vincentclark dot com

knowing vince – Two Perfect Cents

In the summer of 1997 at the age of 22 I began to feel a painful lump in my right testicle. I was attending my second semester at California State University Chico. I left Norther Arizona University in the spring of 1996, my fiance broke up with me a few month later in August of 1996. 1996 was a rough year for me, it seemed just when things couldn’t get any worse they did. My time at NAU was an onslaught of misery and despair. My father filing for bankruptcy caused my credit to tank, my checking account canceled, credit cards gone, all because he did not removing me from his American Express account prior to filing for bankrupcy. I had my apendics and was molested by a doctor when being examined for epididymitis. These were someone of the highlights.

Those that were with me during that storm left for higher ground. After almost a decade and a half of getting out of Simi Valley I found myself back home living with my mother. As luck would have it an old friend called me from Chico needing a roommate, though a series of ambitious steps I found myself attending CSU Chico in the spring of 97.

That summer I spent working as a camp counselor at St. Nicolas Ranch. This is when the pain in my testicle started. I thought it was the same as the pain I had a year prior, a pain that came with a lot of problems when a doctor acted wildly inappropriate and pushed me further down a spiral that only seemed to end when I had nothing left to loose. Naturally this scared the shit out of me.

As September came I was sleeping less and less. The nurse practitioner at the medical center on campus insisted on treating me for gonorrhea, something I knew I didn’t have. He tried to tell me that there are other ways of catching something that would cause an infection in the testicle than sex, we said that but I doubt that he believed it. After three weeks and a pharmacy worth of pain killers and antibiotics the lump and pain was still there. I was then referred to a Urologist.

It took the Urologist less than two minutes to make the diagnosis and to speak the words that rank among the most feared words in our language, “it is cancer.”  Followed by a phrase that no man wants to hear, “we are going to have to remove your testicle.”

Next came a task that no son ever wants to consider, especially a 22 year old college student that until recently thought his life was finally getting back on track. I had to call my mother’s work from a pay phone to tell her that I had cancer. I could hear the wind leave her lungs and not return. I could hear her feeling for a chair to sit before she fell.

I was upset for a while, cried a little, was scared out of my mind. I told my good friend Heather and she cried too. Then in a moment she looked at me and said, “so now are you going to be the uniballer?”

I chuckled and responded, “yea, a one nut wonder.”

We both laughed and proceeded to make jokes. It was then we realized crying, feeling sad or scared would not make the cancer go away so why not have some fun with it. Heather and I had a long tradition of getting lemons and trading them in for a pitcher of beer, which is exactly what we did.

I found out I had cancer on a Wednesday, two days later on Friday I had my testicle removed. The cancer was non-sonomic embryonic carcinoma. This is really imported because non-sonomic does not respond to radiation therapy. In the best case testicular cancer scenario you would have the diseased testicle removed and then have your retroperitoneal lymph nodes radiated in case the cancer had spread.

I was now faced with two decisions. I could choose surveillance or have a surgery known as a modified Retro Paraneal Lymph Node Dissection. If a second tumor is discovered then it has the potential to be one of the most invasive surgeries one could have.

I chose to have the second surgery and the risks were considerable. I wanted this cancer gone and my life back and I was willing to do what ever it took. Of course I was looking at this through the lenses of a 22 year old man who wanted nothing more than not to have to return to Simi Valley.

Towards the end of September, less than three weeks after my first surgery I was under the knife again. I awoke to some of the worst timing I had ever encountered in my life. My mother was there with tears in her eyes telling me that they found a second tumor and I would need chemo therapy. I would have to go home to Simi Valley. At the time I could not imagine a worse fate.

Upon hearing that I was refusing to go home for chemo therapy my Uncle Chris visited me in the hospital. He was instructed by his mother to “talk some sense into that boy.” He told me not to mess around with this, it is my life, and do what needs to be done. Which is exactly what I did.

I returned home to Simi Valley the first week in October. Three weeks later I started my first of two rounds of BMP chemo. The pain from the surgery coupled with the nausea of the chemo, the painfull pimples all while living in Simi Valley, I could not imagine a worse fate.

December 2, 1997 I was officially done with chemo therapy. I had one what I foolishly thought was the war. As it turns out the victory would be one in many battles that would be waged over the course of the next twelve years.

In January of 1998 I ventured back to Chico State. I will be the first to admit that I went too soon and that I should have stayed another semester perhaps two in Simi Valley. Life was so miserable there I saw the cold freedom of Chico State to be far better than where I was currently living. My mother and I always had problems living together, especially when it was just the two of us, and I knew that this wasn’t easy for her and her behavior was more from a lack of experience than love. In the end it came down to the fact that she made it so difficult for me to live there I would rather take my chances in the only other place I was able to go, Chico. The 145 pound, bald, pale, and sick Vincent Clark moved north 400 miles away from his mother’s home in Simi Valley.

