapters on secular campuses. And then later on, in the 14 years, it was preparing the next generation of leaders who are now running the ministry. And so I just went to a National Staff Conference and had the joy of watching them do a great job.

Al: Yeah. That's great. Let's get to 2015. When you were president, something happened to you that you weren't counting on, something that you really couldn't have imagined. Tell us what that was.

Alec: Yeah, it's not much fun when you go into an oncologist office and he says you have bone-marrow cancer. And I asked him, is this worse than leukemia, or as bad as leukemia? He said, no, it's worse. And without a transplant, you'll die in 18 months or earlier. So it's an auto immune. It's like AIDS—it's not AIDS—but it means that your white cells are failing and you just eventually die of a common cold because you have no system left to fight it. So it's a bad—it's a tough way to die.

Al: Certainly not something to look forward to.

One lesson I’ve learned from your book, and Kathy and I are reading this to each other as we go along, but that is that when you've got something out of the ordinary happening to you physically, you should probably act on it right away. Well, tell us about the beginning of when you had your head in the refrigerator.

Alec: Yeah. I’m not the poster child for this, so I'm kind of embarrassed to tell the story. It was the morning after my daughter's wedding, and I'd been in three cities in eight days. And I opened the refrigerator door, and I fainted. So I bounced up—I think it was half a second. It wasn't long—but I knew I'd fainted. That had never happened before. And I rationalized it away, and I did not tell my wife. And the next week, I was sitting across from my pastor, who wagged his finger at me as I told him the story. He said, first of all, never self-diagnose. And second of all, always tell your spouse. So my counsel to people is something weird happens like that, that's never happened before, don't just let it pass, because it may be like on your car. The light starts to blink, and if you pay attention to it now, it gets better; if you wait, it gets harder and worse.

Al: Yeah. Just don't take an aspirin and wait until the next day—

Alec: To blow it off. Ironman, I’m just going to keep going. And that's really foolishness.

Al: Yeah. I remember watching the video that you posted when you announced to your staff about your diagnosis and then departure, and you were a little more emotional than I've seen you normally. And as you think back at that time when you were at the top of your career, letting go of a job that you loved, and then all of a sudden, you've got this startling news, and you're entering a battle of your very life. Replay that scene for us. What was going on?

Alec: Well, I had just received a second opinion in Seattle coming back, and it was more bleak than the first opinion. I'd been moved from a moderate to a high risk in a high-risk cancer, so it felt like a death sentence. And we wept when we left the doctor's office in Seattle, my wife and my oldest daughter and I. And so I flew back, Mary and I flew back to Madison, Wisconsin, and word was going to get out. I had to leave quickly in three weeks because I had to get into treatment. So I had to make this video. And I worked on it for a day or two and thought about it. And it had been eight minutes.

It's funny. You remember me being emotional. I thought I was wonderfully stoic, almost to the point of being kind of clinical. I was numb. I knew I had to do it. And what was remarkable were my pastoral feelings towards staff and saying goodbye. These are people I loved. Most of them had come on during my tenure, and I was going to miss them terribly. So it had a feeling of not only a goodbye from the work, but I'll see you on the other side in heaven.

And so trying to communicate both stability, that we had other structures and people in place, and the ministry was going to be fine. Please pray for me. But I'm shaking right now. It was one of the most difficult eight minutes that I've ever had to communicate anywhere to anybody. And actually, as I look back on it, Al, I think it was one of my better moments. I hope that it doesn’t sound like pride. But I think, I didn't back away from it. I leaned into it. I did it. I collapsed afterwards. I mean, but I got it done.

Al: Well, I obviously remember it as a moment in time and thinking, my goodness, I wonder, again, what would I have done in that situation? How would I have pulled that off?

Alec: I think you would've done the same thing, Al. I think any leader you—how did I say—you learn how to fight through doubt, pain, confusion, and do a task. And I think you would have done the same, frankly.

Al: Well, I've really been enjoying your book and how it really hits the main points of the journey. You don't really drag us into the gory details. But give us a few of the early mile posts of your journey through cancer. I think this is good for every leader just to understand what happens, including your bone-marrow donor, who you happened to know for quite a long time in your in your life. Tell us about those main points.

Alec: Yeah, it was like an onion that just continued unpeel. And as we learned more, when I was moved into high risk, they discovered that I was chromosome 3 damage, which there’re only about 500 of those diagnosed in the world a year. And that put me in the high risk because chromosome 3 damages is chemo resistant, and that was the main drug. So it felt awful.

