If you’ve ever faced a life-altering medical diagnosis, you know how that moment can stop you in your tracks, forcing you to reevaluate your priorities. Today’s guest came face-to-face with such a moment, a type A workaholic whose life was upended by a stage IV colon cancer diagnosis he never saw coming. Lee Rafkin, owner of Rafkin Brand Consulting, shares his powerful and inspiring story of resilience, recovery, and reinvention, encouraging others diagnosed with colon cancer that there’s hope for a second act.
We talk about Lee’s author journey that began with a darkly funny “top ten list” he presented at a Colon Cancer Alliance fundraiser. We also talk about the value of a writing community, and how joining a writing group for first-time authors helped him learn how to move from marketing copy to emotional, literary storytelling.
Lee Rafkin is a brand manager, marketing consultant, CMO, and communications professional with a mission to destigmatize colon cancer so people don’t ignore the symptoms. Lee lives with his wife, Keri, in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts and enjoys traveling, riding his motorcycle, and perfecting his Spanish.
Join me in this inspiring episode, and learn how one author’s journey from a cancer diagnosis to being cancer-free led him to impact his audience for a deeper health awareness.
Book recommendations:
- The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch
- The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- Everyone Poops, by Taro Gomi
Get to know Lee:
- Website
- Book Always Order Ice Cream
- Facebook @lee.rafkin
- Rafkin Brand Consulting
Follow me on:
- Instagram @stacyennis
- Facebook @stacyenniscreative
- YouTube @stacyennisauthor
To submit a question, email hello@stacyennis.com or join my email list http://stacyennis.com/join and fill out the form on the page.
Always order ice cream: how a cancer survivor turned resilience into a book | Episode 274 Transcript
These transcripts were generated by robots, not writers.
Stacy: Welcome, welcome. This week we are going to be having a really important conversation, in part about ice cream, but also about mortality, about cancer, and about journeying through difficult life situations. I’m really excited to get to welcome this week’s guest, Lee Raffkin. Welcome to Beyond Better, a podcast that explores a simple but profound idea: we all deserve to live lives we love, and that includes our work lives too. I’m your host, Stacy Ennis, an author, book coach, speaker, and longtime location-independent entrepreneur living in Portugal with my family of four. Join me as I talk business, location independence, writing, publishing, and so much more, all focused on building a life that is beyond better. Lee is a brand manager, marketing consultant, CMO, and communications professional whose life was upended by a stage four colon cancer diagnosis he never saw coming. After facing death and beating overwhelming odds, Lee shares his powerful and inspiring story of resilience, recovery, and reinvention, and I love those three R’s, helping the millions of people diagnosed with colon cancer every year and reminding all of us that a second act is within reach. Lee lives with his wife, Carrie, in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. He enjoys travel, road trips, riding his motorcycle, and perfecting his Spanish, and I would say, his Portuguese.
Lee: And in Portuguese too.
Stacy: Yeah. So welcome. I’m so happy to have you here today.
Lee: Thank you, Stacy. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Stacy: I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation. It’s such an interesting title for a book, Always Order Ice Cream. It’s very uplifting and joyful, and the subject matter is quite heavy. It’s a heavy journey that you went through. What inspired you not only to pick this joyful title for this heavy journey, but also to share this story?
