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| "A True Story of Acting, Health, Illness, Recovery, and Life" | ||
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"I've had the most marvelous life. When I was sixteen my parents were divorced. At age eighteen I lost my father. By twenty-eight my career as an actor in Hollywood was finished, in the opinion of anyone who could render it otherwise. I've had, at one time or another, all of the following ailments: falling hair, arthritis, acne, lower back pain,impotence, weight problems, excessive drinking habits, and finally, at age thirty, the really Big One, the ailment to end all ailments, the disease that keeps the wheels of Corporate Medicine well oiled and spinning......cancer. The American medical community clasped me to its fiducial bosom with its diagnosis of a tumor in my prostate gland.
I wouldn't have it any other way. Remove any of these items from my physical/psychological resume and you diminish in quantum leaps the richness of the fabric that has been my life. My joy hasn't been in spite of but because of these itemized events. This attitude on my part has always been viewed by those that know me as slightly, if not grossly, abnormal. Perhaps. Certainly, according to my pulse (45), my blood pressure (106/60), and my cholesterol level (145), my friends are right. I am very abnormal. My life span might also end up being far outside the "norm". But it wasn't very long ago that I wasn't so abnormal. Especially as far as the medical community was concerned. Oh yes. I was very normal and headed for a lifetime of paying medical bills as proof of my normalcy. One can have a ten-year-old tumor languishing in one's prostate and pass a physical with flying colors. I know. It happened to me time and again, every fall, as I had my physical for college football. And again in 1969 when I passed my pre-induction physical for the millitary. (What kept me out of the millitary was not the tumor in my prostate, but a head injury I'd received two years earlier playing football). At 200 pounds, with a seventeen-inch neck, a resting pulse of 78, a benchpress of 200 pounds, I was very much indeed a normal All-American male. I carried my sickness within..........." Excerpt from "preface" | ||