Insight: Beyond My Wildest Dreams

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

There’s an old Kris Kristofferson song called “Please Don’t Tell Me How The Story Ends,” and for me, it perfectly sums up where I’ve been for the past 20 years.

Nancy and Ed Pierce by Lake Ontario in 2006.
COURTESY PHOTO 

Back in 2004, I had been living in the same one-bedroom apartment for almost a decade, had been single for 13 years and poured myself into work because I had very little else going on. At the age of 50, it was depressing to come home each time to an empty apartment without much optimism for the future.

Then my life was totally turned upside down. Some of my co-workers at the newspaper I worked for thought that I should try internet dating and asked if they could create a profile for me. I reluctantly agreed but after a negative experience, I edited out much of the personal details from my listing. All that remained listed my gender, my age and the city I lived in. I thought nobody in their right mind would answer that ad and that my internet dating participation would come to an end.

Was I ever wrong. A woman living in the next town over sent me a note late in the month of May and asked how I could ever expect to get to know someone based upon the scant info that I had put out there on my listing. I answered her note with a lengthy reply about who I was, what my occupation was, and some of my likes and dislikes. I fully expected that to be the end of it and went back to my normal routine.

That evening, I received a reply, and it intrigued me. First, this woman could express herself in an email and she could spell correctly. I learned that she was an elementary school teacher and had moved to my area recently. We had similar tastes in music, food, politics, movies and a mutual love of ice cream.

Exchanging numerous emails, I learned that she had been divorced after 23 years of marriage and had three grown sons. She was originally from Burlington, Vermont and had a college degree in education from the University of Vermont. I looked forward to each subsequent email from her, and each one I received from her was the highlight of my day.

Before we ever shared photos of what we looked like, we had a few long telephone conversations, and I asked her if she would like to go out on a date with me. She thought that would be nice and agreed to meet me at a Friendly’s Restaurant after work on a Thursday. I pulled into the restaurant parking lot in my 1995 Pontiac Firebird and wondered how this would go. A few minutes later, a huge blue 1985 Ford Bronco pulled in next to me and this attractive woman stepped out wearing a handmade sign around her neck that read “Hi Ed.”

It broke the icy nervousness of meeting for the first time and as we sat down at a table in the restaurant, I started to realize how much I liked everything about her. She ordered vanilla ice cream, had sparkling blue eyes, lots of freckles and reddish-brown short hair. But the most important thing about her that I noticed was her incredible sense of humor and sense of sarcasm that matched mine perfectly.

Simply put, it was the best first date of my life, and we made plans to do something else again soon. We spoke on the phone for the next four days, but on the fifth day, she told me that I probably wasn’t going to want to date her anymore. She told me that she had found a lump in her breast and was going to have surgery after having been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Being a cancer survivor myself, I did my best to reassure her that she would be OK and that I wouldn’t give up on her so easily. Over the following weeks, I spent a lot of time at her apartment bringing her vanilla milkshakes and making sure that kept her spirits up. I went with her to her radiation and chemotherapy treatments. And I met her youngest son, Danny, who spent several weeks with her that summer to assist as she recovered from her surgery.

The longer I knew her, the closer I felt to her. She has three brothers and a sister, and one of her brothers, Rick, lived nearby and had played guitar for a band I liked in the 1980s called “Dr. Hook.” Meeting him for the first time, he asked me to rattle off how many Dr. Hook songs I could name, and he also asked me if my hair was real. I laughed as I had never been asked previously if my hair was my own, and it certainly is.

By that Christmas in 2004 she had moved in with me and brought along her dog. We were married on June 11, 2005, and our life together has now included homes and jobs in Florida, New Hampshire and Maine.

It’s said that love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place and that rings true for me. I am perhaps the luckiest man ever to have found Nancy.

Insight: A Christmas like no other

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

At the time I wasn’t sure if 1998 would be my final Christmas or not. Now with more than two and a half decades behind me in the rearview mirror, I can look back and reflect about how it was a pivotal time that changed my life forever.

It sure didn’t feel like it at the time, but Christmas 1998 marked the beginning of a new chapter for me and turned my world upside down and for the better.

I had spent most of that fall on the doctor merry-go-round trying to determine what was causing my dull and aggravating back pain for months, a slow weight loss, and weekends of uncontrolled vomiting even if I had nothing to eat. Each of the four physicians I had visited had no answers and they seemed at a loss as to why at age 45 I was experiencing these symptoms.

Then the fifth doctor I had an appointment with decided to send me for a chest x-ray and it provided some clarity. It revealed a spot on one of my lungs and that doctor suggested I see a surgeon immediately.

As I sat down with the surgeon, and he reviewed the x-rays and the results of a CAT scan I had taken, he turned ominously and told me “This could go two different ways. Either I’m going to save your life, or you need to start putting your affairs in order. We need to confirm what this is through surgery.”

He suspected I was suffering from a form of leukemia or lymphoma and scheduled my exploratory surgery for the day after Christmas. While others enjoyed the holidays that year, I was worried if I would make it to see another Christmas.

When I finally woke up from the surgery and in the first few days thereafter, I began to receive phone calls from friends, family and co-workers and couldn’t understand why suddenly I was the subject of so much attention. Finally, my surgeon met with me in my hospital room while my mother was there visiting. He told me he had good news and bad news. He said the bad news was I had a rare form of cancer and that he had told my mother right after the surgery that I had 90 days or less to live. I asked him what the good news was, and he said he had sent my results to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for a second opinion, and they believed a regimen of chemotherapy and follow-up surgery could be an effective treatment and restore my health.

He had made an appointment for me to meet with an oncologist and begin treatment as soon as possible. That launched six months of chemo where I had a port implanted in my chest and checked into the hospital every two weeks for rounds of platinum-based chemotherapy. My weight quickly dropped from 171 pounds to 100 pounds in a month. All my hair started to fall out and my friend shaved it off for me. I couldn’t eat as everything tasted like ballpoint pen ink. I also had trouble standing, let alone taking steps to walk anywhere.

I’d have the chemo for a week and then spend the next week trying to recover. I kept a bucket by my bedside into which I frequently threw up. Friends stopped coming by to visit for fear they might catch whatever it was I had. I’d have so little energy that I’d call it a day at 4:55 p.m. and head to bed.

But each time I’d go to the hospital for chemo, I’d lay there and imagine if I made it through this, what I wanted out of life. I wanted to return to meaningful newswriting after years of writing about sports in my career. I wanted to own my own home, put up outdoor Christmas decorations, and have a family of my own to share the holidays with. I asked God to give me a second chance at life and thought about how things would be different if I survived.

Six months of chemo and two operations later to remove small pockets of cancer in my chest, I returned home and went back to work. Within several years, my doctors told me I was completely cancer free. I met Nancy in 2004 and she came over for Christmas that year and never went home. We were married the next year, and I inherited three adult stepsons in the process. We bought our first home, then I became a section editor and started writing news stories again for the newspaper where I worked.

Eventually we moved to New Hampshire, where I served as the Editor-in-Chief of the daily newspaper in Laconia, then on to Biddeford where I was the Executive Editor of the daily newspaper there. I’ve been the Managing Editor of The Windham Eagle since May 2020 and my life has come full circle.

I thought of this last week when I was stringing up Christmas lights. No matter how bad your Christmas may be, there’s always someone going through sometime much worse. As long as we all have hope and dreams though, life is indeed worth living.