Lee: Thanks for having me. And by the way, this is the very first podcast or discussion I’ve had about my book formally like this. It just launched about two weeks ago. I’m in New York City tonight because I’m doing a big launch party, so everything is kind of coming together, with a lot of thanks and gratitude to you, Stacy Ennis, for really helping me along my journey. So how did I begin with this title? Obviously the title is a metaphor. Always Order Ice Cream is really about living your best life, not delaying gratification, and going for it, because the future is very unpredictable. People adore ice cream. It’s a universal thing. It’s really about treating yourself well, and ice cream is a metaphor for that. Actually, the way it all started was that, pre-COVID, in 2017 or 2018, probably 2018, I volunteered for the Colon Cancer Alliance and did a corporate fundraiser, and they asked me to speak to this big crowd of people. I did what I would call a darkly funny list, like a David Letterman top ten list, about what it was like to have colon cancer, what I went through, my journey, and my recovery. People loved it. They just ate it up, and I said to myself, I can do this. That top ten became the outline for my book, and that’s how I started it. I will tell you quite honestly that it was more of a vanity project, a retirement project, something to keep me busy, because I’m very much a type A person who always needs to be busy, and I had just recently retired. But then I joined a writing group in October and it became very serious. I spent about a year writing and editing the book. My wife and I are lucky enough to be able to travel during the winter. We were in Costa Rica, where I wrote most of the book, and then I edited it when we traveled to Argentina and Brazil. So it took me about a year, most of it written away from home, and that’s how it all began.
Stacy: I love that you leaned in with such seriousness and commitment, and of course I got to witness that journey, which was really wonderful to watch as you put this important book together. The thing I’m curious about that we didn’t quite hear in your reply is, why not just move on? You went through this really difficult thing. It had all sorts of impact on your life, not just on your own self, but on your relationships. It would have been easier, maybe, to just move on and live the rest of your joyful life post-cancer. So what made you decide to put a year, a year plus, I should say, of your life into this project and to share your story?
Lee: That’s a great question. I don’t know if I have a complete answer, but I’ll try. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I’ve been a marketing writer. I’m a marketing guy, so I’m very good at writing copy, short, succinct, to the point, and I had to relearn a whole way of storytelling, because literary writing is very different from marketing writing. I always wanted to write a book, but more than that, and this sounds really corny, but it’s true, I had an eleven percent chance of living. I’m a survivor, I was amazingly lucky, and I really do want to give back and help other people. I found it was very rare to find a first-person account of what people were going through. I looked, and there aren’t a lot of books. There are books written by doctors, books that are very scientific, books about the physiology, a lot of books about the head, but not about the heart. My book is about the heart. Instead of going down dark rabbit holes on the internet, full of misinformation, I really believe that a cancer buddy, a first-person account from someone who’s gone through it, is the most helpful. So I really wanted to help people. My whole thesis, or mission, now is to destigmatize colon cancer. My very first chapter is titled “Say the Words.” As you know well, it starts out with four words: rectum, anus, feces, poop. I really believe that saying the words and normalizing it is what it’s all about, because we’re such Puritans in the United States. We don’t want to talk about poop. It’s embarrassing, it’s dirty, it’s private. But we have no problem talking about other disgusting things in America, in advertising and marketing, which is really what I know. We talk about earwax, toenail fungus, ED, vaginal discharge, really disgusting private things. So why can’t we talk about poop? I really believe that normalizing poop, bringing it out into the sunlight and talking about it, is going to help save millions of lives. Colon cancer is the third most diagnosed cancer in the world and the second biggest killer, and by 2030, which is only three or four years away, it’s going to be the number one killer. It just does not need to be that way. Many, many people like me ignore their symptoms, don’t talk to their doctor, and delay getting either a Cologuard test or a colonoscopy, and that’s really a killer. If you catch colon cancer early enough, it’s actually quite simple. But if you wait and delay and don’t talk to your doctor and ignore your symptoms, as I did, it gets pretty serious. In America alone, 150,000 people are diagnosed every year with colon cancer, and 55,000, about a third of them, die. It does not have to be that way. It’s just that we, as a society, don’t want to talk about these things. So I believe that saying the words, normalizing it, bringing it out of the shadows, if you will, is what’s going to help people. That’s my mission. I don’t know if I answered your question.
Stacy: You did. Two things come to mind. One is that any longtime listeners know our family has been on a gut health journey for several years, so we are super comfortable with poop. We track poop. We spent quite a period of time with charts, the Bristol stool chart. I am very familiar. I know it intimately.