My brother was my donor. Grant was 64 at the time, and usually donors are 20s and 30s. And I didn't realize until I wrote the book and I asked him to read the chapter, how badly he'd been beaten up. They watched him for six months afterwards. He had a platelet transfusion. His red and white cell counts were abysmally low. So my brother is a hero who sacrificed for me. I joke with him. I say, well, if he ever gets a bad disease, I now have his DNA. So I'm like a bank, and he could just make a withdrawal. So we go back and forth with this thing, but although we're getting older, so it probably wouldn’t work.

Treatment itself is horrific. In five days I received as much chemo as people do in a year. They had to kill all of my white cells, not just the cancerous ones. And on top of that, there was full-body radiation. So scabs and skin peel and flakiness and all of that. And following the transplant, which was really more like a transfusion, my brother's cells ran through. I had a catheter surgically put in my chest, and it ran through that. And the four hours of the transplant was pretty anticlimactic. But then because of the chemo and the radiation for 23 days, I had no white-cell count—zero—and they were giving me 50 pills a day in order to give me a sort of a separate artificial immune system. And 87 straight days of infusion; we were going for up to four hours a day and they would pump fluids into me because I was so parched. And then a year [unclear 09:31] it was, for a person who kind of goes and goes and goes and is a classic extrovert, that came as a shock as well. It was an unpleasant experience.

Al: Yeah. Wow. And a year in isolation, and that was not really in your own place, but in a special area?

Alec: No, no. I’ll clarify. So I was four months at the cancer housing, in the apartment we had. Then we did come home for eight months, and I called it house arrest. Nobody could come in. I could go out for walks with people, but I couldn't touch them. So it was a weird—my immune system was so immature. So it was much better being home and having access to technology. I started mentoring people and doing Zoom calls and all of that, but I couldn't touch people. I mean, I really had to be removed. It wasn't a bubble. It's not the old bubble. It's sort of short of that.

Al: I remember you saying you mostly were afraid of kids and dogs just because of the germs they carry.

Alec: Oh, they’re petri dishes, I swear.

We have a favorite dog named Dizzy that we see every morning and go for a walk. And I’d bend down and Dizzy gives me a kiss. And it's kind of a special moment because I ruffle him, and then I let him lick me. And it was a horror for a whole year.

Al: Yeah, yeah. Well, I have to ask, at what point in your cancer treatment did you feel most vulnerable? I mean, you just outlined a remarkable journey. What was maybe a low point?

Alec: Well, there were 40 days between the transplant and another bone-marrow biopsy, where they were going to tell me if there was grafting going on. And during those 40 days, between steroids and all the other drugs they were giving me, I was so loopy and I was in and out, and chemo brain was incredible. I couldn't complete sentences. I had basic, really easy crossword puzzles, just try to get my mind. I didn't know. I mean, they told me this is temporary, but it felt like there was a sponge inside my mouth and my head and my brain, and I couldn't function.

I think the worst moments were, frankly, on my knees, over the toilet and just feeling so sick that it had to come out one end or the other. And I mean, people go through chemo, they know what I'm talking about. Mine was just sort of uber intense for those 40 days.

Al: Well, 40 days, a time of biblical proportion, no question.

Alec: Indeed.

Al: Yeah. I think of moments of truth kind of as you've experienced. I mean, I don't have anything close to that. It might have been where I realized I needed to change a job or something, or maybe change behavior that was impacting my marriage, but, boy, certainly something that’s a lot lesser degree than what you went through.

Where in your journey with cancer did you experience your most significant encounters with God? We've talked about that. Where did you really feel your encounter with God, maybe your need for God, certainly your faith and trust in God?

Alec: I had just read Mother Teresa's book, her journal, and in it, she talks a lot about her extended long, dark night of the soul. It went on for a long time. And I had this fear that going into the cancer land that I might not only be in a physical desert but somehow enter into a spiritual desert. And the opposite happened. When we got off the plane in Minneapolis—we were flying to Seattle for the second opinion—I got an email from one of my staff, who I was mentoring at InterVarsity. And she basically said, “At 9:20 this morning, God told me to tell you, ‘Do not fear; I'm with you.’” And she had no idea. She had no idea I was sick. I hadn’t told anybody. And she also didn't know that Isaiah 43, which uses the same language, “Fear not, for I am with you.” So that was a great assurance.

