Laughing to the end
Mike O’Brien is dying of cancer, but his sense of humour is intact.
WINNIPEG — Mike O’Brien walked up to the admitting desk in the hospital’s emergency room. He was tall and thin, bald from chemo, weak from illness. He told the nurse, “I’m a diabetic who has stage four cancer. I just had my first chemo in months, and I’ve been vomiting and really fatigued. I’m having trouble breathing, and I have other side effects. This morning I started peeing blood.”
The nurse looked at him and said, “But apart from that, you’re fine?”
O’Brien and his wife, Robin Summerfield, burst out laughing at the inadvertent punch line. It still cracks them up, telling the story weeks later.
“We just thought she was so sweet to try to find something in this dying husk of a human that might not make it away from her desk before it collapses,” O’Brien chuckles. “She’s looking for a silver lining.”
There’s nothing funny about terminal cancer. And yet, sometimes, there is.
In the summer of 2011, it seemed like O’Brien had it all. He had a wife and baby, the family he had always imagined for himself.
A role on popular Canadian TV show Corner Gas had helped him secure a dream job writing comedy for the CBC, and he’d been given his own national CBC radio show for the summer. He had a regular role on HBO Canada’s Less Than Kind, and, after a series of small movie roles, he’d landed a leading role as the killer in a horror movie.
“I had everything I wanted,” he says.
Then came the pain in his leg. And a lump, the size of half an egg, rising up from his thigh. After long weeks of hope and worry, it was a surgeon who finally told them, “It’s not good news.”
O’Brien had synovial sarcoma. Internet research told them it was curable at stage one, but at stage four, a death sentence. O’Brien was on the golf course when he got the news his tumour was stage four.
“What happened to stage two and three?” he asked.
There was no cure, only treatment. O’Brien started aggressive chemotherapy on his son’s first birthday.
“A lot of people get cancer,” he says. “But this is the cliché: You never think it’s going to happen to you.”
Growing up in Inuvik and Victoria, O’Brien discovered early the power of making other kids laugh. Though he considered becoming an actor, he chose journalism instead, starting his career at the Medicine Hat News in Alberta, then moving east to the Regina Leader-Post. It was there he started acting again, and landed a recurring role on Corner Gas as small town liquor store/insurance agency owner Wes Humboldt.
O’Brien met Summerfield in Winnipeg, after moving there for a job writing and voicing radio sketches for CBC’s Comedy Factory.
Summerfield was a reporter with the Calgary Herald, home visiting family in Manitoba. They were set up by mutual friend Michelle Lang, also a Herald reporter.
O’Brien was 43, Summerfield 36. They’d both been looking for the right person for a long time. Over a two-hour coffee date, the two journalists talked about crime and murder. Summerfield says they just seemed to get each other. Most importantly, they laughed.
“I’m just a sucker for a good laugh, really,” she says.
She noticed how he touched her gloves on the table, in a way that seemed so sweet and tender.
They were married 18 months later. They named their son Will Lang in honour of their friend Michelle, who was killed reporting in Afghanistan in December 2009, not long after Summerfield became pregnant.
Friends encouraged O’Brien to write about his experience with cancer, but he says it wasn’t until he took part in a workshop for doctors and social workers that he started to seriously consider it.
“As we were in front of an audience of about 50, my natural inclination to start cracking jokes came through, and then people were laughing,” he says.
“And then my other natural inclination, to cry whenever I talk about my son and my cancer, that also came to the fore. And so I would start crying, and there were people in that room that were crying. I left that conference thinking, ‘ Hey. there’s a mix there that maybe could be useful.’ ”
Humour can be both armour and weapon, salve and crutch. Laughter and comedy had been an integral part of O’Brien’s life and personality throughout his life, and so it was no different as he faced cancer. Even in the grimmest moments, his internal monologue would naturally look for things that were funny. Surprisingly often, he would find them.
“I’m living it, and I see moments that are funny. So you can’t tell me there’s no humour in it,” he says. “You could see the exact same situation as me and not see the comedy, that’s fine. But just the way I’m geared and wired is I’m always on the lookout for that. If we’re sitting in an waiting room, an emergency room, waiting to see a doctor about some side-effect, if we can crack a few jokes, we’re going to feel better.”
O’Brien says sometimes he would go too far, and make a joke that is too much or too soon. Instead of laughing, his wife would cry.
“And I’d go, OK. Crossed the line.” But most times, it helps. It is strangely powerful to laugh at cancer. O’Brien compares it to slapping cancer in the face, or kicking it somewhere soft and unpublishable. He says it’s like stealing back moments of your life, and saying: “You, cancer, you disease, you. You haven’t wrecked my entire day. We just had a laugh.
“If you can laugh at cancer, cancer probably doesn’t like it. It feels shame, it feels belittled and its self esteem drops,” he says. “And that is something I would really love to do to cancer, because it’s certainly affected my dignity and self-esteem and regular enjoyment of life. So it’s nice to get a few back.”
Summerfield asks, “Why not laugh?”
O’Brien adds: “Because you certainly get your moments to cry.”
In March 2014, O’Brien started a blog to talk about his experiences. He called it The Big Diseasey, “because all the good names were taken.” With the slogan “tumour humour and chemo emo,” he set out to do something different from what he’d seen elsewhere.
“There’s so much stuff out there that will make you sad and depressed, and if you have cancer, why on Earth would you want to get more sad and depressed?” he says. “Cancer pretty much gives you that. You don’t have to go find more written material to make it worse.”
