Cancer: A word that makes a man take note

By Gracie Bonds Staples
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 07/25/07

The man had spent nearly his entire life on the move and at the center of attention.

If he walked into a room, he owned it. If he talked — and he talked a lot — he led the conversation. The more places he had to be, the better.

But Warren Bruno was forced to take a moment to consider what mattered in his life when he heard a single word: Cancer.

"Everything just kind of stops when you hear that," he said.

Bruno was a married father of four, a mover and shaker who sat on many committees and boards. He was an advocate and lobbyist for the public schools and local restaurant and bar owners.

He was best known, perhaps, at Atkins Park, the Virginia Highland restaurant he'd owned since 1983.

For fun, he went sailing or hot air ballooning. He was always in motion.

But in the winter of 2004, Bruno noticed some swelling in his neck that wouldn't go away. He made an appointment to see a specialist but before he could get in, there was more swelling — under his arm, in his groin and throat.

Tests showed he had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system.

Even though the cancer had spread to 80 percent of his body, doctors offered Bruno hope. Yet the thought of being sick horrified him. One night, lying in bed with his wife, Sandra Spoon, he cried.

"It was a watershed moment," he recalled. "My whole life had changed."

But he wouldn't know how much until his second round of chemotherapy treatments.

Over the next six months, in eight-hour, three-days-a-week sessions, Bruno got a lesson about what it meant to live day to day.

At each treatment, he was forced to sit still for once. He listened to the chemotherapy machines beeping. He looked into the faces of old people, young people, lonely people. He knew some of them would die. He felt lucky to have his wife at his side.

But he said, "It's like you're laying there dead."

As the treatments became more brutal, his world shrank. Instead of 15 places to be, he only had two, home and the hospital. He no longer had a thousand friends, just six close ones, his four children and his wife. He gave himself permission to be still and savor the moment.

"That was the gift," he said.

With the treatments successfully over, it would take him nearly a year to reclaim his strength and get back to his life, brokering real estate deals.

At 58, he says, he's living day to day, always mindful of the gift and the need to give back.

He'll do just that on Aug. 4 and 5, when he joins 5,000 cyclists from 36 states and six countries in a ride across Massachusetts to raise money for cancer research and treatment. The 28th annual Pan-Massachusetts Challenge will benefit the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Friends, he said, have given more than $4,000 toward the cause, but he's hoping others will log onto PMC.org and donate as a sponsor to Warren Bruno (51305-0) or directly to PMC (Pan Mass Challenge, P.O. Box 41457, Boston, MA, 02241-4575). It doesn't matter to him.

"The important thing," he said, "is to donate."

Bruno will bike 193 miles from Sturbridge, a central Massachusetts town, to Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod.

Alone, he knows his ride won't mean much. But taken together, the cyclists might bring us closer to taking the power from that single, horrifying word: cancer.

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