Last Words

This is the speech that my childhood friend Michael Pueppke gave at Dallas Baptist University just the day before he found out that his leukemia was back and aggressive.  It took his life just 3 weeks later.  This speech exemplifies the beautiful testimony of who Mike was.  His life told a beautiful story of His creator.  

January 25, 2012 - DBU Chapel

Well, it’s good to be back. I want to begin by thanking God for letting me be back. I want to begin by thanking Dr. Cook for allowing me to come and speak here. I’m going to be talking a lot today about teachers and mentors. In 2007 I watched Dr. Cook struggle through his own battle with leukemia while still leading this university from his hospital room. (As I talked to you last time, I stayed in that hospital room.) That year, I watched him speak to our Christmas assembly through a mask because he had a repressed immune system. I also watched him give out diplomas at my wife’s graduation in December 2007, letting an assistant shake the students’ hands as a precaution against infection. I know something about what that took as far as courage—when you have cancer. It’s a story for another time, but Dr. Cook has been an inspiration to me as a student, a cancer patient, and most importantly as a Christian. You are truly blessed to have leadership like him at DBU. You really are.

Before I get started I also want to thank my family, friends, teachers, professors, doctors, and nurses who are in the audience. Cancer is not a one-person disease. It affects everyone who knows and loves that person, especially your immediate family. For some of my immediate family, their jobs were often harder than mine, and the truth is in some ways I am glad that I was the one who was sick. I can’t imagine having a sick wife, son, or daughter to watch. I can take a little pain myself (and I’ve taken some these last couple of years), but it is very, very difficult to see it happen to others.  

I’m sorry if I’m getting too serious right off the back here! I mean, this isn’t gonna be just a down-in-the…you know. Okay, so good stuff happens. I tell a joke about a parrot later, okay? So just bear with me for a second here. There are some serious things I have to get out of the way first because in this experience, there are some people who have made incredible sacrifices for me, and they deserve to be recognized. So family, friends, and all of you who have held me in your thoughts and prayers these last two years, please stand and be honored.

But listen to me using phrases like “after all this happened,” like we are at the end of the story rather than the beginning. Stories don’t have beginnings; they don’t have ends. They do have rough patches, and they have joyous patches. You always want to go for the joyous patches as much as possible. But you can’t get there without going through some of the rough patches.  How many of you are freshman in the audience? I was a freshman once, too—don’t be embarrassed. It wasn’t here, though. I just got here as soon as I could, as they say of Texas.

A year and a day ago—January 24, 2011—I talked at chapel looking quite normal. I had my hair. I had a nice suit on. But I had a secret, a cancerous tumor growing in my chest. In fact I had just come from a radiation treatment in an attempt to kill that tumor. The only tattoos I have are radiation tattoos, where they tattoo you so they can lay you on the table and try and “nuke that little sucker,” as I say. And they did!

The tumor was a lymphoma, a hard mass like a flesh hamburger pushing against my heart, lungs, and nerves. But lymphomas turn into leukemia; lymphoma cells work their ways into the bone marrow, so really lymphoma and leukemia can be the same disease. Leukemia is cancer of the bones, cancer of the blood, cancer of the immune system. At the end of the service last year, as would only happen at DBU or other Christian universities, the student body surrounded my family and me and prayed for healing. For months that prayer was answered with a “yes.”

As you heard in my introduction, I’m a student just like you, only I go to SMU, study Shakespeare, and dream of becoming a professor someday. So after that speech, I went back to classes just like you did. My semester went well. That summer Dr. Rebecca Dark graciously invited me to teach a couple of classes here, so I officially became an adjunct professor at DBU. What fun! I taught Hemingway, Faulkner, and best of all Shakespeare, because remember that’s what I do at SMU. I even had the fun of covering up the less modest—the naughty—bits of anatomy that tend to show up in modern cinematic renditions of Shakespeare’s plays. And I don’t know why they have to be in every movie, but they are! It’s like finding a clean Shakespeare play is like finding a calm two year old—and I know something about that.

