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| SIMON HAYTER / TORONTO STAR |
| Bob
Hunter was near death but he’s free of pain and back to work after
receiving a variety of unconventional treatments. He meditates and
continues a regime of special diet and supplements. |
|
Not without a fight
Bob Hunter, Greenpeace co-founder and CITY-TV eco expert, is battling prostate cancer head-on
When all else failed, he went to an alternative clinic in Mexico. He's not cured, but he's feeling better
JUDY STEED
"I'm not out of the woods yet."Long hair flowing to his shoulders, agate bracelet clasping his wrist, Bob Hunter sits in his writing cabin, at his computer, surrounded by trees.You wouldn't think death was on his mind."God
bless the 'burbs." He looks out the window at the sylvan glade that
doubles as the backyard of his home in the wilds of Scarborough — not
exactly where you'd expect to find one of North America's most
prominent environmental activists. This is the man, after all, who
co-founded Greenpeace and created "Media Mind Bomb" tactics designed to
explode in the public consciousness "through dramatic, camera-ready
opposition to environmental crimes," according to the Greenpeace
website And here he is, one of Time magazine's top
"eco-heroes" of the 20th century, glowing with good cheer after three
and a half weeks at a Mexican cancer clinic, belying rumours of his
imminent demise."When I thought I was toast," he laughs — yes,
laughs, though his eyes tell a different tale of facing a diagnosis of
terminal prostate cancer — "we decided to sell the house. But now I'm
going to stay here till I die." He grins.The 63-year old
trickster chooses his words with the care of a consummate craftsman.
The 13 books he's written over the past 35 years are arrayed across the
top of a filing cabinet. "If I don't collect me, who will?" (Reporter's
disclosure: In the late 1960s, in my first job out of university,
reading the "slush pile" of unsolicited manuscripts at McClelland &
Stewart, I "discovered" Erebus, Hunter's first novel, published by M&S in 1968.)
The bookshelves behind him sag under the weight of manuscripts and
files crammed with material of interest to a University of Toronto
archivist, contacted when Hunter thought he was doomed.Above the
windows that frame his work-station are dozens of framed photographs
documenting his multifaceted career, including stints as a hard-hitting
Vancouver Sun columnist, whale-protecting activist, and CITY-TV "ecology specialist" — stages he regards as different lifetimes lived in one.There may be more — lifetimes, that is. Facing
death, he's learned more about life and its possibilities, including
reincarnation. In his search for hope, after his Toronto oncologist
gave him two years to live, he has sought out so-called alternative
therapies. The Mexican clinic — Hospital Santa Monica, about 25 kilometres south
of San Diego in Playa Santa Monica, Baja California, Mexico, founded in
1983 by Kurt Donsbach, an American naturopathic doctor and chiropractor
who has a Ph.D. in nutrition — popped on to his radar screen as a
result of a desperate phone call by Laura DiBattista, a CITY-TV health
reporter, to Dr. Fred Hui, a Toronto physician, late last year."She
was in tears," Hui says. "Her colleague Bob Hunter was in terrible pain
and he needed help." DiBattista had called Hui, 53, a Hong Kong native
and graduate of U of T's medical school, because he's known as an
open-minded physician who is interested in "integrative medicine."
"I am the doctor of last resort; I treat all the leftovers other
doctors can't help," Hui says. "Conventional medicine is wonderful but
it has its limits."
