Speaking with...

Fr. Colum Power

Fr. Colum Power was born on the
14th of September, Feast of the
Triumph of the Cross, in the year
1965, in Cork, Ireland, and raised
in a profoundly Catholic family.  He
is the fifth of nine brothers.  In the late seventies and eighties he drifted away from the Catholic faith he grew up
in, until at the age of 31, in 1996,
he had a strong experience of God that dramatically changed his life.  In that same year he felt the call to the
priesthood.  Seven months later he
responded to that call by consecrating himself as a religious in the Servants of the Home of the Mother.  On the 20th of December 2003 he was ordained a priest.  A few months later he made his perpetual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, along with a fourth vow to defend the Eucharist, to defend the Honor of Our Lady especially in the privilege of her Virginity, and a commitment to dedicate his life to the conquest of the youth for Christ, and was sent with a community to the United States to do apostolic work in the recently founded Ave Maria University.  Shortly before completing three years of work there he was suddenly diagnosed with a form of leukemia that brought him to the brink of death. 

Fr. Colum, how did the disease manifest itself? 
I travelled to Spain in mid-May 2006, having completed the academic semester in Ave Maria University, to spend a couple of months with my community.  I already felt sick.  I had always enjoyed robust health and had never spent a day in the hospital in my life and hadn't visited a doctor in many years.  But at that time I had persistent fever and flu symptoms that I couldn't shake off.  I also experienced a tiredness which I attributed to three things: first, to the fact that I was now forty years old, and was getting old; second, to the fact that I had lived like an idiot from the age of fourteen to the age of thirty-one, and this was the price I had to pay; and thirdly, to this tenacious fever that wouldn't go away.  Later on, a nurse scolded me for not having gone to the doctor earlier; her theory was that when it comes to health and sickness men enter immediately into denial, pretend nothing's wrong and refuse to seek help until it's too late. 

Is that how it was in your case? 
No.  I can say with total honesty that it never occurred to me for a second that I might be seriously ill.  I did feel under the weather but I just didn't give the fact much attention.  It was not a question of self-deception, conscious or unconscious.  I simply felt a little sickly, but it never crossed my mind that I might have, for example, leukemia. 

You returned to the States; how was the illness discovered? 
 I was quite busy there with apostolic activities.  In the space of a few weeks I was scheduled to have two summer-camps for boys in different States and a pilgrimage.  I was to be the chaplain in all of these activities, and to use one way of putting things, I was too busy to be sick. 
There was one bad moment in the first camp when I could scarcely breathe, and throughout the camp I was unable to participate in the sports.  In the second camp I just got worse and worse.  One doctor told me afterwards that I hadn't consciously registered the gravity of the illness because it's evolution had taken place over the space of three or four months, and that if it had happened in the space of just one week I would not have hesitated in seeking a doctor or a hospital, because I would have experienced and observed a dramatic collapse of health. 

What was it that eventually sounded the alarm and set things in motion? 
Two days before the end of the second camp, I got up in the morning as usual and was shaving in front of the mirror when I noticed that I had a cloud in the center of my right eye.  At this point I felt quite bad in general, very weak and tired and with aches and pains, but the loss of sight was the red light.  I remember saying to myself, "Whoa, you don't play around with your eyesight!", and I decided to go that very day to see a doctor.  Later on, speaking with the Grady family on whose land we were running the camp, I asked them if they knew a doctor I could go and see.  They telephoned a doctor they knew but he couldn't see me until the following Monday.  That day was Friday (the 28th of July), so I said: "Okay, let's leave it until Monday".  I walked out of the house but hadn't gone three steps when I turned around suddenly in my tracks, went back into the house and said: "Monday is too late; it has to be today, I have to see an eye doctor today".

Any idea why that reaction? 
 To this day I don't understand why I said that, but I remember I felt a sudden sense of urgency and conviction.  It made sense to wait until Monday, but I felt...  I don't know, it's not something I can explain. 

Did you get to see an ophthalmologist that day? 
Yes, that same afternoon.  He performed the usual tests on me.  Then he asked me: "Do you have diabetes?"  I said, "No, not as far as I know".  Then he said: "Well, this is very strange.  You have a large pre-retinal haemorrhage in the center of your right eye, and I have never seen that in anyone under seventy years of age - and you're only forty - who didn't have diabetes". 
Then he said: "On Monday you're going to see an excellent doctor, a friend of mine, who is going to give you a complete check-up looking especially for signs of diabetes".  Then, as an afterthought, he added: "On your way out just cross the road to Homesdale Hospital and give them a blood sample for them to analyse".  I did this and returned to the camp.  The following morning at around 10.00 o'clock I received a phone call from this ophthalmologist: "Drop everything and make your way immediately to the hospital, to the Emergency Room.  They're waiting for you.  The results of your analysis have come back and your blood counts are totally out of whack". 