Lee: It grades poop like a fine diamond.
Stacy: I actually find it very interesting, because you know so much about your health and your body through your poop. The other thing that came to mind, and I don’t know if I ever shared this with you, Lee, I might have shared part of it, is that I think I’ve only really interacted in a deeper way with two people with colon cancer. One is you and the other is my late uncle. He died of colon cancer, and I imagine part of that, I don’t know for sure, was delay, and maybe discomfort with getting in and getting checked out. When I met you and learned about your project, it really hit close to home for me, because I watched what can happen without early detection. It’s a really, really hard and painful experience. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Lee: No, it really doesn’t. Up to a third of all people who are diagnosed with colon cancer die from colon cancer, and I think about half of those people literally could be saved through an earlier intervention. If you have early detection and catch colon cancer at stage one or stage two, it’s a very slow-growing cancer, and it’s very treatable. You basically cut it out, like cutting a garden hose, put the two pieces back together, and boom, your colon is back. If you’re in stage three or stage four, as I was, the cancer has jumped from your colon to other places in your body, and it becomes a lot more serious. I ignored my symptoms. Everyone should know what they are, because I have no problem talking about anything. The symptoms are blood in your stool, mostly, which I assumed was hemorrhoids, as most people do, and it wasn’t; pain in my stomach, which I was very aware of and basically ignored; inconsistent or changing poops; and body weight loss. With any of those conditions, you should talk to your doctor. The problem with people in the US, unlike in other great countries, is that we don’t have a lot of medical continuity, so some people don’t even have doctors they feel they can talk to about this. But there’s another thing I wanted to say, and that is that this book is not really about having cancer. It starts that way. That’s the premise, the foundation of the book. I didn’t want to write another book about how hard it was, and how I was a fighter and I beat it. All of those things are true. But I really wanted to write, quite sincerely, about the lessons I learned. I have become a much more grateful, humble person through this experience, and that’s what I wanted to write about.
Stacy: Yeah, and you’ve definitely accomplished that. I think the humor you bring into it makes it such a joyful and lighter read than you would expect for a book that deals with cancer.
Lee: Cancer can be very funny. I mean, seriously.
Stacy: I can’t say I have the personal experience with that, but I definitely learned through you the funny parts of it, and you do a great job capturing that in the book. I would love to go into your story a little bit, because there was a moment in your journey, when you were first diagnosed, when your doctor told you to get your affairs in order, and the hope just floated out of your body. It really stole that hopefulness from you. I’d love to take us from that moment and hear what you did with it. And perhaps you could share, for any doctors, caregivers, or patients listening, what you would offer them if they’ve had a similar experience.
Lee: By the way, that is the excerpt of the book that I’m going to read tonight, because people respond to it in a very strong way. Like a lot of people, I assumed that doctors knew what the hell they were talking about, and I accepted that first opinion. I spent about two weeks reconciling everything and doing what he told me, which was to prepare my affairs and get ready to die. I was prepared to die. I had a whole bucket list: I’m going to go to Iceland, I’m going to go skiing in Chile, I’m going to go to one of those beautiful overwater places in Bali. I had my whole list of things, and I was ready to die. If it really wasn’t for my sister, Holly, who was my medical angel, and I’ll explain what that is, I would have. But she got me into Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City, which in my opinion is one of the best, if not the best, cancer hospitals in the world. I got a second opinion, and the second opinion was completely opposite of what the first guy said. Spoiler alert, I’m still alive. I realized then that two doctors, both esteemed heads of their departments at esteemed, huge hospitals in New York City that will go unnamed, had diametrically opposed opinions. There’s a whole chapter in my book titled “Doctors Are Not Created Equal,” and I believe that now more than ever. We have to understand that doctors are human, and that a first diagnosis or first opinion doesn’t have to be the only opinion. You’re not insulting a doctor, or challenging a doctor, or being rude or impolite if you go for a second opinion, because it’s your life, and sometimes you’ll get a completely different diagnosis, as I did. My first doctor basically told me I was going to die, I should prepare my affairs, and there was not a lot he could do. My second doctor, at Sloan Kettering, told me they have the best surgeons in the world. They were going to cut the cancer out of my body, and then give me chemotherapy to clean up all the remaining cancer cells, every other week for six months. I had twelve infusions over six months, twice a month, and then I was going to be completely cancer free. And that is exactly what happened.