With Summerfield acting as editor and test audience, O’Brien focused on his own experience and way of seeing things, writing bluntly and honestly about the things that were happening to his body, his mind and his life.
What came out was funny and sad, irreverent and tender. Posts range from using cancer for your own benefit (“Cancer is kryptonite for telemarketers.”), weight loss (“I have the same chest as Audrey Hepburn.”), the benefits of having sex with a terminally ill person, (“You’ll never have to sit by the phone and wonder ‘ Will he call?’ ”) and still being alive. (“Believe me, I’m as surprised as you are.”)
“Certainly some people don’t want to laugh about cancer. I expected some letters about that. People saying, ‘I lost my sister and I don’t find anything funny.’ That’s a totally legitimate response,” he says. “But I have yet to get a single letter like that. Not one person has ever said you should not be writing this stuff.”
Recently, O’Brien got his first troll, who wrote saying, “Why don’t you go into the next room and die?”
Instead of being upset, O’Brien and Summerfield thought it was funny. Summerfield gleefully crafted their response.
“This has been my trick for years: When people email you something nasty, you just say ‘Thanks for reading!” she says. “I left him with ‘ Have a nice day,’ too. Just to be a bitch.”
For nearly four years, an aggressive regime of chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation kept the disease at bay. O’Brien says he doesn’t think anyone expected him to last that long, including his doctors and himself.
In that time, O’Brien and Summerfield took Will to New York, Ireland, Disneyland. They went camping, joked and played.
O’Brien says he feels lucky to have had that time, to have been able to watch his son grow up a bit, and find out what kind of boy he is: A storyteller, a “happy motormouth” who never stops performing and who loves comic books, like his father.
“He’s known me longer than I knew my father,” O’Brien says. “I have no memories of my dad. He’ll have memories of me. And he’ll have good memories of me, because we have a lot of fun.”
A friend recently gave them a picture of O’Brien as his favourite comic character, The Spirit, with Will bouncing over his shoulder, a happy, youthful Spider-Man.
But cancer does not wait forever. As O’Brien wrote in December, “I feel like cancer is saying ‘I have ignored you, and allowed you your small daily victories, because I have so many other lives to destroy right now. But I have not forgotten you. My memory is long.’ Maybe cancer is a cat, and I am a bird on the ground.”
In February, O’Brien got brutally ill. He went to emergency four times in eight days, the last time in an ambulance. His doctor told them he was stopping chemotherapy, and moving O’Brien to palliative care.
“You know you’re in this process. You know the outcome,” Summerfield says. “Yet when you get those words, ‘palliative,’ it’s just like being punched.” Without chemo holding them back, the tumours have grown fast and numerous, appearing in O’Brien’s lungs, lymph nodes and kidney and, he suspects, his spine and brain.
In the early days of March, friends and family flew to Winnipeg to say their goodbyes, thinking he was about to die. O’Brien thought so, too.
“Honestly, I was thinking, ‘Will I see the first episode of Mad Men this season?’ Because it doesn’t start until early April, and that was a month away,” he says. “And now, there’s only two more episodes, so I might actually hear what happens to Don Draper.”
A series of treatments have helped O’Brien to feel better: He got rid of a lung infection, had his chest drained of a litre of blood, and was put on a home oxygen program. Though doctors told him not to travel, O’Brien and Summerfield took Will to Victoria, so O’Brien could see the ocean one last time with his son. They stayed at the Surf Motel, at which O’Brien had wanted to stay since he was a boy.
“That was tremendously restorative for my spirit. For whatever that is worth, to have an improved spirit or will, or just good vibes. That certainly helped or contributed,” he says.
A TV crew happened upon them along the beach, and did a story about their trip. During the interview, O’Brien told the reporter, “You choose to be happy.”
O’Brien and Summerfield sit in their living room on a warm and sunny afternoon, the hum of his oxygen machine running steadily in the background. They sip champagne, laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time.
He reads the obituaries every Saturday now, looking at the record of lives lived. He says he feels luckier than those who died after only a “brief battle” with cancer, and is trying to think of a better word to express what it means to live with, and die from, the disease.
“As soon as you say it’s a battle, then what? Cancer won?” he says. “I don’t ever want to be beaten by cancer. I have cancer, it’s going to kill me, but that doesn’t mean it beats me. Because it certainly hasn’t stopped me having wonderful experiences for four years and a really great life.
“Not a really great life up to the point I found out I had cancer, but a great life up to today.”
O’Brien hopes to be able to walk his son to the first day of kindergarten in September, the way his own mother walked with him along the edge of the forest in Inuvik when he was a boy. He knows he may not make it that long.
So he is leaving them what he can. Household chores done, so Summerfield won’t have to do them alone. Letters he’s been writing to Will since before he was born, sharing things he has learned about life. And the Big Diseasey, a record of how he found laughter and joy in the face of something so ugly. Proof that it wasn’t all suffering.
“I don’t know if he’ll laugh,” O’Brien says. “But, I think he’ll at least see that sometimes I was laughing.”
“You know you’re in this process. You know the out come. Yet when you get those words ‘palliative,’ it’s like being punched. ROBIN SUMMERFIELD WIFE OF MIKE O’BRIEN “I don’t ever want tobe beaten by cancer. I have cancer, it’s going to kill me, but that doesn’t mean it beatsme. MIKE O’BRIEN FATHER, HUSBAND, CANCER PATIENT