But then one day when I was in the middle of the second class I was teaching here, I had a routine scan for cancer throughout my body. Now, after two and a half years of battling cancer off and on, I’m one of those “be your own doctor kind of people,” so the scanbeing early in the morning and my doctor’s appointment not being until that afternoon, I asked for the digital CD and went back to my office at SMU to take a look. The scan took a while to load, but when it did I saw my bones lit up like a Christmas tree, which could only mean one thing: the leukemia was back. Not in my chest, but in my bones. Another bone marrow transplant was in my future. The certainties were pain, drugs that would probably make me lose my mind for a while, long periods of separation from my wife and child (we’d had a whole year together—a beautiful year), a huge strain on my family, medical bills, and any plan that I had for the future of my career would have to be put on hold, perhaps indefinitely. My life would have to be put on hold.

For some reason I didn’t even cry. I just calmly walked into the SMU English office, checked my mail, told our receptionist Brooke that my cancer might be back, and then called my wife and left a message on her voicemail: “I might see something in my PET scan. May be nothing but a virus or something. I’ll talk to Dr. Pineiro this afternoon and let you know. Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.” But I was lying. I knew exactly what lights in the bones of a leukemia patient on a PET scan mean. They meant another bone marrow transplant that would be harder because my body was weakened from the chemotherapy of my previous transplant and from the total and localized bodily radiation I had already received. It meant a longer recovery. It meant a slimmer chance of survival, because this second time around the doctors would try to induce something called graft versus host disease, where the newly transplanted, engrafted cells would attack the cells of the donor—me—in hope that they learn to tell the difference between me and my cancer. 

This can be an excruciatingly painful process, and I’ve seen people die from it. Last month I was asked to pray over and anoint with oil the head of one young man who died from graph versus host only a few hours later. He was having his second bone marrow transplant just like me. He was my friend through months in the hospital. He went to another Baptist college. And he was 20. He could have been my student in a class like the ones I teach here. But he was really one of my teachers, and I will never forget his faith, the faith of his lovely wife, or the faith of his family. Theirs is a story that will stay with me always.

So that is what that little PET scan on my computer screen meant as I look at it at the end of July, hardly six months ago. But let’s not focus on all that just yet. To be honest it’s a bit too hard for me to talk about these things for too long. They are still too close.

Instead I’d like to skip around a little in this story and go back a few years to tell you of God’s faithfulness. That’s what is coming at the end of this story, and it would sure be nice to hear a little of that right now. The summer of 2005 was my last summer at DBU. I had graduated the past December but had stuck around here taking graduate courses, really because I didn’t know what else to do with my life. I had rushed to graduate so quickly that I had no plans laid, and I was spinning my wheels. And I did have two problems, and they both seemed pretty great at the time. First, I was coming off a freshly broken heart. But this was one of those relationships where I realized for the first time that I could really be close friends with a girl, that I could actually like the person I was dating. 

Here’s the catcher: I was about to leave DBU without having found a Christian mate. I mean, this isn’t the only reason you come to DBU, but it wasn’t much of a confidence boost. I wondered how I would ever meet the Christian woman that I wanted to marry one day. This was even more of an anxiety because I had been around beautiful Christian women for three years and, well, hadn’t had much luck.

The second problem was a bit more serious. During a boy version of a mammogram—(can I even say that at DBU?), I had found a lump near one of my testicles, which I was worried might be cancerous. After all, my grandfather had had testicular cancer when he was thirty-five. He had survived, going on to have three more daughters. But this was me; this wasn’t him.

The long and short is that I was having to get real with God for one of the first times of my life. I started reading the Bible fervently. And it began to jump out and actually speak to me. But I was scared, crying myself to sleep many nights. And it was still hard to see that truth from our school verse that God had a plan, had a purpose for my life.

Then one day as I was thinking of all these things, driving down off campus, going slowly over those silly huge speed bumps, and I heard a voice say to me as crystal clear as if somebody was sitting next to me: “Trust Me.” I almost drove off the road and made some work for the grounds crew. Trust me. I’ve often heard people talk about when God has spoken to them. They talk about it with such certainty. There’s nothing wrong with that. But that wasn’t my experience. I questioned. Was it just a hallucination, a psychological manifestation of that which I most desperately wanted to hear? Or was it really the God of the universe telling me for the first time that, although I was afraid, I wasn’t abandoned?

