Nothing against Atrium, the daughter said. She just wanted her dad to be seen by a doctor who practices at a larger hospital in Cincinnati.
Fox, who lives in Monroe, remained loyal to Atrium.
“This place is more like a family,” he said after a recent radiation treatment at the Compton Center on the Atrium campus. “You don’t have to be big, or be located in a big city, to be a good hospital and receive good care. I don’t have one bad word to say about them.”
Fox said his Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA), a protein produced by the cells of the prostate gland, was elevated. His PSA rose from 4.0 to 4.5 during a three-month period. He said his PSA is 0.04.
His cancer is in remission.
His said two dark spots were detected on the left side of his prostate. He said the aggressiveness of prostate cancer is rated from 1 to 10.
His was an 8.
“That can’t be good news,” he remembers saying at the time.
Throughout the radiation treatments, Fox, 69, said he stayed positive. He had cancer. He wasn’t dead.
“I try to see the bright side of things,” he said. “It is what it is. You just have to do the best you can.”
Fox and his wife, Mary Jane, have two daughters — Jackie and Jill — and seven grandchildren.
He didn’t need any presents this Christmas. When you’re alive and a cancer survivor, who needs another tie?
“Family and friends are what matters,” he said. “Cars and houses aren’t a big deal anymore.”
Survivor takes second cancer diagnosis in stride
Jack Fox doesn’t look bad for a guy given three to six weeks to live. And that was nine years ago.
In 2001, Fox, then 60, was diagnosed with bile duct cancer. Doctors thought about removing the cancer from a portion of his liver, but his liver was so small, the surgery would have been deadly.
So they sewed him up, sent him home and told him to plan his funeral.
“It was a jolt,” his wife, Mary Jane Fox, said. “You don’t expect that.”
What happened next, the family said, was even more unexpected.
A few days later, Fox, who had his cancer surgery in Cincinnati, was seen by Dr. Mary Ellen Gaeke, a Middletown oncologist. The cancer, once expected to write Fox’s obituary, was deleted.
Because of regulations, Gaeke said she couldn’t discuss Fox’s medical history.
Still, others dubbed Jack Fox the “Miracle Man.”
“I like to think it was,” Fox said recently after receiving radiation treatments at the Compton Center on the Atrium Medical Center campus.
So when Fox, 69, was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer, and was told it was an extremely aggressive form, he wasn’t “all that excited.”
He was told prostate cancer, if caught early, is 95 percent curable, and he doesn’t think about the other 5 percent.
“I’m a positive person,” he said. “It didn’t bother me too bad. I beat it once.”
His wife, a longtime secretary in a doctor’s office, remembers her husband’s ultrasound, performed by Dr. David C. Miller. Early in the procedure, Miller said he needed additional biopsy plates.
“When you have cancer once, you prepare yourself,” Mary Jane Fox said.
Fox’s Prostate Specific Antigen level, once at 4.5, is 0.04. The cancer is in remission.
Fox 2, Cancer 0.
After what he’s been through — being told he had months, not years to live — he called prostate cancer “really nothing.”
Nothing, as in, life changing. Fox remembers being told once that his employer wasn’t pleased with his work. Understandably, he was upset.
He didn’t sleep that night.
If that happened today, his reaction would be much different.
“I’d be thankful I had a chance to do something wrong,” he said with a laugh.
Throughout the process, the cancer scare in 2001, and this year’s prostate cancer diagnosis, Jack and Mary Jane Fox have relied on their faith.
“You always have that to fall back onto,” he said.
His wife of 46 years added: “God gave us 10 more years with him. We get up every morning and thank God.”
Now, Jack Fox lives every day like it may be his last. He doesn’t want to share his death bed with regrets.
“You can either sit around and cry about it, and say, 'poor me,’ and all that stuff, or you can fight it,” he said. “It’s going to be what it’s going to be.”
Contact this reporter at (513) 705-2842 or rmccrabb@coxohio.com.
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