Stacy: Wow. It’s interesting. I have a long line of physicians in my family, specifically surgeons, and I grew up being told that if you have surgery, you need to write in Sharpie on your body. Like, do not cut this leg. It was just very clear from a very young age that doctors are imperfect. To your point, whether or not it hurts the doctor’s feelings or is rude doesn’t really matter. Some doctors will not like it when you get a second opinion, but ultimately it’s your life. It was clear in your book that you very much respect and appreciate the medicine that saved your life, but you thought for yourself, you got different opinions, you tried things your doctor didn’t always approve of, and you had a real sense of ownership over your journey. That was a takeaway I had from the book: you did not just take the first doctor and say, that’s it, and not question anything.
Lee: I would have, and I think a lot of people would have, accepted the first opinion. It’s just a strange little story, but I’ll tell it to you. I just remember kind of completely zoning out while he was telling me what they were going to do and what his treatment philosophy was, because I was in a very bad place, actually. His treatment philosophy, not to get too technical, was to do chemotherapy first to shrink the tumors, and then surgery second, if the tumors were small enough, to remove them. My sister has friends in her town who had the exact same thing. They went to this doctor, followed that advice, and both of them died. So I would have accepted that opinion. I remember sitting in his office looking over his shoulder, and he had this huge collection of very exotic paperweights. I also collect paperweights. I don’t know why, but I do. I remember looking at that collection and thinking, my God, that’s an amazing collection, he must be a great doctor, he collects paperweights like I do. And then I fantasized about which paperweight from my collection I was going to give him when he saved my life. I’m thinking to myself, that’s not the way to pick a doctor. This guy meant well, I’m sure, and at the end of the day it was a completely, diametrically opposed diagnosis, and that’s something people need to understand. There are two words I like to use a lot: agency and advocacy. You need to advocate for yourself. You need to stand up for yourself. No one is going to do it for you. Here in America, where we have such a medical system, which we really do, it’s even more important that you advocate for yourself, because oftentimes the people who see you aren’t your regular doctors and don’t really know you. My doctor had no idea how physically strong I was, or how mentally strong I was, or what a fighter I was, which I’m a big believer is a major contributor to survival: mental attitude. So the first word is advocacy. The second word is agency. What I found through my experience was that I could make a lot of the decisions myself. I was in control of my own body, my own decisions, and who I wanted to hang out with. In terms of agency, you really do need to be imbued with the power to manage your own affairs, because no one else is going to do it for you.
Stacy: It’s interesting what you said about who you surround yourself with, because I think that’s a general life guide. In my own life, if I have a new friend, I’m pretty quick to notice if my energy drops around them or I’m not looking forward to spending time with them, and then I’m like, okay, bye. I’ll focus on the people who bring me joy and energy and lift me up. I think that’s such an important piece, because if you had surrounded yourself with people who were negative or not contributing to your quality of life as you were going through this journey, that would have made all of this so much harder. I would love to come into life after cancer. Maybe you could take us into the moment you were officially cancer free, and then take us forward into what changed for you. Who were you before, and who are you now?