`After Greenpeace, I was burned out, thought I'd failed to save the world. I was suicidal'Bob Hunter
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Hunter had hit the wall. His prostate cancer had metastasized
into his bones (ribs, spine and pelvis). He was surviving (barely) on
morphine, to dull the pain, devouring morphine tablets "as if they were
Smarties," Hunter says. "I felt so bad I didn't want to live."Hui
observes that "Bob's cancer was blowing up so quickly that as a
last-ditch measure, his doctors offered him chemotherapy, which maybe
could prolong his life for a few months."The chance of success
was remote, he would lose his hair, grow weaker and weaker ... I
thought of the Santa Monica clinic. I have a patient who years earlier
had terminal prostate cancer — I didn't know him then — and he went
there and is healthy to this day." Hunter had been first
diagnosed in 1999, just before flying to Hollywood with his wife Bobbi
to accept a prestigious Wyland Foundation "eco-pioneer" award. (Bobbi
was "the first woman in front of a harpoon, confronting the Russian
whaling ships back in the '70s," Bob says. "They stopped when they saw
Bobbi.") The Hunters then went to Amsterdam, where Bob addressed a huge
crowd of Euro-Greenpeacers and "educated them about the origins of
Greenpeace in Canada." Back home in Toronto, Hunter faced the truth: He had prostate cancer. "We've got to operate," the doctor said."I
jumped back," Hunter says. "A natural reflex." Surgery, he was told,
offered a 70 per cent chance of both impotence and incontinence. "I
thought I'd like to try something else." To this day, he does not
regret turning down surgery."It was his decision," says Bobbi
Hunter, who eventually stepped down from her management job at Rogers
Cable Inc. (and went back to construction planning) in order to spend
more time taking care of Bob. "It didn't seem like a big emergency at
the time," she says. "You don't know what's the best thing to do.
Surgeons want to do surgery. The radiation guys want to radiate. The
chemo guys want to do chemo."Hunter chose radiation. He
proceeded to Princess Margaret Hospital, where "I got high voltage 3-D
conformal radiation with gold chips in my prostate. Everyone said it
was working. Yeah, I thought I'd beaten cancer. I was one of the lucky
ones." (For Canadian men, prostate cancer is the third leading cause of
cancer death, and the most commonly diagnosed cancer, according to the
Canadian Cancer Society.)In 2001, CBC-TV came calling to do a
documentary on prostate cancer and Hunter agreed to participate. "I
thought I had something to cheer about." His PSA (prostate specific
antigen) was monitored every few months, but a year later, during Moses
Znaimer's "Idea City" conference, where Hunter was speaking, he
received word from his doctor. His PSA numbers were up. The radiation
had failed. "I cried my eyes out," he says. "We all bawled our eyes
out." He was put on hormone blockers, which dropped his PSA
numbers down to zero, decreased his testosterone and sapped his energy.
"Night sweats. I had to take sleeping pills to get any sleep." All to
no avail. A year and a half later, in early 2004, the constant
monitoring of his PSA showed the numbers were up to 11, a month later
up to 20 and rising rapidly, doubling to 40. The cancer had spread to
his bones — ribs, spine, pelvis. Which produced the doctor's "death
watch," verdict, as Bobbi puts it. "The doctor said Bob had two years
to live."He went to a naturopath, went on a Vitamin C drip, and his PSA numbers kept climbing.
The Hunters flew to China to tell their daughter Emily, now 19. "I
couldn't pick up the phone and say, `By the way, Dad will be dead in
two years,'" Bob says. He can't avoid noting the terribly polluted
state of China. "On clear, sunny days, all we saw was a pale orb in the
sky. The pollution was so bad Emily left after six months." She
is a chip off the old block. Last April, she boarded the Sea Shepherd
with Hunter's old comrade-in-arms, Paul Watson; she was the only female
on a mission to protect the Galapagos Islands from marauding poachers.
Enrolled in international studies at U of T, she's bright and she's
focused. "I want to be an activist like my parents," Emily says. Her
brother Will, 26, the family politician, is working for the Ontario
government's Ministry of the Environment as a communications assistant.
(Hunter is a grandfather, thanks to his older children from his
first marriage. Justine, 37, is a political reporter with CBC-TV in
Victoria. She has a young child. Conan, 41, works on computer
integration with the federal government in Ottawa and has three
children, the eldest 17.)