How did you react to that? 
It was the first scare.  When a doctor speaks like that, he's not normally joking.  When they send you to the Emergency Room because there's something wrong, let's just say you realise it's not a case of the flu.  I drove immediately to the hospital and was waiting for a short time before they realised who I was.  Then, with great haste, much efficiency and affection, they brought me to a room and put me on a stretcher.  You could tell there was something serious in the air.  A doctor came into the room with two medical students and she said to me: "Well, what's wrong with you?"  I answered: "I don't know; isn't that your job?"  I laughed at my little joke and she responded somewhat firmly: "I mean, describe to me your symptoms".  I told her about the fatigue, the fever, certain pains I had experienced, an itchy rash of pink spots on my legs that I attributed to bugs from sleeping in the tent, which turned out to be another symtom of leukemia. 

How did they tell you what you had?
She asked me several times if I had had any injuries, open wounds or cuts, and how my body had reacted to them.  At first I said I hadn't, and then I recalled that a few days earlier, while returning from hearing confessions and making my way to the chapel to celebrate the Eucharist, I was suddenly overwhelmed again by a sensation of exhaustion and had difficulty breathing as I made my way up a slight hill.  So I laid down face downwards resting my forehead on my forearm to rest, but my nose started bleeding.  I was falling asleep when I noticed and turned on my back to stop the bleeding.  The doctor winced visibly and said: "You were lucky; if you had continued sleeping, you may well have bled to death right there".  My platelets were at 6,000.  The normal level is somewhere between 150,000 and 400,000.  It was then that she said to me: "It looks like you have leukemia".  That was the moment of the first explicit diagnosis. 

Were you aware of the consequences of what you'd just heard?
I had little or no clue about medicine but I did know that leukemia was a "big word" that denoted a serious disease that you can die from.  I received the news calmly, perhaps because one's psychology assimilates that kind of information gradually.  I'm sure I didn't fully capture in that moment what lay ahead and I was busy with thoughts about the camp of boys, about how to inform my superiors, my community, my family in Ireland and two close friends who live in the United States. 

Did you have any immediate attitude?  In the first twenty-four hours I had to form a radical, fundamental attitude towards the sickness which afterwards hardly changed. 

Were there critical moments? 
That weekend I had two or three tough experiences that seemed a little like a death sentence.  The type of leukemia I had attacks primarily the eyes and the lungs.  On one occasion, in the Mercy Hospital, Scranton, I had a breathing crisis and the room was suddenly filled with nurses and doctors.  I was given an oxygen mask.  They decided to take me to the Intensive Care Unit.  The nurse cried as she told me. 
Also, during that first night they gave me the first blood transfusion.  At this point I was exhausted.  My body reacted badly and I rejected the transfusion, vomiting violently.  They had to interrupt the process.

Did you at any point experience fear? 
I'm not a genius but nor am I altogether stupid.  I realised that if I had leukemia and my body was rejecting the first blood transfusion, well... things were not looking good. 
Throughout the entire saga I experienced physical fear many times.  But only on two occasions, both during the first twenty-four hours, did I experience the close threat of terror, a psychological and spiritual fear of the unknown, fear of the blackness of death.  The first time was when I rejected the blood transfusion and the second was when I woke up the following morning and noticed that I was now partially blind in both eyes, having had another large pre-retinal haemorrhage this time in the center of the left eye.  This was a moment of physical darkness but also of psychological darkness.  But it did not overwhelm me. 

How did you get over it? 
I see clearly that the christian life, more specifically, in my case, the religious life, had prepared me to live this situation.  I had spent the previous ten years turning always, immediately and often, every day, to the Blessed Virgin.  So on this occasion, I just did it again.  Fr. Rafael, our Founder, often spoke to us about St. Francis Xavier and about how, whenever he would find himself in a crisis situation he would say: "Virgin Mary, are You not meant to help me?  Well, help me!"  I don't mean to say that this precise phrase came to my mind in those moments, but certainly it was for me a common practice, an interior spiritual custom, a need of my soul, to turn to Our Lady in every moment of trial and temptation.  So, as a kind of spiritual reflex that's what I did, and as always, She came to my aid and I recovered peace and strength. 
Another thought that I often clung to was that one day, sooner or later, I would have to die.  On the Sunday morning I received the Anointing of the Sick, made a general confession of all the sins of my life (that I could remember), and celebrated the Eucharist.  I saw and felt that I was at peace with God, and thought to myself: "Well, if my turn has come to present myself before God, right in the middle of a summer-camp, proclaiming his Word, fulfilling his will, I can't really complain.  If this had happened to me fifteen years ago, it would've been a lot worse".

How did the doctors react to your attitude of faith? 
I was greatly helped by one conversation I had with Dr. Barsigian, the head of the team that was treating me.  He told me about a young woman (39 years old) who had arrived two weeks earlier to the hospital, was placed in the same room in the same bed, with the same illness I had, and had died.  He told me precisely what I had, explained to me the survival statistics, the gravity of the illness, how certain defective cells suddenly begin to divide and multiply and invade the entire bloodstream causing a kind of interior civil war in one's body.  He told me that the leukemia type I had affected especially the eyes and the lungs.  Most importantly, he explained everything not in a cold or clinical way, but with much human warmth and affection.  As he was speaking, I came to the realisation that this sickness was much bigger than me, that from the physical point of view I could do nothing to fight it, absolutely nothing.  And that God was bigger than me but bigger also than the disease, and that things were going to turn out however He wanted them to.