Lee: That’s a great question. Cancer taught me a lot, and it was obviously a life-changing and life-affirming experience for me. What I realized most was that, always order ice cream, life is not a dress rehearsal. It’s one of my favorite sayings. You should live life every day as if it’s going to be your last, because maybe it will be. It’s very unpredictable. You never know. I learned a lot about that, and I learned a lot about what was important to me. My second act, which I refer to all the time, was really my realization that I was not too old to find true love. I’m divorced and remarried. My wife, Carrie, is spectacular in every way, and I really feel like I’ve gotten a chance to do things right that maybe I didn’t in the past. So what was I like before, and what was I like after? Before, I was a control freak, a type A, hardworking, stressed-out guy. I flew all over the world. I had a very high-energy consulting gig where I was in China and Russia and all over Europe, and I traveled a lot, and I totally defined myself, like a lot of men, I think, by my career and my success, a blue-collar kid who grew up and did good. It was important to me, and I got a lot of my self-esteem and affirmation from my career. Post-cancer, not so much. I realized that I would rather work to live than live to work, which is a really important realization, and I have a story that backs that up. I was in New York City during 9/11. That’s how old I am. I was very close, actually, at Park Avenue South and 23rd Street. The day it happened, after the planes hit the towers, our building security came in and said, everybody needs to leave the building right away. It was about nine thirty in the morning. And I remember, if you can believe it, staying an extra twenty-five or thirty minutes, finishing an email and collecting my files, expecting I’d be out of the office for a week or a month, who knew. I’ll take this and leave that, and write this. Now I realize, and I can see the expression on your face, now I realize, post-cancer, that that was an absolutely ridiculous response, and that nothing is more important than life and living, as opposed to staying an extra twenty-five minutes to clean up my desk, which is what I did. So what I realized was that life is funny, and that work is really not as important as we all think it is. I learned to invest in relationships. I spent a lot of time investing in friends, mostly old friends, because I think old friends are the best friends. I invested a lot in my kids, in my relationship with my kids, and I invested a lot in my new marriage. Carrie and I are both remarried. It’s our second marriage for both of us, and we really want to do it right. I think a second act is way more than just personal, who I’m with and my personal relationships. It’s about having an attitude about life and what you prioritize. And you know what else I learned? I learned that I have to be willing to accept help from other people. I’m very much a control freak, and I found it difficult to ask for help. But you have to ask for help, and you have to be willing to accept it, and that was probably the first lesson I learned.
Stacy: It’s such a powerful way to look at life, and I appreciate the way you look at your journey and can see all of the good that it brought you. It also made me think: I was in the Dominican Republic during the Haiti earthquake, and my husband grabbed our cat and I grabbed my laptop. I didn’t have any kids at the time. I definitely would have grabbed my kids, but I did not grab my wedding ring.
Lee: You clearly didn’t have kids then.
Stacy: It’s those moments, in the split second. I look back on that and think, that’s really interesting that that was the only thing I grabbed in the whole apartment. It does cause you to reflect on those moments.
Lee: One final lesson, which I think is important, is experiences over things. Carrie and I aren’t rich. We’re comfortable. It used to mean a lot more to me what rich was, and who had what, and what it allowed me to do. Now I really believe in experiences over things. We like things, like a lot of people do. We like cars, we like houses, we like clothes, like everybody. But we like traveling more, so we spend half the year traveling in Latin America, because I speak Spanish and Portuguese, or more Portuguese than Spanish. We just decided, why not? If you’re not going to do it now, when are you going to do it? If we were to wait, like traditional people, saying I just have ten more years until I retire, I just have to put another couple hundred thousand into my 401(k) before I retire, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow. I believe there is a destination and a lifestyle for every budget. You’re in Portugal, as many people know. You can be in a lot of places and not have to be in New York City. So we’re totally about experiences. We live up in the woods in the Berkshires, and we love it there. That’s more important to me than pretty much anything.
Stacy: I love that you shared this perspective on experiences over stuff. I really resonate with that in my own life, and especially in experiencing the world and world travel, which I know is really big for you. Speaking of experiences, I would love for you to share a couple of challenges you overcame, experiences that were difficult during your cancer journey.
