Please welcome Peter Darrow author of Wise Millennial
Peter Darrow will be awarding one copy of Wise Millennial, US only to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.
Wise Millennial
by Peter Darrow
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GENRE: Self-Help / Memoir
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BLURB:
In “Wise Millennial” (April 2019) Peter Noble Darrow asks Millennials to think deeply about their parents’ expectations for their lives and find their own paths, instead. Rather than aiming to reveal failings to grow up, or on the other hand, defensively praising his peers, Darrow chooses to speak to this audience on a deeper level—the book points millennials toward growth from the inside out. Darrow presents an even-keeled approach to helping his generation find meaning and purpose, accepting mistakes and learning from them along the way.
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EXCERPT:
“The situation is ominous.”
I will never forget those words.
“I have an idea,” he said, “but it’s risky and has never really been done
before. There is a special piece of machinery—the only one in the city—that
can recirculate his blood while on life support.”
Dad was already in a coma and not getting enough oxygen. The
machine in question performed extracorporeal membrane oxygenation—a
form of advanced life support that works like an artificial lung to oxygenate
the bloodstream. Trying this on Dad was a Hail Mary pass of sorts, since it
was incredibly risky for a patient this sick.
My family responded, “Great! Let’s give it a try. What floor is the machine
on?”
“Well, that’s the problem,” the doctor said slowly, averting his gaze. “It’s
at the Columbia University Medical Center on 168th Street, far uptown. We’d
have to transport him and just hope he survives the transport. There’s no
guarantee he will.”
The effort didn’t seem promising, but we were willing to take the risk.
We didn’t feel confident about his chances if we stayed and did nothing. But
while the doctors were prepping my dad for the transport, he started coding
again, right there in the hallway. The medical staff rushed him into a room
and barred anyone other than my stepmother from entering. Though my sister
and I waited helplessly outside, the door to his room was left ajar. I sneaked a peek.
It looked like either war triage or an alien abduction — cables and wires hung
all over the room, running from multiple devices to my father’s dying body.
Numerous electrical machines, displaying indecipherable data on their LED
screens, beeped and pinged and hummed. A half dozen nurses and doctors
hovered over my father and passed around different equipment like a game of speed chess.
While the frenzy swirled around her, my stepmom sat next to my
father’s bedside cheering him on. “Keep fighting, Peter! You can make it!
Keep rowing!”
After a treacherous five minutes that felt like an eternity, the medical
team managed to stabilize him once again. Should he actually make it
through, however, none of us knew what mental condition he would be in
long-term, if there even would be a long-term. But that was like making it to
the World Series; in the moment, we were just focused on the playoffs.
In 2001, my paternal grandmother died from lung cancer, and then in
2008 my father, Peter V. Darrow, was diagnosed with end-stage multiple
myeloma, a type of blood cancer that attacks the plasma cells, white blood
cells that fight infection and illness. Only three months later, my mother
was diagnosed with stage-one breast cancer. My mother’s treatment—a
lumpectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation—was ultimately successful, and
she’s in good health and high spirits today.
My father, on the other hand, battled his disease for four years. The first
moment he realized something was wrong was while he was rowing on the
ergomoter (indoor rower) at the gym. My dad loved to row; he first started
rowing in 1968 with Columbia’s lightweight rowing team. Around the time
he was diagnosed with cancer, he got his old college crew together again
to row the Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston. These old geezers who
hadn’t rowed in thirty years came together and started an annual tradition.
They rowed the Charles every year for about seven years, until he passed,
and then the guys continued the tradition in my dad’s honor for another five
years afterward.
That day at the gym while my dad was rowing on the erg, he felt pain
in his chest as if he had broken a rib. Tests later revealed a tumor the size of
a grapefruit in his chest cavity. Following surgery to remove the cancerous
mass, Dad underwent aggressive chemotherapy and radiation. Though he
went into remission, the cancer came back twice. The first time, he had a
stem-cell transplant using his own harvested stem cells. When the cancer
returned two years later, a second transplant used donor stem cells.
Normally doctors inject donor stem cells all at once, but in order to
reduce the chance of rejection or graft versus host disease, they planned
to try a radical new treatment of slowly reintroducing the T cells in stages.
