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Brian Du Bois talks about his three-year bout with leukemia at his home in Stockton. Posters of famous photos line the wall behind Du Bois. He used photography as a way of keeping his mind busy while being almost immobile after undergoing a bone marrow transplant. (Brian Feulner/News-Sentinel)
Brian's Battle
Leukemia patient Brian Du Bois used his talent for photography as a therapeutic way of fighting his deadly disease
It all started with bloody noses. At first, they lasted five minutes. Then 10. Then 45. He thought it was maybe a weird strain of the flu. His friends said it must be the high altitude.
Brian Du Bois, an adrenaline-seeking Lodi native, was working in North Carolina, overseeing the set-up of a new Cost Plus World Market. He loved every part of his job — living out of his suitcase, the cities he experienced, his coworkers who were his best friends.
The week the bloody noses came, he visited Wilmington Beach. He photographed the water turning to salty foam as it crashed into the wooden poles of the pier. The sea was aqua colored between the blue sky and sand. With his brand new Nikon D70S hanging around his neck, he photographed the waves and a historic battleship. He didn't know that would be the last photo he would take before things changed. Before he knew his ability to photograph would become a way to cope with a new life.
That night, dinner on the beach was cut short.
"It felt like someone taking an ax to the middle of my head," Du Bois said. He started popping Excedrin pills like they were Skittles. They only delayed the inevitable. He spent Saturday night cradling the toilet, black blood draining uncontrollably from his nose.
On Monday, he went to work. As he explained the art of using a pricing gun, his head began spinning. Fast. Faster. Standing became impossible. His coworker wheeled him to the parking lot in a rolling office chair.
At the hospital, he was isolated, put in a room, the door sealed with something resembling plastic wrap used to keep food from wilting.
Finding out
On March 28, 2004, Du Bois was diagnosed with leukemia.
He's come a long way since that day in North Carolina when he arrived at the hospital, sick to his stomach, jaundiced and barely able to see. It's been a long road that has yet to come to an end. His goal is to continue with recovery — to grow stronger and take fewer pills every day — until he reaches five years. Five years is a good sign. Doctors tell him that when he reaches that milestone, he will have a 70 percent chance of surviving. This month marks the third year since he received a bone marrow transplant; his chance of survival is now at 40 percent.
A cancer of the blood or bone marrow, leukemia is characterized by an abnormal production of cells. White cells may be suppressed or dysfunctional, causing the immune system to attack other cells. Like what happened with Du Bois, the overcrowding of cells kept bone marrow from producing healthy cells needed to live.
"It made sense when the doctor told me what I had," Du Bois said. "I was relieved, kind of happy because I knew what was going on."
Picking up the camera
Athletic and up for almost anything, Du Bois was a regular outgoing 29-year-old.
He dated. He traveled. He worked hard.
As a young boy, Du Bois lived on Church Street in Lodi.
Eventually, he moved to Stockton with his family and attended Bear Creek High School. In those years, he discovered photography. It started with his grandpa's 35 mm camera that he used in high school photography classes. It was old, manual and he loved it. He purchased his own camera — a Fuji S7000 that amplifies the image to capture every wrinkle, spot, reflection of light. Even in his earliest days as an amateur photographer, he found something alluring in the small aspects of larger objects.
"Taking photos — it was just something he always did," his mother Claudia Cuthbert said.
In his late twenties, Du Bois became the project manager for Cost Plus. He traveled around the country, setting up new stores in states like Arizona, Oregon and Texas. With his coworkers, he found the best hangouts, places to eat, a male fight club and even an independent wrestling ring in Iowa.
Now, in his one-bedroom Stockton apartment, framed photography and Superman memorabilia fit together like puzzle pieces on his walls. Some of the photography is his own, scenic photos just before he got sick, other macro images shot when he was bedridden. The collection in his living room are his own inspiration: a man and woman kissing on a soaked beach; a woman applying lipstick, her feet on her vanity as a man watches in the distance.
Du Bois has boxes of photos that tell of his life before his blood poisoned his body. Some photos are painful, reminders that half of the people he called friends stopped calling after he got sick (the other half pitied him to the point of becoming obnoxious.) In his photos, Du Bois is a goofball — acting as his own version of Steve Urkel and posing with Superman. His playfulness and excitement in life still shine through in his storytelling and sarcasm, but it's not the same.
"My life was interrupted and it wasn't my choice," he said.
The moments he froze, the random objects he photographed became his therapy. His escape. When he didn't have control over his body, he had control of his cameras.
The wolf man
Sterile. Yellow. Dingy. "Like a small prison cell." That was the San Francisco hospital room he called home when he was transferred back to California after being hospitalized on the other side of the country. Most of the time, he was alone in the 12-foot by 8-foot room. Eleven Long was his floor, and he wasn't allowed to leave. He lived on 11 Long for six months, undergoing chemotherapy treatments daily. They infused him with high doses of chemo to remedy the imbalances in his body. His hair fell out the first week.
In September, one week before receiving a bone marrow transplant, he underwent radiation.
The transplant was fast, successful. His donor: a 46-year-old German man.
"Basically, I was a born again infant," he said.
He's never met his donor. But Du Bois knows a lot about him by the way his own body has changed. His blonde hair is growing back dark. Even the pattern of hair growth has changed. His blood type also changed from A positive to A negative.
"There are times when I just don't feel like myself," he said. "Sometimes I say, I feel like a wolf man right now."
A friend told him that he seems calmer.
"Maybe it's the new DNA," he joked.