And I think as the transplant went on, it was a remarkable paradox of God's presence. The pain, as I've already described, but the presence of God was almost like I thought He was preparing me to die. I thought He's giving me a bridge, a grace, here, and I'm going to die because I'm in a liminal space that I've never experienced before. And so what I've learned since is that that's not uncommon. I thought it was unique to me, but Augustine calls it the sweetness. And again, it's this paradox between pain and this sort of sense of God that is so real that it's almost like the Shekinah glory which showed up with Moses.

Al: Yeah, wow.

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Al: All right. Now, let’s hear more from today’s guest.

You're talking about days and months of chemo, isolation, weakness, loss. Sounds like a living hell. And yet on a practical level, certainly what you've just described, a sweetness, helps keep your spirits up. What else would you give credit to keeping your spirits up through the process? And I know that there's just a lot of research around people that have a positive attitude and how important that is for healing. How did you bring that back and even maintain a positive attitude?

Alec: Well, a four-letter word, which I guess I can use. My wife's name is Mary, and it's a four-letter word. She cared for me and made me happy. She's an artist. So every morning she'd write up the number of how many days it’d been since the transplant, and then she would do a graphic. And I kept a number of those. She was remarkable. And I don't know how it was that she didn't break, because she had to carry me three loads of laundry a day. And what I found out when I when I wrote the book and interviewed her, Al, was that every day, she was kind of under the impression that if she let a single germ get to me, I would die, and it’d be her fault. Isn’t that hard?

Al: That's hard.

Alec: So how did she maintain such a positive face towards me? And then she'd go out and she'd see gurneys carrying—we were on a floor, probably with 20 other people. Twice she saw gurneys carrying corpses out. Our next-door neighbor died the weekend before he was going to get his transplant. And all of that, she held. I didn't know. I was in my own little world.

So I think humanly speaking, it was my wife. And we've known each other since I was 12 and she was 11. We didn't get married then. That was probably good, but we’ve basically been in each other’s lives almost all of our lives. And I'll tell you, I would have hated to have gone through this alone.

Al: Yeah. One of the things you bring up in the book is this concept of survivor's guilt. And we've heard about survivor's guilt when it comes to wartime survivors or survivors of major catastrophes. Where did survivor's guilt come into play with you? As I read the book, that was a bit of a surprise to me. How did that come about?

Alec: Yeah, so, six months after the transplant, I'm at home, finally. I'm starting to heal, I’m getting stronger, I’m going for walks. It should have been a moment of great exuberance and hopefulness and joy. And it wasn't. And I think I went into about a three-month depression. It wasn't severe, but it was mild, and it was persistent. And it wasn't until later—I was talking with one of my daughters who, for her own reasons, understands PTSD and trauma, identified it for what it was. I realized, having done the research and read, is that when we go through real traumatic events, our brains can protect us by not letting us be overwhelmed by it in the moment. And as we heal, those bad memories start to release.

So my bad memory’s more primarily my own pain and survival, although I had dreams about that, too. There were 100 of us in a trial, and we were supposed to talk, but we would find each other in the hospital, and we would talk with each other and their stories and meet in the elevators and so surreptitiously reform these sort of elusive friendships.

And I think what happened was is I recognized, two in particular who died, really hit me that there was—anger isn't quite right. The emotion was just sadness. And then there was a sense—I remember sitting—I went back for an oncology visit, and I'm sitting and watching a mother who must’ve been in her late 20s, with two or three kids. And I'm saying, “Lord, if You can heal me, why not her?” And of course, I don't know if she's lived or died. I had no idea. But I then also said, “Lord, I'm 62. Take me. Save her life. She's got her whole life. And she got dependents.”

So I think the sense of when you're in a tight group that's easily identifiable, you go through stuff and some of them die, that's survivor's guilt. And I still get it to this day. I went to a funeral of a friend who died of melanoma. And I wasn't just weeping for losing him, but it was also this sense of why me? So why me? was asked twice. It’s why did I get the stupid cancer in the first place? And the second why me? is Lord, why am I still here?

What it does, though, I do think, Al,  it can be converted into a survivor stewardship where we live with more purposefulness. I mean, remember at the end of Private Ryan, where Tom Hanks is basically saying, I think I've lived a worthy life because all these men died to rescue him. I feel like that.