Lee: There’s a chapter in my book called “Gray Socks.” It’s a story about recovering from surgery at Sloan Kettering and being encouraged to get out of bed and walk the halls to gain strength and mobility, which I did. I was awarded, because I really felt that way, gray socks, as opposed to yellow socks. At Sloan Kettering, gray socks meant steady on your feet, stable, and not a fall risk. Yellow socks meant this person is a fall risk, they’re unstable, they’re not steady on their feet. Usually when a person with yellow socks went out to walk around the hospital hallway, there was a nurse there to make sure there wasn’t a fall. I felt like, wow, I’m super stable, I’ve got gray socks, I can go anywhere, I don’t need anyone to help me. The reason I was able to do all of that, even walk right after my surgery, was a little drug called OxyContin, or oxycodone, which a lot of people have heard about. It’s a very controversial painkiller. It’s a narcotic, and I’m convinced I became addicted to it. I was on it for a couple of months, it made me feel great, and it allowed me to do a lot of things pain-free that I couldn’t do without it. No one told me to stop, so I kept taking it. It was great. But then, when I was close to being fully healed, I had an incision scar, like a thirteen-inch scar from my pelvis to my rib cage, and every time I would walk without the oxy, it felt like I was ripping my torso apart. I realized that it was a pretty dangerous drug, that I was most likely addicted to it, and that I needed to get off it. I did, and it took me some time. So that was one challenge. Another challenge, which I think was a lot deeper, was my best friend, Arthur. There’s a chapter in my book called “Trading Places.” He was unfortunately diagnosed with ALS. We were best friends, and we used to hang out together a lot, and I watched him progressively get worse and die as I was progressively getting better and living. I very much had survivor’s guilt from that. People say that’s totally ridiculous, that it’s not a rational response: how can you have survivor’s guilt, this guy has ALS, he’s going to die, and you were given the gift of life? It’s hard to explain the psychology of something like that, but it was definitely a challenge I faced. We had a great time. I watched him decline, and I learned a lot about dying with dignity. He really wanted to die with dignity, and he really wanted to leave a lasting legacy for his kids about how he dealt with what he had. I thought that was a really important lesson for me as well.
Stacy: Those sound like really difficult experiences, and I was thinking about my own best friend as you were sharing that, and I can really feel for you. This might be a good place for us to transition the conversation a little into writing. We have a lot of aspiring authors who listen to this podcast, many authors who are in the process of writing, and you writing and publishing this book is really inspirational for them. And yet we know it wasn’t all roses and honey along the way. I wondered if you could share one or two experiences from your writing journey, challenges you overcame and how you got through them so that you could see this goal through.
Lee: As I mentioned earlier, I’ve always been a marketing writer, not a literary writer, and they are completely different. What I needed to learn, and what I really tried to put into the book, was emotion and feeling and showing instead of telling, if you know what I mean. I was challenged in multiple edit sessions with you, and with a wonderful person who works with you, Kim, to help people feel what happened instead of telling them what happened, and to open myself up to being more vulnerable as a writer. I did, and I think a lot of people have responded to that, and that really resonates. I started writing this at home in the Berkshires before we even left. We left on December first, and I started really over the summer. It was all over the place, and every chapter was almost like a short story. So understanding how to link them, and pull a thread through all of those chapters to create a narrative arc and a total story, was something I had to learn through this writing group. I would sit down and start writing in the morning, and I had such flow that I would look up and it was dinner time. I mean, it was like that. I had no problem.
Stacy: Dreamy.
