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Sunday, June 3, 2007
Dooleys thankful for each other, modern medicine
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Vince Dooley had a speaking engagement last week. Trouble was, he couldn’t speak. Following surgery to remove a malignant tumor from his throat, the former Georgia football coach and athletics director was under doctor’s orders to keep silent for 10 days. But he’d committed to appearing at a fund-raiser for a library in Jefferson, so he went anyway and signed books.
His famously talkative wife gave the speech, much of it, as you’d expect, about her famously forbearing husband.
“I always said Barbara usually has the last word,” Dooley said. “That night she had all the words.”
With the moratorium finally lifted, Dooley spoke over the weekend in what his wife described, accurately, as “a gravelly whisper.” He said he feels fine — he has been going to the office he still occupies on campus even though he couldn’t talk to anyone there — and is confident that, after a round of radiation treatment, he’ll be rid of his cancer.
“It’s very, very treatable,” he said. “The doctors feel very good about it. I wish I’d had these odds in every game we played.”
Said Barbara: “I told him, ‘You do not have to worry about dying of cancer. Your problem will be me killing you.’ “
Ten speechless days had a trying and comic effect on the Dooleys’ marriage, which has lasted 47 epic years. Thinking ahead, Barbara bought her husband some dry-erase boards to use as communication devices.
“He ruined two by using an [indelible] Magic Marker,” she said. “We lost both erasers. I thought I was going to have to pin messages on him.”
Said Vince: “Barbara was a little difficult. She wouldn’t let me finish a [dry-erase] sentence. My daughter [Deanna] was a lot better. I tried to get her to come over and stay.”
Barbara and Vince Dooley are, in their diverse ways, great conversationalists. Barbara says pretty much anything that springs to mind; Vince can seem reticent until he happens on a subject that intrigues him, and then he’ll rattle on at encyclopedic length. (Get him going on his garden. Or the Civil War. On the sunset in Johannesburg.) They tease each other relentlessly — “I often say talking to Vince is like talking to the wall,” Barbara said — but in those 10 days of silence there came a poignant discovery.
“We’re apart a lot,” Barbara said, “but what I didn’t realize until this last week was how much we talk on the phone. I’ll call him and say, ‘Are you coming home for dinner? What time will you be here?’ We’ll talk for 15 minutes every night [when Vince is traveling]. And then I couldn’t do that.”
Vince Dooley, who’s 74, is scheduled to begin radiation therapy June 22. His biggest concern is that he’ll have to commute between Lake Burton, site of the annual Fourth of July clan-gathering with his four children and 11 grandchildren, to Athens for treatment.
Barbara Dooley was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 2005 and underwent chemotherapy in 2006. Today she’s selling real estate. “I’m fine,” she said. “Every three months they tell me I’m fine, and that’s what they told me a month ago.”
Said Vince, speaking on the wonders of modern oncology: “I’m glad we all came along when we did.”
The radiation is expected to render Dooley hoarse, if not completely mute. Might that be an opportunity for the family to try, say, text-messaging?
Said Barbara, hooting: “He has not grown with modern-day communication. We can’t e-mail him, we can’t text-message him, and we sure can’t get him to write on a dry-erase board with the right pen.”
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