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I shaved my head because my buddy has lymphoma

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Contributed by: Brendan Leonard/YourHub.com on 7/2/2007

For Eric Lubbers' storyand photos of the Bald is Beautiful Event, click here.

To read YourHub.com blogger Mick Rule's account of how he lost almost an inch of hair for a good cause at the Bald is Beautiful event, click here.

This past April, I was walking down the greeting card aisle in my neighborhood grocery store, trying to find the "Cancer" section, knowing there wasn't one, but thinking there sure ought to be. "Get well soon" doesn't really cover it. What I wanted to say was something like, "Don't think for a second you can't beat it."

Hodgkin's lymphoma is a cancer that attacks the lymph system, as I learned in Jarrett's e-mail on April 21. My buddy has it, and he shouldn't. No one should get cancer, right? Before April, I didn't have much experience with cancer, except that I knew a lot of people got it, and I thought we should devote more money to finding out what causes it.

Now, I have a friend who's battling for his life. The situation was first described as "treatable," and in recent weeks, Jarrett's found out that he has both Hodgkin's and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is a very rare situation. His doctor is getting help from the Mayo Clinic's team of oncologists and haemotologists, and some other well-known lymphoma experts from the Harvard Medical Center and British Columbia. Jarrett's 27 years old -- he shouldn't have teams of people trying to figure out how to heal him so he can get on with his life.

Jarrett and I first started talking by the pencil sharpener in Mr. Voss' algebra class when I was a sophomore in high school and he was a freshman. The first thing we had in common was an almost fanatical devotion to rerun episodes of Welcome Back, Kotter(and later an almost fanatical devotion to Monty Python). After high school, Jarrett went to the University of Iowa and spent a large chunk of four years in different European countries, and we didn't see each other as much as we should have because I spent too much time in the bars of Cedar Falls, where I went to school at the University of Northern Iowa.

When Jarrett got married to Angie, I was in Idaho, doing a summer internship at the Idaho Falls Post-Register. I was a groomsman in the wedding back in Iowa, and I wanted to get them an original gift. The night before I left to drive back across Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska and Iowa, I made a sign that said "Congratulations, Angie and Jarrett," and stopped at several spots along the way and asked people to hold the sign so I could take their photo -- tourists, construction workers, guys in chicken suits, etc. The night before the wedding, I traced my route on a taped-together series of maps ripped out of my Rand McNally Road Atlas, and taped the photos of the people holding the sign next to their respective cities. Angie always assures me they're trying to find a way to hang this "gift" in their house, but I know she's just being nice. It's really the thought that counts, not the execution.

Jarrett actually called me the week before I got married to let me know that he was very sorry, but his chemotherapy wasn't going to allow him to travel to Utah to my wedding. I thought it was ridiculous that he was even worried about missing the wedding, and I told him so. Fighting lymphoma is pretty damn important in my book. It sure as hell trumps a wedding.

In May, in one of the mass e-mail updates Angie sent everyone about Jarrett's fight, she mentioned that Jarrett had shaved his head in anticipation of losing his hair. His younger brother, Nolan, also shaved his head so Jarrett wouldn't be the only one with no hair. I thought this was fantastic. I decided I would do the same, only after the wedding reception we held near the end of June in my wife's hometown.

You can't really do much for your buddy when he's fighting cancer 900 miles away, aside from offering encouragement, cards, and kind words and gestures. Where I come from, you do things all the way or you don't do them at all.

It just happened that the Rock Bottom Foundation's Bald Is Beautiful event was six days after my reception, so I figured, why not? I raised $115, mostly at my office, for the Andre Center for Breast Cancer Education and Navigation, then went and got my six inches of hair publicly shorn on June 29 at the Rock Bottom Brewery on the 16th Street Mall.

Then I sent Jarrett a photo of a newly bald me, asking if I could be added to the team. I received a response Sunday affirming my new teammate status. This is how we fight lymphoma: An almost fanatical devotion to optimism, followed by a lot of medical stuff. And shaving our heads.
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