Lee: But it was also twelve years in the making. For your listeners, I waited twelve years. These stories had been bouncing around in my head for twelve years, but I never really put them down in a methodical way until I started writing this book. As I said earlier, even though I had great flow, my manuscript was not a book until I joined this crazy writing group that you do with first-time writers. It was fabulous. It was an opportunity to learn the craft, because there are things to learn about outlining and writing a book, but also just having other people read my work and respond to it like real readers was amazing. For instance, I was very reluctant to lean into the whole ice cream thing. The title was always Always Order Ice Cream, because that was an old saying of mine, and I thought it was pretty apparent what it stood for. I showed my original first book cover to the group and there was no response, dead silence, like, really, that’s your cover? And I’m thinking, where’s the ice cream? I want to see ice cream. I realized that ice cream is a universal metaphor. Everyone loves ice cream. So I leaned into the ice cream imagery on my book, which is right here, Always Order Ice Cream. It’s fun, it’s playful, it’s universal, and people love it. The title is sweet and light, as you mentioned earlier. The content isn’t, and that’s on purpose. I really didn’t want to write a cancer book about how I went through all this horrible stuff. It was horrible, but that’s not new to anybody. What was new is what I learned, and turning a negative experience into a hopeful one is what I wrote about, which is why I think ice cream is the right metaphor. I learned that from my writing group. And in terms of the process of writing, so much of it is actually not writing but editing, and making sure the story you tell has some oomph to it. That was something else I learned from the writing process.
Stacy: And now you’re through the main creative writing portion, and tonight you have a launch for your book at the Museum of Ice Cream. You’ve been through so much of this process now, and of course there’s always more to come and a lot ahead of you. When you look back on this journey, is there one thing you would say, or something you wish somebody had said to you at the start of your writing journey?
Lee: One thing you taught me was that your audience is not all of the people in the world who’ve had cancer. It’s not even all the people in the world who have had colon cancer. Your audience is a very, very narrow sliver. I stole a great saying from you that I still use in my business consulting, which is that the riches are in the niches. People love that. I love it too. I really had a very specific person in mind when I was writing this book, and I think that’s very, very important: you don’t write a book for the world. You write a book for a very narrow slice. In marketing we call it a target audience, and you hope that target audience makes your book and your ideas kind of viral, and it starts from there. But if you start big and hope it’s going to explode, I think that’s a lot riskier than having a very narrow target in mind and writing to that person. In my case, that person was my cancer buddy, who went through what I went through a couple of years after I went through it. I really, really believe in the whole cancer buddy experience, and that’s actually going to be the subject of my second book.
Stacy: We heard it here first, an exclusive on book two. That’s very exciting. Lee, I’m going to ask you the question I ask all of our interviewees. If you could recommend one book to listeners, one that has profoundly impacted your life, what would it be and why?
Lee: Okay. I read a lot. I’m a big believer that you can’t really be a good writer if you’re not a good reader, and I’m a pretty voracious reader. I credit my mother for that. She was a great reader.
Stacy: I loved that part of your book, by the way, the part about your mom. That was really fun.
Lee: So I’ll tell you the story I know you liked in my book. I was probably nine years old. My mother used to take me to the public library and drop me off to do my homework, and then she would pick me up and I’d have a big stack of books I liked to read and bring home. One day she was sitting at home and she got a phone call from the librarian, who said, “Your son Lee wants to take out some very adult-themed books. Is that okay?” And my mother, bless her heart, was very supportive and said, “He can read whatever he wants to read.” She really stood up for that. She would be very much against what’s happening in the US right now in terms of books and book banning and all that baloney. But that story is important in terms of books. I have a lot of favorites, but the book I recommend in my book is Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture. This is a guy who died of pancreatic cancer. He had a very short amount of time to live, and he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and Carnegie Mellon invited him to give, literally, a last lecture. Usually they did this for retiring professors. This guy was going to retire forever. So they asked him to give a last lecture, and he turned it into a book, and it’s a fantastic book. It’s not fantastic because it talks a lot about dying. It’s fantastic because it talks a lot about living. And who gets the opportunity to give a last lecture right before they die? I think it’s an amazing book, with amazing insights and truisms that you really need to read for yourself. The whole idea was that he wanted to leave a lasting legacy for his children. He wanted to leave a roadmap for living, which sounds like a cliché, but it was true, a roadmap for living for his kids, who were young at the time. I thought to myself, who does that? You write about something in the present that you hope your kids are going to read in the future, about the past. It’s an amazing opportunity to leave a lasting legacy for your kids. So I would recommend that. Randy Pausch is his name, and it’s called The Last Lecture. It’s a pretty emotional read. I also listened to one of your podcasts recently where you recommended The Little Prince, and I hadn’t read it, so I ordered it. It’s a quick read, half an hour maybe, and I agree, it’s fantastic. And there’s one other book that was one of my biggest influences, and that is called Everyone Poops.