Let’s fast forward a little bit. That was the beginning of the summer—that’s the strife. Let’s go to the last three weeks of my time at DBU—I had accepted a position at the University of North Texas to study linguistics and teach technical writing, and all that impressive mumbo-jumbo Dr. Cook read in my credentials was about to begin. I had finally through prayer got to guts to get my…stuff checked out, and found out they were just harmless epididymis cysts that many men have. And one night, while discussing these things with friends by the DBU apartment hot tubs, a beautiful Christian girl in a blue swimsuit sat down next to me.  And we clicked, intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally. I was down at the pool every night for the next three weeks trying to run into her. This actually worked out rather well, as she was doing the same thing trying to run into another guy. Either way, I was there and he wasn’t, so end of story. [Actually, I was looking for Mike after that first meeting.]

We talked ever night for three weeks, walking around the Mahler looking at the stars, the back of the science building, sitting in some gazebo somewhere (okay, so the campus has changed that much). This chapel, though, beautiful as it is and as much as I like it, wasn’t here. Instead there was a grassy slope, where we set up a quilt and talked about what we wanted out of life, what our goals where, and we began to realize that we wanted to share that life. As we talked one night, I reached my hand over to touch Brittni’s hair, neither of us realizing it for a minute. That’s a really intimate thing to do. We had known each other a week! We hadn’t even held hands. And the thing you need to know about Brittni is that she is an official member of the Baptist Abstinence Brigade—she probably started the thing, which is good. I’m not going to call Brittni prude, but calling Brittni “prude” is like calling the Pope a Catholic. But when we realized what was happening, we just laughed. I pulled my hand away, and we continued to talk. We talked about marriage in November, the ring was on her finger—not quite by spring but—by June, and the following year we were married on 7/7/07, to be exact, not wanting to be accused of being original or anything.

“Trust me.” God had said. The next time I would hear those words I would be lying in a hospital bed, crying to God to make the nerve pain of chemotherapy go away just for a moment. And He did. Brittni would be asleep on a chair near my bed, uncomfortable and six-months pregnant with our son Luke. And I would hear God’s voice again: “Trust me, I’ve got you.” A few months later I would be in remission, and a year later—January 24, 2011—I would be standing here for the first time talking about how God never abandons us. And now you know the story up to six months ago. And now, although it’s going to be hard, I can tell you about the second bone marrow transplant. About my dark night of the soul, about the valley of the shadow of death. About the thing I haven’t written on my blog about because it almost killed me, as I saw it kill my friend. About the thing that almost killed my hope. About the thing that almost made me stop trusting God.

The first part of my second transplant went as well as could be expected. I got my new cells, the cancer dropped out of my blood, and I was released. But then I developed a case of pneumonia, and returned to the hospital, not the cancer floor, but the infectious diseases floor, which meant that I couldn’t leave my room, because who knows what was lurking in the halls. Brittni and Luke couldn’t come see me because she was teaching and always sick with germs from her kids, and Luke was in a daycare petri dish (it’s a great school, but he does get sick a lot), as I called it in my more cantankerous moments.

Then the graft verses host disease set in. Graft verses host disease can affect any part of your body, but it usually most affects fast-growing cells like those in your eyes, skin, digestive tract, mouth, fingernails, lungs, kidneys, and liver. The last three are the fatal ones, and luckily they never affected me. (My friend's had gone to his lungs, and he coughed so hard he broke his ribs from coughing, dying cancer- free.)

