The Truly Unusual Little Episode in which Hoda Kotb, Cyndi Lauper, and Sara Bareilles Unwittingly Conspired to Save my Life

Sorry about the convoluted nature of this post…but there’s a payoff when threads tie together that challenges some of the most tightly written Seinfeld episodes…promise!

Cyndi

Anybody who really knows me knows that I have been a huge Cyndi Lauper fan since her emergence in the early days of MTV. Yes, I did my share of head-banging with Def Leppard and Quiet Riot back in those days, new-waving with Duran Duran, arena-rocking with Journey, et. al. But this 15-year old boy had a ridiculously oversized “She’s So Unusual” poster on his bedroom wall and played that LP along with Cyndi’s previous rockabilly band outing “Blue Angel” until, as they used to say, the needle wore out the records. There was something special about her voice, talent, and quirky passion that appealed to me much more than the otherwise often banal music landscape of the early 80s. I was lucky enough to see her in concert on the original “Fun Tour” at Cleveland’s Blossom Music Center in 1984 and to have recorded the “Live at the Houston Summit” (of all foreshadowy places) concert off the radio that year, a cassette tape I still have. I've always kept up with her discography through multiple format changes over the decades, LPs to CDs to digital. “True Colors” came out in college, “A Night To Remember” in medical school, "Hat Full of Stars" alternating with "Nevermind" as I moved from Cleveland to Galveston in '93; each subsequent album takes me to a specific time and place. 

In the summer of 2013, barely a month before the seizure that started The Sickness, Charlotte and I saw Cyndi live in Houston at the House of Blues on the “She’s So Unusual” 30th Anniversary Tour. Nothing like seeing a true talent live on stage to create a 2nd Generation fan for life. We both loved the show and I was thrilled to share this time with my daughter.

The Rainbow Connection

Now as a pediatrician in Galveston, Texas, I have worked closely with our local children’s oncology camp, The Rainbow Connection, both as a member of the Board of Directors doing year-round fundraising to keep the organization going, as well as serving as the Camp Physician every summer for the past 10 years so the kids can just be kids and enjoy camp, forgetting about their diagnosis and illness for a week…but with a doctor on standby “just in case.” Another part of my involvement in The Rainbow Connection is maintaining the website, Facebook page, and planning some of the multimedia used at camp each year. I’m always listening for the latest and greatest inspirational tune to add to our extensive camp soundtrack that gets the kids pumped up and encouraged to be brave and try new things.

Sara

Sara Bareilles hit my radar so solidly into the digital age of music, that like many I owned her first hit single around 2007, the infectious “Love Song,” as an iTunes/Starbuck’s Free Song of the Week. How amusing when returning to iTunes to buy the whole album to find it titled “Little Voice.” Like Cyndi’s, Sara's is hardly a “little” voice and similarly captured my attention with her passion and talent. iTunes has certainly been Sara's friend, seeming to always push any of her new material to the front page, where with such simplicity I’ve clicked each of her subsequent releases into my collection, no needle on the record necessary.

The Sickness

Of course this entire series of blog posts or facebook notes was inspired by my own cancer diagnosis in August 2013. I had surgery and treatment for a brain tumor in September 2013, and had been recovering wonderfully in every way while under very close medical surveillance for complications or recurrence. Last spring, anticipating attending the upcoming 2014 Rainbow Connection 30^th Anniversary Camp not just as the Camp Physician, but also as a patient myself, who needed and wanted to be able to forget about my diagnosis and “just be a kid” for a week, Sara’s 2013 song “Brave” was, for me, clearly the Camp Song of the Year. I’d already been playing this song on endless loop as motivation for myself…and I knew it had to be the song at the top of the rock wall for the kids to show us how big their brave is as they leapt down the zip line. Indeed, the song became part of Rainbow Connection musical canon and also punctuated the camp's 30th Birthday Week-in-Review Slide Show.

Unfortunately the sickness continued, requiring an additional surgery just a month after camp, in August 2014. For the second time, I had been recovering from brain surgery quickly and fully, until very abruptly on a mid-September day I became critically ill with an infection-related complication and was hospitalized in the ICU at MD Anderson in Houston. I recall virtually nothing about those first few days, as my brain-infected, sedation-infused mind operated wholly outside normal boundaries. I’ve been told I was confused, combative, at times seeming not to even recognize my closest family and friends who had dropped everything and mobilized to visit me from all over the country. This was some serious shit and I was drowning in it quickly. Nothing was reaching in and I was barely reaching out. Then…

The Song ("Truly Brave")

In honor of National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month (September), Hoda Kotb of the Today Show, a cancer survivor herself, had created an amazing music video with some kids from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and some very talented musical artists. While visiting me in the hospital, my sister clicked a link posted by our Camp Director on the Rainbow Connection facebook page to the Today Show video and it started playing in my room. Somewhere, from the darkest depths of my illness, during its deepest inescapable, surreal cave of disoriented hypnagogic state, something that should have made virtually no sense whatsoever made perfect sense at just the perfect time, to just the exact person who could understand and need it most of all. Me.

An IV dripping…a hospital monitor beeping…Cyndi singing “True Colors”…no wait, that’s Sara singing “Brave”….kids giggling at the top of the zip line showing how big their brave is…there was nothing that could have spoken louder or clearer to me at that moment. I needed to be truly brave. I needed to wake up. Get better. I’ve got kids to raise. I’ve got a wife to love. I’ve got patients to care for. I’ve got camp next year. I’ve got stuff to do. I am not finished. I am smiling ear to ear and crying in my obtunded unresponsive sleep. 

WAKE UP!!!

YouTube link if video not playing inline above:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9fMNNsdPjU

So I did, and here I am.