Stacy: Have you seen this book? Yes, I have seen that book. I think we might have checked it out from the library at some point.
Lee: This was my kids’ favorite storybook. I read it to my kids every night. They loved it because it normalizes poop. They were never embarrassed about poop, and I think it’s a very important lesson that the whole world needs to know. And here it is. It’s pretty easy: all living things eat, so everyone poops. It’s funny and lighthearted, but if you have children and you have not read this book to them, you must. My whole mission of destigmatizing colon cancer is really all about being aware of your poop and not being embarrassed by it. I really believe that if you say the words and are explicit about it and normalize it, it’s going to help get earlier detection, and it’s going to help people talk about this kind of embarrassing topic with their doctors. I think it’s a complete travesty that King Charles and Princess Catherine in the UK both had cancer, and still the world does not know what kind of cancer they have. The reason is that Buckingham Palace is protecting their privacy. It’s such an old-fashioned, puritanical approach. They have such a bully pulpit. They have tens of millions of people who look up to them, and it’s such a great educational opportunity and such a missed one. I just think it’s utterly ridiculous. They shouldn’t have any privacy. Their whole role is to be a role model for other people, so they should be educating the world. If King Charles came out and said, I had colon cancer, a million people would get screened. It’s just ridiculous.
Stacy: You think about Katie Couric on the other side of that, who has made such a difference in the world of colon cancer and didn’t have to do that, but she chose to.
Lee: For your listeners, she had a colonoscopy live on a morning show in the US called the Today Show, when she was a host. And I actually tried to get her to blurb my book, but she never responded.
Stacy: Such an icon. Well, Katie, if you’re listening, we have a great book to contribute to your…
Lee: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Stacy: But seriously, Lee, where can our listeners and viewers find your book, learn more about you and your mission, and how can they share this message with the people they care about?
Lee: They can visit my author website, which is leeraffkin.com, that’s L-E-E R-A-F-F-K-I-N. They can also go to Amazon.com, where the book is available as a paperback, as an ebook, like a Kindle, and also as an audiobook, like on Audible. I recorded the book in my own voice in May, and one of the best reviews I’ve ever gotten was from a friend who said, my God, it was like you were speaking to me, I heard your voice with these words. I told him, well, if you really want to hear my voice, you can go to Amazon and buy my audiobook. Double up. That was great feedback. The other great review I got was from people who said, I’m going to give this book to someone I love because they’re going through what you went through. That’s actually the best possible feedback I could get.
Stacy: I love that. Lee, thank you so much for joining me today. And to whoever’s listening to this, I know that exactly the right person heard this today, and hopefully they take action. So thank you.
Lee: Thank you. It was great being here.
Stacy: And thank you to you, our listeners and viewers, for being with us. As I mentioned, I really hope that you’re exactly the right person who needed this message today, or maybe you can pass it along to somebody who’s been complaining of some of the symptoms Lee mentioned, or has been diagnosed recently, or has a loved one who has been diagnosed. I want to thank, as always, although I said this recently, normally I say “as always” to Rita Domingues, but she is on maternity leave, so now we have Margarita here as our producer. I am so grateful. She helps make sure the show gets out every single week. And I will be back with you before you know it.
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