What did the doctor say? 
He was looking at me closely as he spoke, and at one point he asked me straight out: "How are taking all of this?" I remember feeling puzzled myself and even a little embarrassed at how calmly I was receiving it all.  My reaction seemed strange even to me and I supposed that it must have seemed even more so to him.  I could tell that he was surprised but since I knew he was a man of faith, I said to him: "There's nothing I can do.  I'm in your hands and in God's".  He totally agreed. 

Did you at any moment lose your peace?  
I had my ups and downs, moments in which I cannot say precisely that I was "happy", but I always had peace, always.  I never lost that peace in the depths of my soul.  Nor did I ever lose my submission to the will of God, which was not a matter of passively tolerating but of actively trusting.  I knew that God was looking after me, as I know it now, as I have known it from the very first moment that I let myself be found by Him. I knew that He knows all things, that He can do all things, that He loves me, that He is my Father.  This was not solely an intellectual attitude but an experiential one, that embraces my whole person. 

At first they did not detect the exact type of leukemia you had; how did that happen? 
I spent a month in the Mercy Hospital, Scranton, Pennsylvania, receiving the first treatment of chemotherapy; induction, they call it.  Then I was transferred to the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, where I would continue the treatment.  I went there because that is where Ave Maria University is located, where I work, and I thought that between one session and another of chemotherapy I might be able to maintain some minimal level of activity.  But my diagnosis was immediately changed.  I had been told that the leukemia I had was of the less malignant type, the most "benign" of all, in fact, and that my survival chances were up to seventy-five or eighty percent.  In the Mayo Clinic, however, new tests revealed that there was an anomaly, a duplication of the abnormality in my chromosones that might indicate nothing but that might also change everything.  Dr. Rivera, head of the medical team in charge of my case at the Clinic, spent a weekend investigating a discovered that what I had was an extremely rare sub-type of leukemia, with only eight previous cases recorded in all of medical history worldwide, all eight of whom had died.  None of them had even responded to the first phase of chemotherapy.  In other words, all had died almost instantly, and this was what I had; an extremely aggressive and malignant leukemia. 
The survival possibilities went down, therefore, to about thirty-five percent, and I would require sessions of chemotherapy plus total body irradiation and finally a bone marrow transplant, to have the best chance of recovery.  This is the most total and aggressive cancer treatment available.  It meant that I had to look for a bone marrow donor. 

 What are your thoughts on this? 
I see in all of this that life engenders life, as death engenders death.  The culture of death engenders death.  When my parents married, my father was thirty-two years old and my mother thirty-one.  Ten years later they had nine children, no twins and no girls.  This was a hugely important factor because it significantly increased my chances of survival, because there was a greater possibility of a compatible donor.  The doctors and nurses have repeatedly told me that this was the most crucial factor of the entire process; the fact that my brother's bone marrow was perfectly compatible.  I give thanks to God for that, and thanks to my parents for their generosity and openness to life, and thanks to my brother. 

Can you describe your condition when you came out of the critical phase and left the hospital? 
The treatment takes you on a rollercoaster.  On several occasions throughout the process I had to recollect myself psychologically and spiritually by retreating into silence and solitude in order to assimilate and adapt.  I know that this caused suffering for those closest to me because they wanted to help.  They had to undergo something of what Our Lady suffered because they could only help me with prayer and affection, which certainly sustained and consoled me a lot.  I was enveloped by a wave of prayer and love that I could often almost feel.
 
Would you say that you underwent a period of depression? 
Certainly I understand the question because I see I may have given that impression, but I'm not sure because I never really felt sad.  I was often cranky, although never with God.  Impatient, irritable, nervous when in company, yes.  I don't know if this was due to the illness, the weakness, to my bad character, but I did feel the need to be alone.  I found communication enormously difficult.  I would ask people simply to pray, pray, pray and I myself prayed and prayed and prayed, and left myself in the hands of God.  Now, in hindsight, I see that a sickness like that along with the treatment it requires, involves entering a physical, psychological and spiritual tunnel, and that it takes prayer, effort and time to climb out of it and to recover one's spark and zest for life.  At this point I feel I have left that tunnel behind and am ready to live, and ready to die.  Whatever God wants. 

What effect has this experience of suffering had on you? 
 I see that the whole experience has "domesticated" and softened me a little and I have a healthy fear of ever losing that.  The price may seem high but when the prize is union with Jesus Christ and identification with Him, no price is too high.  Suffering has enriched me a lot as a person and as a priest and I hope with all my heart that I never lose that.  I give thanks to God for my faith because with faith everything is abundantly meaningful. I am immensely thankful to my family, to my brother Brendan, to all the members of the Home of the Mother and the community of Ave Maria University who loved and prayed for me, to all my doctors and nurses.  And I cannot end this without expressing my special thanks to my Superior, Fr. Felix, who interrupted his doctoral studies in Rome to fly to the United States and was at my side throughout the whole Calvary of tubes and needles from the beginning to the end.  His generosity, friendship, closeness, make me feel proud to be a Servant of the Home of the Mother.

©HM Magazine No. 142 May/June 2008