Through the lens
In the months after his transplant, Du Bois lived in a two-bedroom apartment with his mother and grandmother at the Avalon Sunset Towers, down the street and up a hill from the medical center at University of California, San Francisco. With daily appointments, it was easier than commuting from Stockton. His vision was becoming clear again. He was preparing to walk again. Picking up his camera was how he passed the time. He removed the screens from his windows and photographed the Bay and Golden Gate bridges from seven stories up. He shot everything. Rooftops on gloomy days. Trees lining the street. Cars driving by. He even braved the cold December air to photograph the moon one night.
"After his grandma and I would go to sleep, he would sneak down to the first floor to take photos," Cuthbert said. "I don't know how he managed to walk, but he'd go down to the corner and take photos."
On days prescription drugs kept him in bed, he would create his own mini studios with solid backgrounds and pieces of fabric on table tops. In his photos, plump, purple blackberries float on a heavenly white background. Flowers are illuminated with vivid colors and details that are missed even in person. Homegrown "crazy looking plums" deemed inedible by family members became subjects that he could tweak until they became beautiful under the scope of his lens.
Nothing was easy in those days. Not even taking a still photo. The pills caused him to shake. He was still weak. And sometimes he only had the energy to take a few shots. Small tasks like changing a memory card in his Nikon was strenuous when shaking would cause him to flick the card across the room. Bending down to pick it up was a separate struggle. Every move hurt.
"The purpose of his photography was keeping his mind off the pain," Cuthbert said. "He was in more pain than he would ever allow us to see or know."
In the moments when he was powerless to the condition he faced, photography offered an outlet, a sense of enrichment and control. For hours he would study the outlines of purple seeds that create a blackberry. He thought about his life, his future, but it allowed him to focus on things that weren't just cancer.
Bridget Mazzini, Du Bois' bone marrow coordinator at UCSF said many of her patients discover their creative sides as they adjust.
"I think, personally, it's a very good idea for patients to find a creative outlet," Mazzini said.
Du Bois realized he was more than a guy with a couple of high-tech cameras. He was actually good at it.
"When I got sick, photography kept me busy. I didn't want to think, 'Is today going to be the day?'" he said.
Death and dying is no longer a constant thought. He still hopes that he'll live to be 60 or 70. And he doesn't want his mother to have to lose a son.
"I know I've shaved at least 20 years off my life by getting sick," said Du Bois, a person who was always considered healthy, who never once drank or tried drugs.
His mother knows he is scared. She's scared for him.
"I think he's afraid of his future. He's afraid the cancer is going to come back," Cuthbert said.
Brian is beating the odds. The doctors tell him he is. Even though they say he has a 40 percent chance of survival, he is determined to overcome leukemia.
Du Bois doesn't spend days in his pajamas or laying on the couch in self pity. He is a clean, sporty, well-dressed 32-year-old. He is bald, but he used to keep his head shaved anyway. He is funny, full of laughs and anecdotes of his time on the road. People say he talks a lot. But he just has a lot to say and a newfound appreciation for people and friendships. He walks with a slight limp, sometimes bent over. It doesn't keep him from getting out to photograph.
Giving it a try
On a hot August afternoon, Du Bois kneeled on the grass at Lodi Lake. He used his monopod to steady his camera and himself. He took dozens of photos of a park bench, where the graying wood was splitting and a chunk of rippled wood formed a hole on the side. A brown, cracking leaf blew onto the tabletop as though it were posing for him.
Life after leukemia has presented Du Bois with a new appreciation for life, things both flawed and perfect.
The hot sun burning his head and beating through his black T-shirt that read "Arrive. Raise Hell. Leave" was his cue to change locations. He hoisted himself up, leaning into the long arm of his monopod. Connected to his camera, it acts as a cane. Walking under the shaded trees, he searched for knots or blemishes on the trunks to photograph.
He spent a few hours at the lake that day. A few months ago, he only would have been able to stand it for an hour. Now he can go for four or five.
He's been off steroids for over a week, too. Now, he's only taking 18 pills each day. He's positive, though, that now that he's off steroids, he'll be able to get off the others.
"Maybe one day I'll only have to take four pills a day, maybe just one," he said, excitedly.
Recovery, for Du Bois, is not an option. He's taking every day as it comes, thankful for them all. He's learning to be his new self, the person he is after months in the hospital, after losing friends, when the only people you can talk to are doctors and your mother.
What: A walk with Team Du Bois to raise money for leukemia research.
When: 6 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 15
Where: University of the Pacific in Stockton
Register for the walk at Brian Du Bois' Team Page at http://Teams.LightTheNight.org/BrianDuBoisTeam.
When: 6 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 15
Where: University of the Pacific in Stockton
Register for the walk at Brian Du Bois' Team Page at http://Teams.LightTheNight.org/BrianDuBoisTeam.
His new mentality: "You never know until you try."
He wants to try new things, like rock climbing, teaching and writing. But first, he wants to work on learning how to be the fun-loving, outgoing, confident Brian he was three years ago — before all of his conversations turned to the topics of bowel movements, levels of pain and cancer.
"My people skills have really gone down hill," he admits. "I have a lot of new insecurities."
Though he kept his head shaved before leukemia, he says he at least had the option of being bald. Before cancer, he said he would talk to girls, but now he is scared to get close again.
"I get the feeling that (they think) if they kiss me or touch me they're going to contract something," he said.
He doesn't want to be in a relationship right now, but he knows that one day the timing will be right.
Positive. Welcoming the future. Remembering the past. Brian is ready for his next steps. He'll never be the person he was that day on at the Wilmington Beach pier, photographing the rolling blue waves that crash into the sand. He's going to be better.
Contact reporter Lauren Nelson at laurenn@lodinews.com.
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