`We don't know where this is going. The clinic isn't guaranteeing'Bobbi Hunter, wife of Bob Hunter
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Hunter's family rallied round to support him and he started
meditating with yogis in the Brahma Kamaris tradition. Softening into
spirituality was new for him. "I'd always been in a rush, in a panic,
to hurry up and get things done. After Greenpeace, I was burned out,
thought I'd failed to save the world. I was suicidal." It's a
common affliction for environmentalists: being in a painful state of
awareness, knowing how bad things are and how the situation is
worsening as anti-environment governments (such as the Bush
administration in the U.S.) continue to deny the damage being done. "I
can only hope there will be a massive scientific breakthrough,
something unexpected out of left field, like the Berlin Wall coming
down ... "By September 2004, Hunter was consumed by the pain of
bone cancer. "The morphine high lasts only a month, then you get
agitated and depressed," he says. "You develop a tolerance, they boost
the dosage, you feel worse. I didn't give a s--- emotionally about
anybody — Bobbi, the kids, the dog. They say detachment is a neat, Zen
thing. It's not, actually."He had a heart attack, he lost
weight, "he was skin and bone, had no energy, couldn't walk," Bobbi
says. On Oct. 13, 2004, his birthday, she took him to the hospital —
"in a wheelchair, he couldn't stand up" — and said, "Get him off
morphine."The pain was excruciating. All the "cancer doctors"
could offer was chemotherapy, to extend his life a few more months.
Then Hui recommended the Mexican clinic, where Hunter received "a mosaic
of treatments that attempts in 20 different ways to make the human body
an unwelcoming host for cancer cells," clinic founder Donsbach explains
in an interview.Among the treatments Donsbach delivered:  Blood transfusions for anemia, "a normal medical procedure because Bob was so anemic when he came in."Infusions
(intravenous drips) every day for two to three hours a day: amino
acids, fatty acids, more than 90 vitamins, minerals and other
nutrients, "some having anti-cancer properties, to build up the body." Hyperbaric
oxygen: Hunter sat in a sealed chamber filled with oxygen "creating
hyperbaric pressure to supersaturate all the body cells with oxygen,"
Donsbach says. "Cancer cells do not multiply well in an oxygen-rich
environment. Normal cells love it." In addition, Hunter had an oxygen
mask over his face. "It felt like space travel — in a geodesic dome,
much hissing of tanks," Hunter says.Hyperthermia:
heating the tumour. Targeted microwave energy increased the internal
temperature of the tumour. "At 107 degrees F, cancer cells begin to
die," Donsbach says. Insulin,
administered to drop his blood sugar, leaving the cancer cells
"screaming for glucose," Donsbach says. "Normal cells can use fat or
protein as a back-up energy source but cancer cells cannot. We drop the
glucose level precipitously, administer a precisely formulated dose of
chemotherapy at one-twentieth of the normal level, with glucose. The
chemo is carried by the glucose primarily to the cancer cells, which
are in desperate need of glucose."(Dr. Linda Rapson, who chairs
the complementary medicine section of the Ontario Medical Association,
attended a Society of Integrative Oncologists conference in New York in
November. "There was a whole day on herbal treatments, and a paper was
given on hyperbaric oxygen," Rapson says. She knows of a Toronto doctor
who's used hyperthermia. "We should be open-minded — but we need
rigorous testing of all these methods.")For the patient — Hunter
— the process was exhausting. Yet he emerged with surprising — to him —
results. No pain. Hope: "Bob really didn't start to fight until he got
to Mexico," Bobbi says. "The doctors here (in Toronto) made him feel
hopeless." And clinical data showing the decline of his "cancer
numbers. With the PSA test, any numbers over 6, 7 or 8, they start to
monitor you. It's called `watchful waiting.' When it's over 10, they
worry. I was at 720 when I went to Mexico. Now I'm down to 480 — high,
I know. The hope is that the numbers will keep dropping. On the bone
cancer, I was at 1100, now I'm down to 62 — in the normal range."
