Vulnerability is strength”

Three years ago, I became an English teacher at Citrus Ridge. In our department, there was this cool guy that went against the norms of the classroom. He had the lights dimmed. He had aromatherapy plugged in the room. He loved teaching poetry. I learned poetry is his thing. Each day and for every class period, the students meditate before he began teaching. I was the new kid on the block. I had no clue what I was doing, but Greg welcomed me in with open arms. He brought me books that I could use for instruction and told me his door was always open if I needed a listening ear.

I really didn’t know how to feel his teaching method. I’d been in corporate America for over 25 years. If you buck the system, you are written up, and life was made difficult. During this interview, I learned, at one point in Greg’s life, he too was in the corporate world.

After flourishing in high school, Greg went to college and graduated with a marketing degree. He wanted to start his own record company or manage a band. He managed local bands for a few years after college. After those few years, Greg entered corporate America working for a finance company. The work was not meaningful for him. He did not like the cut throat word of corporate America. He said, “I never fit in the holes just right. I was not about throwing people under the bus for the expense of others.” His wife, at the time, was a teacher. She encouraged him to look into teaching as a career. Just as he did in high school, Greg flourished as a teacher. Being new, I thought it was pretty cool that he went outside the box, and I loved the fact that he never wavered on the things that he loved. If he was adamant or passionate about it, he would stand firm in his belief.

As the school year rolled by, I notice Greg was absent more often, and there would be a substitute filling in for him. One day, I asked a colleague if he was ok. I learned that Greg was battling colon cancer. March is Colon Cancer Awareness Month. I wanted to know more of who is Greg Guy and how has life been for Greg after hearing the dreaded words “you have cancer.”

Greg Guy’s adoptive mom is a teacher. He grew up listening to stories from his adoptive mom and her assistant teacher discussing having to clean up vomit when students would occasionally get sick inside the classroom. Other teachers in the school would call on them to assist cleaning up vomit because they couldn’t fathom having to clean it up. Greg always told himself that if he ever became a teacher that he wouldn’t mind being the one the others called on to clean up the vomit. “But God, please don’t let me have to be the teacher that has to clean up poop. I can handle anything but poop.” Greg said that God has a sense of humor. Instead of having to clean up student’s poop, it would be his own poop that he would have to clean. For the last two years, he has to wear a colostomy bag and empty out his own poop. How did he get here?

December 2017, over the Christmas break, Greg noticed blood in his stool. Approximately a month later, it happened again. Greg made an appointment with the doctor at the employee’s free clinic. The primary physician referred him to have a colonoscopy because his grandfather passed away from colon cancer. It was scheduled for March (2018). When he went for the colonoscopy, it didn’t last more than a minute. The doctor couldn’t finish because the tumor was extremely large and near the bottom.

May 2018, Greg heard the words that officially changed his life. When he heard the word cancer, Greg had to process the words that were spoken. For the doctors, it is an everyday routine process, a business procedure. For him, his life was about to change forever. He would aches, unimaginable pains, surgery and surgery, procedure after procedure. That day, Greg was diagnosed with stage 4 rectal cancer. Not only did he have cancer in his rectum, he had tumors in his colon, three in his lungs, and one in his liver.

His cancer treatment was Moffitt Cancer Center. He gives his praises to them. At one point, he had at least 12-15 doctors at various points. There were doctors for radiation, gastro, general surgery, and etc. The doctors would gather to discuss his case before they would even have to perform surgery on him. Since 2018, Greg has had approximately 6 major surgeries. One of the last ones was the placement of a colostomy bag.

When a person has this surgery, a bag is attached to your belly to reroute fecal matter from leaving your body. Since the body can no longer process feces through the colon, this is the alternate procedure that must be done. Instead of feces leaving your bottom, it is emptied into the colostomy bag. Some people wear them for a few months, and others will wear them for the rest of their lives. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/procedures/22100-colostomy

Greg has worn a colostomy bag for the last two years. He had to learn proper care for the bag. The bag has a wax ring that holds the bag onto the body and drains out the bottom. The bag can be up worn up to seven days, but he does no more than three days. There is charcoal filter that allows air to run out, but the air is unscented. Since the bags have to be changed at any given moment, the person has to be very strategic when planning events and carry extras bags.

It has impacted his life mentally and physically. Greg states it is also psychological because “you have a bag that is attached to you. This is how you have to go to the restroom.” When the bag gets full, it has to be emptied. He has to get on his knees and empty it out. The bag doesn’t care where he is. There are lots of times that he been in a public restroom and have to empty it out.

Being vulnerable is not something that has been easy for Greg. There has been days that he would press his way and come to work. He would be in pain, but he would be insistent on being at school. He learned it would be easier to let the students know immediately. “Hey. Today isn’t a good day. If you work with me, I will work with you. We can get through the day together.” I asked him if the students always cooperated. He said it would always be one or two that didn’t. Typically, it would be a student that had issues going on at home. Even though he was in pain, Greg said that he would rather the student take it out on him than going home bitter and angry.

One of his most vulnerable moments was a day when he was at chemotherapy. The bag exploded. He was “embarrassed and humbled.” Here he was at the cancer center, holding the chemo pole as the chemo was still going through his body, kneeling on the floor, and having cleaning up his poop, apologizing to those around him. Talk about vulnerability. Greg said through his vulnerability, “I have strength.” In part two, Greg will give us words that will carry us through to help give us strength.