On a Healing Track

Performer jumps on "Train" to raise money for cancer research

by Lucinda Breeding

Denton Record Chronicle

Sunday, July 9, 2006

Scott Wood is used to making his moments on the Denton stage count.

 

On Saturday, though, the 34-year old North Dallas resident will make his moments on the Campus Theatre stage count for something more than entertainment. He wants to help another man - or woman - get through cancer treatment and into remission.  The last time Wood performed on the local stage, he was playing a principle role in Denton Community Theatre's Ragtime. This weekend, he'll return for the first time - this time to raise money for cancer research. Around Christmas, Wood said his life changed.

"It was right around Christmas. I was sick, and I had the flu. The rest of my family was

celebrating Christmas in San Marcos. I thought that was bad, but then, I found a lump under my arm."

Wood jokingly calls himself - and his brother - a hypochondriac.

"We'll call each other and ask: 'How's your bird flu?'

"We're always at the doctor. My dad died when I was 10, and I just have a natural proclivity to worry about my health," Wood said.  He had the lump removed during the Christmas break. The mass was the size of a small grapefruit, he said. Just a few days later, his cell phone rang after hours, and it was his doctor, telling him that she wanted Wood to see an Oncologist.  "I had Hodgkin's Disease," Wood said. "I know it sounds weird to say I was elated, but that's how I felt when I heard "Hodgkin's". It's one of the most curable forms of cancer."

 

Like others who have been diagnosed with cancer, Wood did his research. He said that in 1960, only 40% of people diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, a form of lymphoma, were still alive in 5 years. Now, he says, about 90% of those diagnosed are alive 5 years later.

 

Wood had to give up the typical things to get better - weeks of feeling fine, a little piece of mind, and just about all of his hair.  Chemotherapy was Wood's biggest obstacle.  "It was really rough," he said. "Chemo builds up in your mind. It becomes this mental thing as much as it's a physical thing to get through. I'd go in and I'd smell the rubbing alcohol [nurses applied to his skin before administering the intravenous needle] and I'd start gagging."

 

Chemotherapy can have lingering affects. Wood said he felt physically heavy.  "I felt like gravity was like two to three times stronger or something," he said.  Wood said the disease tested him in a lot of ways, and he credits his family, friends, his Christian faith and music for getting him through the difficult times. He said he can't thank the medical professionals who tended to his health enough. The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society paired him with a mentor who'd gone through cancer treatment, and music remained an important part of his life.  "I even sang when I went to the oncologist's office," he said.

 

Like a lot of cancer survivors, Wood decided he wanted to do something to help others who will one day sit in the chair where he received chemotherapy. He turned again to music.

Wood said the idea for the concert came to him as he was leaving a Billy Joel concert in Las Vegas.  "I was walking out and I was like 'Man, I'd love to do a concert for charity.' Who is that arrogant to walk out of a show by one of the best rock musicians in the world and think ‘I can do that’? But I thought it."

 

Wood and a friend immediately started to work on the concert, an event that would raise money to help people Wood has never met.  He started with a menu of more than 100 songs, and narrowed it down to about 17. His songbook for the concert is mostly adult contemporary music - Sting, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, and Harry Connick, Jr. The OneNightOnly Band is Cody Barry on electric bass, Cody L. Johnson and Kevin Ware on guitar, Sarah Engledow Brown on synthesizer, Georgia Kornegay on piano, Joey Wilson on drums, and Treva McFadden, Amy Rizzo, John Tillman, and Michael Pettijohn on vocals.

 

Kornegay, the director of the choir program at Mesquite High School, was Wood's choir teacher in seventh and eighth grades at Goodnight Junior High in San Marcos.  "He was very gifted musically and had a very mature sense of humor for a 7th grader - beyond his years," Kornegay said. "He was a very good vocalist and loved being on stage - which he still does. What really got him going was when we produced a junior version of The Mikado.

 

He had a lead role in that and loved it. Years later, when he had a chance to do The Mikado in his thirties at the Campus Theatre, he got back in touch with us and we went to see him."  Kornegay said she joined the concert to support Wood, and because she enjoyed the music he selected.

Ware, who plays guitar for the concert, said he joined the concert because of his friendship with Wood, and because his own mother survived leukemia.

 

"This is something very close to my heart," Ware said.  The two met just last season when the Lewisville Community Theatre produced Sweet Charity. "We jokingly call him the Master of Shameless Self-Promotion," Ware said. "That's his nickname among friends. It’s justifiable, though, because he's got this great voice and really good stage presence. You'll see that in this concert."

 

Wood said the event allows him to do something he loves, while raising money for people who have to live with cancer. He said he wishes that all cancer victims could get through the disease with the support and the relative ease he's experienced.  He said he won't soon forget seeing the other cancer victims getting chemotherapy, with their energy noticeably sapped and their pain evident.  "I'm not scared of dying of cancer," Wood said. "I'm scared of living a long, miserable life with cancer. We're going to make such a small donation to the cancer society in relation to the need. But I think it’s important."