`We should be open-minded — but we need rigorous testing of all these methods'Dr. Linda Rapson, chair of the Ontario Medical Association's complementary medicine section
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He is on a strict diet, similar to a diabetic's: no sugar, no
wheat, no starch. As we talk, he munches on nuts and sips water.
(Later, he makes a sandwich and uses the wrong kind of bread. "Got to
get this figured out," he mutters.) He's trying hard. His kitchen
counters are piled with bags and jars of pills and supplements from the
Santa Monica Institute."We don't know where this is going,"
Bobbi cautions. "The clinic isn't guaranteeing, they're not gouging,
all I know is that if Bob had been on chemo, he would be in pain, his
hair would have fallen out, he'd be depressed as hell, at death's door.
Today, he's happy, he's eating, he's not in pain. How long will it
last? We don't know."Hunter kept meditating, before he left for
Mexico, while he was there — with Bobbi helping to manage his days, get
him to treatments, make sure he was eating — and after his clinic
sojourn. "Eyes open, no chanting, just focusing on where the third eye
would be and tuning in to your spirit," he says. "The more you
meditate, the more effortless life seems, somehow." With his
yogis he contemplated God, reincarnation, spirituality. He looked over
his life, his childhood in Winnipeg — where like many kids in the late
1940s and early 1950s, he played behind the "fog trucks" spraying DDT,
which he thinks may have played a role in his cancer. (Donsbach
believes the "overall lifetime exposure to all the toxic chemicals in
the environment" is a major culprit.)Hunter says he "worshipped"
his French-Canadian mother, Augustine Gauvreau, who gave him a
typewriter when he was 15 — and concealed her origins from him. She was
part Huron Indian, something he didn't know when he wrote Occupied Canada with
Robert Calihoo. Published in 1991, the book recounted Calihoo's
struggle to find his roots, after being raised "white" — and won a
Governor General's award. After which Hunter discovered his own
ancestry. (In Red Blood, published in 1999, he described how, at 17, out winter camping, he nearly froze to death and was saved by a Huron Indian.)
Hunter's father was a source of pain. "My dad was away during (World
War II). He came home when I was 7, then he ran away. I was angry at
him forever. I eventually realized it's ridiculous, blaming your dad —
but you do."If he made mistakes along the way, he's not
admitting to any, not even his infamous trip to Thailand in the 1980s
to try out "paid sex." It resurfaced during his run for the Liberals in
a Toronto by-election in 2001, won by the NDP's Michael Prue. Hunter
looks back on the Thai trip as "getting something out of my system,"
and teaching him the value of love. Sex without love, he learned, is
not very interesting. "It was a stupid male thing," Bobbi says. "He would never think about doing such a thing, now." The
love of his life still loves him warts and all, after 31 years
together. Bobbi says her husband's confrontation with death has changed
him. "Bob has become more open to people in the last four or five
months. He's been a guru to a lot of people over the years, and now
he's reached a deeper level."Manifest, Hunter says, at the
Mexican clinic, where he hung out with other patients, "most of them
Americans, some who voted Republican" — not the sort who, in his
previous incarnation, he would have connected with. "I looked at them
as fellow souls." A huge shift for Hunter — and no doubt for the
Republicans, too. After spending Christmas at Hospital Santa
Monica, he and Bobbi returned on Jan. 8. (He took a leave from CITY-TV
in September and says the station has been "incredibly supportive.")
He's back at work, on the morning show and hosting Hunter's Gatherings on CablePulse 24, Thursdays from 9 to 10 p.m.As
for the lessons of the Mexican clinic and its strict diet and
supplement regimen, "I'm sticking to it. This living thing is kinda
cool."
Email your comments and experiences to: life@thestar.caAdditional articles by Judy Steed › Get the NEW Sunday paper! Save 50% now! |