In the summer of 1998 I contracted campo bacter, a mild food poison that would present to most as a bad case of the flu. Unfortuntly the symptoms are much harsher to those who’s immune systems have been compromised by chemo therapy. I was forced to cut my week short at St. Nicholas Ranch and quit my job so I could return to Simi Valley to get better. The doctor gave me a choice to stay in the hospital to get the antibiotics or to return home with my mother. I chose three days in the hospital because I quite simply could not return home, especially when I would be too sick to go anywhere.

In December of 1998 I contracted an almost fatal case of pneumonia, a type of pneumonia only seen in elder ally patients and those that had recently received chemo therapy. This furthered my feeling that I came back to school too soon. I spent three days in the hospital. During that time the only time I heard from my family was when my mother called to yell at me for getting pneumonia and wanted to know how that was going to effect Christmas, after all my two sisters were going to be home and she wanted to make sure I would be there so we can all be a family.

Completing my classes was difficult. I was tired most of the time and the college life in the cold was not helping matters. In the Spring of 1999 I chose to finish my classes via e-mail and return once again to Simi Valley. Again, I simply had no place else to go.

Two years after my diagnosis I found myself once again living at home with my mother. My mother threatened to kick me out of the house shortly after my return home in 1997, being in her eyes “healthy” I was being threatened with eviction every other meal. Fortunately for me I found myself dating a lovely sociopath in a similar situation as me. Both of us were left in a town were we started while all our other friends had long since left.

Since my surgery I could never take a punch to the gut, I always had the feeling that I was not put back correctly. I would have sharp pains that quickly went away. I suffered from retrograde ejaculation, which is where instead of the semon coming out in went into my bladder. I was a healthy 160 pounds and alive, the rest was just cost of doing business. I knew that the pain would be a part of life from hear on out. At the age of 24, that doesn’t seem like too long anyway.

During my last year at Chico when my friends were at the bars and I was too tired or sick to join them I was at home on my Pentium I 60 mz computer learning HTML, Java Applets, and Flash. The Internet was ramping up and there seemed to be a lot of money to be made. I never joined the Get Rich on the Internet club, I knew to be successful at anything it would never happen over night.

The summer of 1999 I spent most of it my mother’s garage on my now upgraded 200 mz Pentium computer with a wopping 16 megs of Ram and a generous 2 meg video card. It was a great computer when it wasn’t catching fire blazing a hole in my mothers carpet, hence why I was outside. When I was not painfully searching the web on a 56k modem I was learning JavaScript, HTML, or Flash. I knew that it would be these three technologies that would launch my career.

The dotcom boom was in full swing and I was not dumb enough to think that this wave would last much longer. I knew that I wanted to work with computers and the Internet seemed to be an appealing new field full of potential and opportunity. I also knew that if I wanted to get into the field with no experience or formal education I would have to act fast and make a name for myself. I was originally hired to integrate Disney’s D-Cards but I proved to be gifted at Flash and found myself being assigned to special projects.

As the dotcom world crumbled and a virtual blood bath ensued the web and all that worked on it I found myself protected by the knowledge I gained during those late and lonely nights in which I could hear my classmates parting in the streets, too sick and too tired to go out on that night.

Together with my friends I built one of the first Web 2.0 applications, which was the first for Disney or any other entertainment site, it was also the first all Flash website of its kind. At the time the scale of the project was unrepresented. We tied in personalization and account information in a new never before seen way. The subscription product known as Blast was not Disney Online’s first attempt to an online subscription based site, however it is a site that forever transformed Disney Online. The drive and determination of this ragtag group of 4 individuals layed down the foundation for the Blast Technology team. This was Disney’s first technology team centered around Flash. This team developed into a full blown engineering team ultimately replacing Application Technology the engineering group at Disney Online.

Over the course of the next two years we continuously blazed a trail on the World Wild Web. In 2002 we once again broke new ground in Flash Application development creating the first all Flash e-commerce site for kids in which kids were able to play games earn points and purchase digital downloads.

For almost three years my life seemed to consist of late nights, lost weekend, and a turbulent relationship. As 2002 came to an end my less than stable girlfriend who was also my best friend parted ways. This was not a mutual decision. After almost two years of helping her through her masters degree Brownwyn had her fill of me. As the winter set in so did the winter pain, something at the time I did not recognize. Work was not going well. We had succeeded so much that those who impeded our progress for the previous two years now wanted a piece of our success. Once again my world was crumbling around me.

In 2003 I regrouped, still in good standing with work I had left Blast to join the application technology team, before it was merged into the Blast Technology team, which would be renamed to the Premium Product Technology team.

Sometimes I feel the reason why people don’t write about this time in history is because one can go mad trying to remember was is called what.

In the beginning of 2003 I weighed 170 pounds at its end I would way 230 pounds.

In October of 2002 I had taken up tap dancing and was forced to quit it when I began to develop a great amount of pain in my groin and side. After a few weeks the symptoms went away. As 2003 progressed and my weight increased I found myself in another spiral of cause and action. As the weight increased so did the pain. The doctors would discount the pain in my abdomen and focus on the lower back. They would find a degenerative disk budging in my lower back, however the failed to take it seriously since where I was pointing was inconsistent to what the MRIs showed.

The storm was brewing once more