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Earlier in his life, Joe was a physics scholar who used equations and measurements to make sense of the world. Today he is a poet who relies on words. He lives in rural Alaska in a log home he built by hand. He has no e-mail, television, or indoor plumbing. “My house is small, and I don’t want it cluttered with a lot of stuff,” Joe says. “I want my silence.”

This pure and elemental life sustained Joe in health. But when Joe was diagnosed with a brain tumor in the summer of 2009, he was drawn into a modern and complex world where medicine, science, and physics intertwine. He was treated at the Precision Radiotherapy Center in West Chester, Ohio, with a technology that was developed and is delivered with the help of physicists. During 33 sessions spread over a period of several weeks, a highly sophisticated linear accelerator directed intensity-modulated radiation therapy with daily image guidance to Joe’s tumor.

Dr. Jessica Guarnaschelli, a radiation oncologist at Precision Radiotherapy Center and the Brain Tumor Center at the University of Cincinnati Neuroscience Institute, oversaw the radiation treatments that targeted the part of Joe’s brain tumor that could not be removed during conventional neurosurgery. Margie Gerena-Lewis, M.D., a neuro-oncologist at the UC Brain Tumor Center, oversaw his simultaneous chemotherapy treatments.

Joe is keenly aware of the contrast between his of-the-earth lifestyle and the advanced technologies that give him a fighting chance to stay alive. “In a couple of hours I’m going to be lying under a machine that’s computer-controlled,” Joe mused on a late-summer morning at a brother’s home in Northern Kentucky. “Had that machine not existed, had this been the 1950s, I probably would have five months to live. Right now, I could live for many years.”

He marveled at his modern chemotherapy regimen: an anti-nausea pill followed by a tablet of Temodar. “It’s like taking an aspirin; it’s no big deal. And I don’t feel nauseated. I’m OK, and then I go up there to West Chester and they do their [radiation] thing and I feel nothing and I go home. I can’t complain about what computers do. They’re powerful tools.”

Joe, born in Cincinnati, majored in physics at Xavier University and earned a master’s degree in physics from the University of Alaska. He settled north of Fairbanks and eventually made poetry his life’s work. He is today a nationally recognized poet whose poems have been published and read on National Public Radio’s Prairie Home Companion. His books include A Winter on Earth, The Man Who Ordered Perch, and A Curb in Eden.

How does a physicist become a poet?

“Physics and poetry are not that far apart,” Joe explained. “They certainly weren’t in the Middle Ages. It was only after the Enlightenment and Age of Reason that we re-categorized science as separate from poetry. Philosophy was part of science in the time of Isaac Newton. I went into physics because I was always in love with poetry. It had to do with the stars, the moon, astronomy, and telescopes.

“I was never in love with the scientific method,” Joe continued. “Some people really are; they love that apprehension of reality, and I appreciate that. Mine was a little more blended, I guess. I did pretty well in physics, I enjoyed it. I decided not to go on [in physics] because I wanted to live in the woods. I wanted to build my house and write poems and see where that went. It’s an unconventional choice. It’s not very lucrative. You don’t make much money doing that. So I’ve had to do a lot of other things to support the work that I considered primary, a lot of different kinds of jobs. I worked for the highway department, and I also worked as a photo tech and draftsman and illustrator for scientific magazines and journals, right before computers took that all away and ended the era of the drafting board.”

Joe was immersed in writing poems and his memoir when, during a summer trip in central Kentucky with an old friend, he suffered a seizure. He was taken by ambulance to the University of Kentucky Medical Center in Lexington, where he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He underwent surgery and awaited the results of his biopsy.

“I thought a lot about death,” Joe recalled. “I thought a lot about what my life had been, about how I chose my friends, even about my animals, what would happen to them. It took five days to get the results of the biopsy. That was five days of agony. That was really hard. Any time the phone rang I thought it was going to be some kind of death sentence. Maybe I’m over-dramatizing it, but this just hit me out of the blue. It was unreal, it was hallucinogenic.”

The tumor was a grade 3 astrocytoma, a type of glioma. The Kentucky neurosurgeon removed all but about 5 percent of the tumor. The remainder was in a deeper part of Joe’s brain, in an “eloquent” area that was involved with the muscular function of Joe’s right arm. Even so, Joe has lost some sensory function, especially in his right hand. “But it’s certainly worth a trade,” Joe said. “You have to get that mass out of there.”

For a month after surgery, he recalled, “the only dreams I had were of tumors, medicine, and pills.”

Joe recuperated at the home of a brother and sister-in-law, Phil and Nancy, in rural Northern Kentucky, in a pastoral area where the Enzweiler family first settled after emigrating from Germany. The stone house was built in 1860. “When this home was built, people died of smallpox, cholera, measles,” Joe said. “Children were buried side by side with their parents, having died within two years of each other. You see it in the cemeteries. You think about the emotional suffering.”   

Joe also had ongoing support from a second brother and sister-in-law, Steve and Patty, who also live in Northern Kentucky.

In Dr. Guarnaschelli, Joe has found a doctor who is both competent and kind. “I’m very happy to have Guarnaschelli, because she has a compassionate healing touch and she’s extremely professional as well,” Joe said. “She answers my questions with a great deal of grace and integrity. We talk about my health. We talk a little about poetry. Every time I talk to her I start to cry because I talk about other things. There’s always a box of tissue nearby.”

Joe’s aggressive, post-surgical treatment consisted of chemotherapy seven days a week and radiation five days a week over a period of six and a half weeks. And while the technology has maximized his chances of long-term survival, the symmetry of his life is also working in his favor. Joe is secure in the knowledge that his life has been well lived.

“Guarnaschelli said that with my attitude and physical health, I’m an ideal patient,” Joe said. “A lot of people survive cancer of all kinds, so I plan on being one of them and getting back to finishing my memoir and my animals and my friends.

“I hope that when they take a look at this, with the followup MRI, all the aggressive treatment will show that the tumor is not just reduced, but the cancerous cells are going, going, gone. And if they are, I’ll be happy. And if they aren’t, I’ll be happy in any case about life. That’s one of the things I realized. I realized, too, that I’m not a wimp, that I’m not a person who panics. I have no regrets. And that’s a real good thing to realize about your life. There are certain things I might have done differently, had I had another chance – the hurts one caused, the normal regrets one has.”

Back home in Alaska, Joe is refining the sixth draft of a 400-page memoir, a project three years in the making. An inevitable consequence of his diagnosis, he also lives with “a very, very chastened attitude toward life – not that I feel I was arrogant before, but when you face this kind of challenge it changes you.

“You re-prioritize. In the way that colors have value, the sunrise, humor, and being with old friends have a changed value now. It’s not about seizing the day. That’s a state of panic. I don’t have to seize the day because I might fall over dead tomorrow. But it’s important to acknowledge and not let things go unfinished. I’ve noticed that you often think you’ll get back to things, but you really don’t. So I do things now.” 

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Hope Story Disclaimer – This story describes an individual patient’s experience.
Because every person is unique, individual patients may respond to treatment in different ways. Outcomes are influenced by many factors and may vary from patient to patient.