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They lived from 'scan to scan'

A professional musician and his wife spent two years waiting to see if he would survive, let alone play again.

By CURTIS KRUEGER
Published December 25, 2005

	[Times photo: Ted McLaren]
	Jim Carson poses with his trumpet at his Clearwater home on Friday. Treatment for cancer prevented him from playing.

Jim Carson knew this would be his last night playing trumpet.

It was New Year's Eve two years ago. Carson and his band were playing Fiddlesticks Country Club in Fort Myers, ringing in 2004 with crowd pleasers such as Chicago's 25 or 6 to 4.

Cancer had damaged his tonsils and spread into his neck, leaving a lemon-sized tumor in his throat. He needed chemotherapy and radiation.

The treatment would cripple his ability to play the trumpet, doctors said, and the prognosis was not good. Only about 30 percent of the people with this kind of cancer live more than three years.

Carson first blew into a trumpet at age 11 and never stopped. He went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston and turned professional, playing in lounges, casinos and at corporate events. When other kids got into rock 'n' roll, he was listening to jazz and the big band sounds of Buddy Rich, Maynard Ferguson, Stan Kenton and Count Basie.

That New Year's Eve was his last professional gig before doctors started treatments. The band was supposed to stop at 1 a.m., but he couldn't.

"Man, let's play 'til 2," he said.

When the show ended, Carson and his wife, Stephanie, also a member of the band, drove back to their home in Clearwater, not knowing how long his music - and his life - would last.

When diagnosed in late 2003, Carson became one of thousands of Americans each year who learn they have cancer.

The medical treatments and human reactions are almost as varied as the people themselves. For many, cancer is easily treatable. For others, the odds are grim. Carson's cancer was considered Stage 4 out of four.

Dr. Andy Trotti, a radiation oncologist at H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa, met with the Carsons.

"Both he and his wife were musicians, and I knew that was very important to their quality of life," Trotti recalled last week. "Unfortunately I had to tell him that the treatment certainly could affect his ability to play."

Stephanie Carson, who is director of music at Northwood Presbyterian Church in Clearwater, said her family began to live from "scan to scan." Each new test would provide hope that the cancer would clear up, but also dread that it would worsen.

Carson went through the seven weeks of chemotherapy and radiation. It exhausted him, filled his throat with burning pain, and forced him to take food and medicine through a tube.

He was thrilled to learn in the spring that the cancer had gone away.

But that summer, in 2004, he went for a followup and learned the cancer had shown up in lymph nodes in his chest. For his type of cancer, the news could hardly have been worse.

"The average survival is about six months in that group of patients," Trotti said in an interview last week.

The Carsons' daughter, Cambia, was scheduled to be married a year later, in the summer of 2005. Now it seemed Carson might not live long enough to walk his daughter down the aisle. The wedding was moved up to November 2004.

By that time he already had begun chemo again. This time, doctors said, the goal of the treatment was to prevent the cancer from spreading. Or, if he was especially lucky, the cancerous lymph nodes might shrink. A little.

"You can't get rid of them?" Carson asked.

That was not a realistic possibility.

Before the treatment even began, the Rev. Raymond Guterman, then the senior pastor at Northwood Presbyterian, asked Carson if he would like to participate in a special ritual. Guterman had previously conducted a series of sermons on the New Testament book of James, and had been struck by the passage from Chapter 5, verse 14:

Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord.

But Guterman asked Carson if he would like to be anointed with oil and prayed for on a Sunday morning after a worship service. Carson said yes.

So Guterman applied oil to Carson's neck and the congregation laid hands on him, and those who could not reach laid hands on each other, and everyone prayed for his healing.

"I just felt a lot of love, a lot of people had tears in their eyes," Guterman recalled recently. He said he felt "just a very Christlike presence somehow."

Early in 2005, Carson went back to Moffitt for another check-up. A nurse handed him and Stephanie test results that they could not decipher.

"What?" Carson said.

"It's gone," the doctor said.

"They're gone?"

Carson says now, "I just wanted to do back flips."

It would take a miracle, he had been told, and now the cancer was gone. Trotti said Carson's recovery "probably only happens in 10 percent of the patients" with similar cases.

Carson was grateful to his doctors at Moffitt, but credited prayers from church members for his recovery.

Trotti said Carson's health "has amazed all of us taking care of him, and I would have to consider that that is at least in part due to his irrepressible spirit."

Although some patients experience dramatic recoveries against long odds, "I can't explain why he has done so well from a scientific standpoint, why he's had an excellent response to the chemo and now he has had an excellent response to more chemo with radiation."

He does not discount Carson's belief in prayer.

"Personally, I feel faith is an important factor in how people are going to handle their treatment and how they're going to do," he said. He encourages patients to draw on their faith, whatever faith that may be.

But as many cancer patients learn, it can take years for a cancer patient to truly feel relief. Another scan this spring showed the cancer had returned to Carson's chest. Once again, he was back to chemo and radiation. This fall, he had another cancer-free scan.

The story is not over. The family still lives from scan to scan. Early next month, Carson will have another test. As Stephanie Carson pointed out, he has never had two clean scans in a row. He admitted his anxiety level is already going back up.

Two Sundays ago, Carson stood up in the front of the sanctuary holding his trumpet.

This was in the church's contemporary service, in which church members regularly share prayer requests out loud, which meant everyone was especially aware of the Carson family's struggle against cancer. Everyone knew what it meant for Carson to stand before them with his instrument.

He lifted the trumpet. With his wife accompanying him, he played two Christmas carols: Hark the Herald Angels Sing and O Come, All Ye Faithful.

The congregation clapped and clapped. They clap other times too, but this time people were crying and wiping their eyes.

"It almost immediately was different," said Stephanie Carson, who looked out at the congregation over the piano. "You could tell it was not just for the song. It was almost a warmth that grew and then someone stood up and more people stood up and it was for more than the performance. It was for the survival, the beating of the odds, the knowledge that a miracle happened."

To Carson, the applause was overwhelming, humbling. "I mean geeze, it just wouldn't stop. But I felt like, you shouldn't clap for me, it's not me ... it's you people ... it's you, all your prayers."

"They were clapping," Stephanie Carson said, "for the miracle."

EDITOR'S NOTE: Curtis Krueger is a member of Northwood Presbyterian Church.

[Last modified December 24, 2005, 23:42:16]