Between the operation and the first round of T cell injections was about a
six-month period in which Dad could not get sick. But he did get sick. To this
day, I think what killed my father was that he wasn’t willing to take a break to
allow himself to recover—he was just back to business as usual. He went to
work and traveled when he should have been at home wearing a mask to
shield himself from germs.
When you have a stem-cell transplant, you have no immunity. You have
zero white blood cells, so you have no defense from the outside world. But
my father wasn’t the kind of guy who could just sit still and relax. When he
was about three weeks away from that first round of T cells, he developed
a bacterial infection, which quickly turned into pneumonia. A healthy person
could have taken antibiotics to help the body fight it off, but no antibiotic
known to man was strong enough for my dad in his condition. It was too late.
He first went into the hospital on a Wednesday, and by Sunday my family
was keeping vigil during his final hours.
After the second time my dad coded, the medical staff waited a short
while to ensure he remained stable. The transport between the two hospitals
was a delicate balancing act, given the volume of tubes and machines
keeping my dad alive, but the hospital team managed to get him downstairs
and into an ambulance, and then drove him to the hospital uptown where he
was hooked up to the ECMO machine.
We exhausted all our options, but in the end it wasn’t enough.
I entered the room where my dad was still hooked up to the machine
and had the hardest conversation I would ever have in my life: I had to say
goodbye to my father. I wondered what to say, knowing this would be the
last time I ever saw him. He was in a coma—could he actually hear me? I told
him how much I loved him and what a great dad he had been. I told him he
had raised two beautiful children who would continue to make him proud.
What else do you say? What else can you say? In that moment, I realized
how many life events he wouldn’t live to witness. Weddings, the birth of his
grandchildren—all of these future moments flashed in front of my eyes. It was
a crazy thing to feel. An out-of-body experience. The pain of that one-way
conversation will live with me forever.
I left the hospital and headed downtown to meet my mother for dinner.
She had been living in Minneapolis since she remarried, but she’d flown into
town to be with Meredith and me. At about a quarter to eight, while we were
eating our main course, my sister called.
“Dad just passed away.”
The sights and sounds of the restaurant around me faded away. All I
saw was my father in that hospital bed—the intubation tube down his throat,
the feeding tube up his nose, the IVs pierced into his arms, the various bodily
fluids, the desperate last moments before death. Those images are burned
onto my retinas, and I will never forget them.
My father was only sixty-two when he died. He was incredibly kind,
compassionate, and intelligent, and the most passionate man I ever met. He
worked as a partner in a major international law firm for nearly thirty years,
and his relentless dedication to his career made him extremely successful
and well-respected in his field. He certainly didn’t deserve to get cancer, but
he never complained. When I gave a eulogy at his funeral, one thing I said
was how incredibly impressed I was that, after their diagnoses, neither of my
parents ever asked, “Why me?” or, “Why is life so unfair?” Instead, they asked,
“Okay, what’s the next step?” They just stayed focused on the next hurdle
ahead of them. Their strength and courage inspired me and served as an
example to follow.
While I loved my father, our relationship was a complicated one. As his
son, I looked up to him for strength, stability, support, and moral guidance.
The millennial generation was born to baby boomers, who were themselves
raised by men who had served in World War II. America was a very different
place then, especially when it came to beliefs about child-rearing and
psychological development. Many men of that generation—my father and
his peers included—felt that in order to set an example for young boys, they
had to challenge us with emotional hardiness, or “tough love.” Some of the
dads I’ve known have displayed disappointment, anger, or lack of empathy
when their sons cried, as if showing any feelings were a sign of weakness.
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AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Peter N. Darrow is a Millennial, a native New Yorker, an entrepreneur, and an expert at learning from his mistakes. After earning an MBA in entrepreneurship from Babson College in 2014, Peter founded Darrow’s Farm Fresh restaurant in Union Square in NYC. He is the current founder of Veggie Dust, first ever vegetable seasoning for kids. A health and wellness entrepreneur with a passion for helping people, Peter has already seen much in the way of success and failure, and speaks to the challenges facing his generation, and dispels myths about what it’s like to supposedly “have it all.” Find out more about Peter at www.wisemillennial.com.
Links:
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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER CODE:
Peter Darrow will be awarding one copy of Wise Millennial, US only to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.
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