Al: Yeah. Let's talk about that because when and how you begin to live beyond cancer, you kind of discover a new purpose. That’s one of the themes in your book. And in fact, using your own words, it's kind of like a bonus time that you receive. And what does that look like? Tell us a little bit about bonus time and kind of how you feel, how that makes you think about the future.

Alec: Yeah, so, the metaphor of bonus time comes from soccer. And basically, you play it at 90 minutes and then some invisible referee is keeping track of all the minutes that haven't been used for injuries or things. And so you play, they play another two or 20 minutes. When bonus time starts, it's called stoppage time in football or soccer, but I call it bonus time. But you don't know when it's going to end.

So my life, my regulation time, really ended at the time of my bone-marrow transplant. I feel like I could have died and maybe should have died, but I'd been given this extension of bonus time. And I know when it started—it started 40 days after the transplant—but I don't know when it's going to end. I do know that my life overall will probably be shorter than what it was without the cancer because of the treatments. So I think it gives me a sense of time that is—I want to make the most of the time I have. That doesn't mean rushing around doing crazy things, but it does mean investing deeply in people. Achievements become less important; relationships become more important. That's not just me. That's, again, solid research.

Focus. People who survive trauma, whether cancer or otherwise, are more sharp in what they think they should do. For me, that's a call from God to serve the next generation of rising leaders. I experience a lot more wonder now. I used to just rush through life and miss things, and now I have enough slow down in me that I just savor seeing and being. It could be nature. It could be music. It could be our first grandchild. It could be just a moment in worship at church when we're singing. I tell you, when a hymn or a worship song comes on and has the right lyrics, I'm just all in. I mean, I feel the lyrics a lot more than I ever have in my life.

Al: Yeah. I have to say, Alec, just a couple of nights ago, reading a chapter of how your life changes in bonus time, and I just was really touched by how relationships just become so much more important. And it caused me to think about, for those of us that try to accomplish a lot, maybe we should focus more on relationships, and all the things we try to accomplish will happen anyway. It just made me reflect on that.

Every one of us listening to your story already knows or eventually will come to know someone who's going through or will go through cancer. How has your experience of cancer altered your understanding of human suffering and how you relate to people facing their own moment of truth?

Alec: Well, 40 percent of us will get cancer in our lifetimes. And what that means is that every family, every neighborhood, every friendship, I mean, it's all touched by cancer. If we don't get it ourselves, we will have a loved one. So I think for me, it's created a great sense of empathy. I probably was a 50 percenter on the empathy scale before. I mean, I had enough in me to be a serviceable human being. But I think my sense of caring for people, for going out of my way when I see someone struggling or suffering—

I was at Harborview hospital here in Seattle recently for an appointment, and there was a guy who was struggling in his wheelchair, and I could see that he had a leg amputated. So I went over and asked him if I could push him. And his name was Rick. And obviously he was a cancer survivor. It was a cancer amputation. And it’d been very recent, and he didn't even know how to use his wheelchair very well. And I thought, would I have walked past him before? I hope I wouldn’t have. I hope I'd been better than that. But I was just drawn to him.

I find myself much more candid, sometimes too candid, with people, where I talk about illness or sickness just as if it's part of life. And I think for some people, they live in denial. Walt Disney never used the word death. He never went to a funeral, because he was so afraid of it. And a couple men have told me, when they read my book, my first cancer, which is painful for some men to read because the part of the body involved, they stopped reading. And so sometimes I forget how much in denial we can be and uncomfortable we become. To be fair, one of the guys has now gone and finished the book. But I think empathy, candidness, and just being—how do I say—not giving advice, but just being there with a person. You learn a whole different language with cancer in that you don't try to solve the problem for them; you try to be with them and listen to them and love them. And if they ask questions, you can move along that direction. But it's a very different pace in a conversation, in a relationship.

Al: This is rich, Alec. Thanks.

As our time winds down, let me just say that as leaders, we think we have some level of control and maybe influence in the direction of our organizations and many aspects of our life. And after your experience, do you see control and influence a bit differently?