Over two weeks my skin painfully mottled, my eyes closed shut and then deformed from the massive steroids they were giving to try and control the GVHD, my mouth glued shut so I couldn’t eat, sores developed throughout my esophagus, my stomach became a knot of massive pain so severe that the doctors gave me access to something totaling 3 milligrams of dilaudid every hour. Dilaudid is a hydromorphone, which means it is in essence synthetic heroine. It’s funny but it’s really not a joke: I became severely addicted to it. Many heroine addicts become such become so because they can’t get meds for their stomach pain. Another less pleasant thing: I also had constant diarrhea, which was mostly blood from the sores in my colon, and I couldn’t make it from my bed to the toilet because I had two IV poles and bathroom that would only fit one. So that was me in a little room, feeling all the pain and loneliness that I could, calling to God and hearing nothing.

But I’m here to talk about telling stories. That’s only one way to tell the story. I’ve left some stuff out. During those weeks, my dad, my donor came to sleep next to me those two weeks. He hardly left my side. He went home about every third day for an hour to take a shower. He stayed up with me all night. When I was spewing diarrhea, he cleaned it up. He wiped my eyes. He wiped the dead skin off my hands. He gave me a model of God’s love that’s so strong, so powerful, that I’ll never forget it for my entire life. That’s just what my earthly father did for me. Remember, he was my donor. His blood was exactly, genetically my blood.

And where was my heavenly Father during all this time? I prayed to Him, and I cried out, but I didn’t hear anything. I just sat there in that haze, asking for more dilaudid. He was there the whole time. Many of you have seen the “Footsteps” poster, which explains that God carries us through the most difficult times. It’s absolutely true. My earthly father was in that room, and God was in that room. And if you think about it, my father and I have the same blood, except for one little thing. My blood now, if the doctors are right, knows how to fight my cancer. Think about that as a metaphor for Christian life and for what Christ does for us. Have you ever wondered about when you first accepted Christ—that God gave you His blood, His shed blood, His clean blood? Have you ever wondered why right after you prayed that prayer—“God, I accept You as my Savior. Christ, let Your blood cover me”—why all the problems in your life didn’t just go away? Guys, do you ever wonder why you didn’t just give up pornography right there? Girls, do you ever wonder why you still went into relationships that you knew you shouldn’t have, still looking for love right there? But then something began to change in you. That blood, that Christ that got in you, started to work. And it didn’t always work fast. There were some setbacks. It wasn’t always pain-free. But you started to become more like Christ. You started—let’s just say this—you started to heal because Christ was in you.

I think about literature a lot. I think about stories, about metaphors. I think I’ve been through quite a bit, but it’s given me physically the ability to be a walking metaphor for Christ coming into our lives, changing us and healing us. [….] God is here. God hasn’t abandoned me.

At the end of my classes at DBU, I try and sum up the semester. I say, “Look, we’ve been talking about characters, we’ve been talking about settings, we’ve been talking about all these great literary terms. Well guess what? You’re a character in a setting, but you have to decide what kind of character you’re going to be and who the other characters are and how they relate to you.” I’m going to say the same thing to you now.  Here’s your setting: DBU. You’ve got the opportunity to do all kinds of mission work, to learn about yourself—you’ve got more opportunities than you can possibly know. How many people get the chance to sit in a building like this, or to sit in the classes you’re in, or sit with the professors you’re with? You’re also your own storyteller in your own way, although our Christian lingo for it is “your witness.” 

How are you going to tell your story and your witness? I’ll give you a hint how to start. Start thinking about how you got here. Start thinking about the little moments you trusted God, or the moments you didn’t trust God, and He put you here anyway. Start thinking about that. If you were in an elevator for five minutes and someone asked you why you were a Christian, what kind of story would you tell? Where would you be in it, and where would God be in it? I’ve told you a couple versions of my story: I’ve told you the selfish, I’m gonna go cry-in-my-soup, let-me-tell-you-how-terrible-my-transplant was version. Then I told you the version of how my father modeled my heavenly Father for me and how God was in it. What is your story? What version are you going to tell the world? You won’t just tell it with your words; you’ll tell it with your deeds and you’ll tell it with your heart.

The last thing I want to say is that you’re not abandoned, even if you feel you are, even if you’re going through one of those hard parts in your story. God loves you, and when you’re in the valley, remember the times you trusted Him and then keep trusting Him. And then you through your life will be telling His story. That’s an awful good place to be.

--Mike Pueppke