Love and survival
Florida volleyball coach Mary Wise stands with her husband, Mark, who he credits in his battle to survive cancer.
Published: Thursday, November 15, 2007 at 6:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, November 15, 2007 at 12:00 a.m.
It was a Wednesday. There are a lot of things that have happened over the last five months that Mark Wise can't remember. But he remembers that it was a Wednesday. And that it was Chautauqua, N.Y.
He began to shave a four-day beard, the kind you let grow on vacation. On his right hand he wore two hand-made bracelets, one made by his son Mitchell and the other by the daughter of a friend.
Suddenly, he froze. The bracelets, the razor, his vacation. They all stopped when he felt the lump.
"What is that?" he thought.
Soon, he would find out.
And so began an ordeal that today leaves Wise with a thinner face, thinning hair and a raspy voice. This is a story about surgeries and radiation and feeding tubes and hell.
But mostly, this is a love story.
Wise, who is the color analyst on both Gator radio broadcasts and nationally-televised basketball games, can't help but let the tears flow when he talks about the people who helped him through this terrible bout with tonsil cancer.
Especially when he looks at his wife, Mary, the Florida volleyball coach who just won her 17th straight SEC title.
"We haven't really celebrated yet," she said. "We haven't had a celebration moment."
"You want to take her somewhere," he said, his eyes filling with moisture, "and all the friends that helped so much, you want to do something for every one of them."
And she looks at him with caring eyes that tell the story of a rugged few months, of tears that have long since dried.
"The same village that helped raise our boys, that same village got us through this," Mary said.
It was June 12.
Mary Wise was in a great mood. She had just landed a big-time commitment for the Gator volleyball team, the program she built from nothing to be one of the best in the country. Her husband had already had a CT-scan on the lump on the left side of his neck, and it showed nothing.
"I was feeling pretty high," she recalled.
Two hours later, her world, their world, came crashing down. A needle biopsy had revealed cancer in Mark's left tonsil.
"Other than trying not to pass out in front of the doctor," she said, "I handled it fine."
There would be surgery, then chemo and radiation treatments. It was bewildering that Mark, a non-smoker and non-liquor drinker, would have cancer in his throat. But cancer doesn't discriminate.
"They had to find the source of cancer to limit the radiation field," Mark said. "That way they could give me the rifle approach to radiation rather than the shotgun approach. If I had the rifle approach, I can't imagine what the shotgun approach does to you."
On this day, he still feels like a truck ran over him.
"And then backed up over me," he said.
He was treated with seven chemotherapy drips, each lasting at least four hours. The couple had been told by Wise's oncologist that his cancer was "curable, but it comes with a price."
It became their mantra. It comes with a price.
"I had no idea what was coming," he said.
There were days when he had chemo and radiation, each treatment burning away at his throat. Even when he had the weekends off, the burning continued. It's just now healing.
Eventually, the treatment made it so hard to swallow it took him two hours to finish a protein drink. Huge, ugly canker sores grew in his mouth and on his tongue. A feeding tube was eventually inserted. He lost 30 pounds and his brown hair.
The treatments confined him to a living-room chair. Mary slept on the couch for a month, wanting to be there when he woke from bursts of chemically-induced sleep.
"The worst part was feeling so detached from my family," Mark said. "You were part of their lives and now you're just a cancer-ridden couch potato."
One son, Matt, had to leave for college in Lexington, Ky., where he plays basketball for Transylvania. Mitchell finished summer camp but Mary decided it would be best for him to stay with family in Michigan for an extra two weeks.
Then it got worse.
Mark's father, Jack, died of cancer at age 78 in Georgetown, Ky. Mark was too weak to travel to the funeral. Mary wasn't leaving her husband's side.
"That was a real low point, the day of the service," she said. "Our boys were there but we couldn't be."
Through much of the treatment, Mary Wise had a job to do. Her volleyball team came into the season with high expectations as usual.
"It almost got to a point where coming to volleyball practice was a stress reliever," she said. "There's some irony. But the players and the staff were wonderful. They helped me eliminate any guilt. I used to never take a cell phone to practice. But here I'd be in the middle of a drill running out to answer the phone."
Associate head coach Nick Cheronis gave the Wises a children's chalkboard.
"It was kind of humorous," she said. "But we ended up taking it everywhere so we could communicate."
That included the long hours when Mark had the chemo treatments. The Wises already knew that if you're sick, Gainesville is a good place to be.
They'd find out much more.
Every day they went to chemo, they found out how special the village is.
"The people there were living, breathing angels," Mark said.
The radiation treatments were short, just a minute or two twice a day. But they were just as devastating.
"I thought I'd breeze through it after chemo," he said. "I was driving myself. But after awhile, not only could I not drive, whoever was driving me had to do it in a certain way. No sudden stops, no wide turns."
"We were always on the brink of nausea," Mary said.
As she watched her husband suffer through the treatments, Mary Wise thought about not traveling with the team. But she had so much support in Gainesville, she reluctantly went. Relatives, friends, they would take their turns sleeping on the couch.
When the treatments finally ended, another surgery was required to see if the cancer had been eliminated.
On Oct. 5, as Mary was preparing to show her team video of Kentucky, she got the call about the latest biopsy. Seconds later, she burst into the room to tell her team, "We just won the game that matters."
"I knew and my team knew before Mark did," she said.
There is still therapy and check-ups. But as anyone who has dealt with cancer and won the battle knows, it's always a relief when your doctor tells you he wants to see you again in two months rather than three days.
When things were roughest, he planned a trip to Lexington. And two weeks ago, Mark Wise reached his goal, making the trip with Ronnie Yeckering, Matt's old baseball coach who had taken his turns on the Wise's couch. After a four-hour delay in the Gainesville airport, they made it to Transylvania College for an intrasquad game.
"It was a parents' weekend," Mark said. "I really wanted to make it. And I went to my dad's gravesite. So I felt like I brought some closure to some issues."
He had been told his seat next to Mick Hubert for UF basketball games would always be open. But the damage left by the treatments had him wondering when that would be.
At halftime of an exhibition game, Wise approached WRUF's Steve Russell, who was filling in, and asked to be interviewed. He wanted to see how his voice sounded through the headsets.
When it sounded better than he thought, he knew he was close.
And so on Sunday, he was back at work, still not feeling like his old self but feeling better than he had felt in months, still wearing the handmade bracelets that never left his wrist during the ordeal. Mary wears a bracelet as well - a yellow "Live Strong."
Mark's voice during the Tennessee Tech game sounded different to anyone listening to the game. But the same insightful comments still came loud and clear through the speakers.
He's supposed to resume his television work next week when Florida's women face FSU. That's a decision he hasn't made yet.
"They told me, 'You'll never be the old you again,' and I'm fine with that," Mark Wise said. "I just want the new me to start."
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