Alec: Yeah, just a little bit. I wasn't quite a control freak, but I really enjoyed organizing and leading a lot. I still do. And that's a God-given gift and drive. But I think my arrogance over-presumed the amount of control that I had. I read Steve Jobs’ biography, where he tried to control everything. He was a control freak. And when he got cancer at age 48, he didn't go see the doctor, he didn't get surgery. He tried self-remedies—diet and other things—for nine months. And by time he got back, it was too late, and then he died a few years later of the cancer. He'd be alive today—I think he'd be 65 years old this year—if he had. So I relate to that. I'm not condemning Steve Jobs. I'm just relating to him that those of us who like to exercise that kind of control, it works for us for a while. We are responsible for our kids and for our work and for budgets. And we are—that's part of the dominion that God has given to us. But there's a whole lot of things we don't control. And cancer sort of knocks the illusion right out from underneath you. And you go, well, I maybe don't have as much span of control as I thought I did. And it's humbling. It also elevates God's role. It also says that we are small human beings, and God, only God, controls many of the bigger issues. That's good. It's good for that revelation is good. I wish I'd had it earlier in life with less pain.

Al: Right, yeah. Well, gosh, this has been a great conversation, Alec. I've really enjoyed all we've learned, and how you've been transparent in sharing your journey and particularly as you have outlined in the book. And I'd really encourage everybody to get the book Bonus Time, because, as I said, sooner or later, and as you've highlighted, everybody's going to know somebody that has a cancer experience. I have a good friend who's going through pancreatic cancer right now, and the book has been tremendously helpful. And a shout out to him because he listens to every podcast that I do, too. So this has really been great.

So, Alec, given all that you've shared, is there anything you'd like to add that we haven't talked about so far?

Alec: Yeah. One of the things I realized maybe a year afterwards is I was more resilient. I was more relational, I’ve mentioned. I was more spiritual. I was becoming a better person. And as I wrote the book, I did research and I found this term post-traumatic growth, and I call it survivor's guilt. But those of us fortunate enough to survive and those of us who are aren’t in pain all the time, we have a chance to gain in resilience and toughness and in boldness. And I see that in my life.

And there was a study of pilots who were downed during the Vietnam War, American pilots, and some of them were tortured in North Vietnam, including John McCain. And 25 years later, they were serving, and 25 percent said that they personally grew from the experience, that they benefited from it. Can you imagine? So it's so counterintuitive, and it makes me cringe when I think about the phrase productive suffering. Suffering still stinks. It's awful. But the good news is we aren't frozen there. It’s not the final word. God can use our trauma. He can redeem it. And out of that compost, out of that manure, can come growth. And I've seen that in my life, and I've seen it in others.

Now, it's not universal, again. I've described some circumstances where it doesn't happen. But I like who I'm becoming more than who I was, I’ll put it that way.

Al: Yeah. Well, you know, it's also a Christian value, if not principle. We don’t like to admit it, but it is through suffering that we do grow. And oftentimes, for successful people particularly, a little suffering is what gets their attentions and actually allows them to have the humility to face it and to grow. So I agree 100 percent.

Alec: Well, I must confess, I always kind of hated Romans 5 and James 1 for that reason because it made suffering sound too cheery.

And I think it’s really important that we say suffering is the result of the fall, it's not God's original plan, and it really sucks. Pain is not good. Stop. But there is a second sentence to that, that it's not the end of the story and that God can do remarkable things out of that. He didn't cause the pain, it wasn't part of the original plan, but He can still use it. And He has in my life.

Al: Well, let’s put a bow on the interview. What's one final thought, Alec? Maybe an encouragement you’d like to leave with our listeners.

Alec: Just a shout out to caregivers. I think the world of you. I already praised my wife, Mary. But caregivers are the unacknowledged heroes in this whole story. They didn't sign up for this. They stay. They love. They’re selfless. And my one piece of encouragement is take care of yourself. Take sabbaths.  Find help at social-service agencies or family or friends. You need a break.

I read a study in California that only, like, 13 percent of caregivers take respites, and I’m going, that's crazy. So take care of yourself. God bless you. You’re the best people around.

Al: Alec Hill, president emeritus of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and the author of the new book, Living in Bonus Time: Surviving Cancer, Finding New Purpose, thanks for sharing your wisdom, insights, and stories. And Alec, where can we get your book?

Alec: Just go on Amazon. It’s right there. Living in Bonus Time. Yeah.

Al: Thanks for investing yourself into everyone who's listening and benefiting from all you've shared with us today. Thanks, Alec.

Alec: Thank you.

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