If there are such things as miracles, there’s no doubt that Petal residents Charlie Marengo and his wife Sherri are walking examples of that.
On a fateful day in 2008, Charlie received the worst type of news from his doctor: he was diagnosed with a glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive forms of a brain tumor, with an average life expectancy of 12-15 months. In fact, Charlie was given seven months to live.
Fast forward to 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown, and Charlie had not only overcome the disease, but he and Sherri were able to chronicle their journey with the book “12 Years After 7 Months to Live: The Faith to Fight a Terminal Brain Tumor,” which was published in early June.
“The main reason (for the book) was a cancer diagnosis that you don’t see coming, and when that happens, the next thing you know you have to make decisions that you never were prepared for,” Charlie said during a recent book signing at The Author Shoppe in downtown Hattiesburg. “The other side of that equation is what happens on (Sherri’s) end of it – I’m the patient and she’s the caregiver.
“We wanted to make sure that we presented this on two different levels, to let people see what it’s like for the fella who’s going through it – or the woman that’s going through it – and also to see what it’s like for the caregiver on the other side of the coin. (The caregiver) suffers more than the person who has the disease.”
The book alternates between the viewpoints of Charlie and Sherri, including a chapter on Sherri’s childhood and another detailing a major vehicle accident in which Charlie was involved. In Chapter 4, the story of Charlie’s diagnosis begins.
“I would say the last third of the book is all about how to survive being a caregiver, how to get your affairs in order, what questions to ask and where to look for some information,” Sherri said. “When we started this journey back in 2008, the Internet was still very young, and there was not a lot of information – or places you could go to get information – that didn’t say ‘death, death, death.’
“It’s a lot different now, and this is a very unusual situation, but we do want people to get some hope and encouragement, because there is a way to get through it.”
The chapters of the book are the result of the Marengos’ journaling, which they stepped up when Charlie received his diagnosis.
“The minute you get any kind of diagnosis for anything, you start journaling, from the beginning all the way through,” Sherri said. “Everybody handles this kind of thing differently, I think. There are people that they just forge right ahead and they jump into everything that they can to do the research, to do what’s necessary, mentally and physically, and taking care of the family and just doing it all.
“Then there are some people who crumble under the weight, and they just walk away, and unfortunately, a lot of people fall in between those two. But still, there’s a lot of really good information in (the book) about being basically encouraged, that you can get through, and you can survive. It’s not always the outcome that you expect – I mean, you’re going to get healed here or there – but there are ways for you to just get through, and there’s just some really encouraging information (in the book).”
More information on “12 Years After 7 Months to Live” can be found at www.broomclosetstudios.net, as well as the book’s self-titled Facebook page. It can be purchased at small local bookstores, as well as online at www.amazon.com, www.booksamillion.com and www.barnesandnoble.com.
Charlie and Sherri also are available for small-group speaking engagements.
“We are currently getting speaking engagements to small groups at different churches – Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana – wherever we are needed, that’s where we’re going to go,” Sherri said. “After 41 years together, we are pretty much ruined now.”
Charlie’s diagnosis came when he visited his doctor after experiencing some unexplainable symptoms while visiting his daughter in Clarksdale before his granddaughter was born. He recalls having massive headaches, earaches, pain in his sinuses and poor vision.
“We’re leaving (Clarksdale) and we’re on our way home and going through Vicksburg, I can hardly drive anymore,” Charlie said. “I felt so bad … (I wanted to) pull over, throw up, pass out.
“Sherri says (now) that you can look at pictures and tell that I wasn’t myself. We get home, and all I want to do is go to bed – from when I understand, when people have brain tumors or something going on inside their head, that’s the first thing the body wants to do, is just shut down and go to sleep. And that’s all I wanted to do.”
The next morning, Charlie woke up and went to work at Petro Nissan in Hattiesburg. When he got to his desk, his head began to ache, which he mistakenly assumed was high blood pressure.
“It wasn’t,” he said. “My ears started ringing; it was almost like I was down deep, deep in water.
“I got up from my desk and I said, ‘I think I’m dying,’ so I leave and I tell the receptionist that I’m going to the hospital; something’s wrong. The first words (the doctor) says is, ‘it’s a brain tumor.’ I’ve never seen people move so fast in my life – I get a CT (scan), the doctor comes back and says, ‘you ain’t going anywhere.’”
Charlie was immediately rushed into surgery, and although he doesn’t remember much of that week, he recalls feeling “like a million dollars” afterwards. Sherri even told him that he was his old self – comical and acting like, well, like Charlie.
However, about three days later, while still in the hospital, he was officially diagnosed with glioblastoma, which the doctor described as pretty much the worst kind of brain cancer one can have.
It was at that point Charlie was given seven months to live and to start getting his affairs in order.
“You don’t prepare – nobody hands you a book and says, ‘here’s what you do,’ so I’m stunned, and Sherri’s sitting over there and she’s irritated because of (the doctor’s) bedside manner,” Charlie said. “We get past the point of being struck by it all and stunned, and all I said was to get the experts in here, because I want to know what the next step is.
“By midnight, I’d already seen a radiologist and an oncologist. ‘Radiologist’ is not a new word to me; ‘oncologist’ is, and I don’t even know what it means. These are things that we actually address in the book, so that people understand some of these terminologies. Having a CT scan and an MRI and a PET scan and all that, you don’t know what those terms mean, and it’s not like you’ve got a dictionary right in front of you when you’re a patient. So the next thing you know, we’re learning the hard way.”
The physicians then laid out a plan for Charlie for the next 30 days which entailed a regimen of radiation and chemotherapy. The chemotherapy came via a pill, which at least made that process a little easier than it had been done in previous years.
Radiation for Charlie became a weekly affair, consisting of 33 sessions in total.
“I said, ‘if I can get halfway through, I think I’ll be able to see the other side,’” Charlie said. “So you count down the days, and I got halfway through it, and I figured that I could keep doing it, and I’m (even) driving myself and not having any major side effects.
“I’m one of those guys that likes to fight – if it’s an uphill battle, give it to me. (My tumor) was encased in a cyst, and the doctor told me when he got it out of my brain, lifted it up and set it in the dish, it ruptured.”
A year after he was given seven months to live, Charlie returned to his primary doctor, who recommended he continue seeing the oncologist, as additional operations would be unnecessary. Three years after his diagnosis, Charlie was still taking his chemotherapy regimen, at which point he told the oncologist he wanted to discontinue treatment.
However, the doctor recommended against that measure, because it was still unsure whether any cancer was still present in Charlie’s brain. But after some time Charlie was given the go-ahead to stop taking chemo after a lengthy series of MRIs.
In March 2019, he had a recurrence when another brain tumor was found, and another surgery was required.
“What he took out wasn’t another glioblastoma; it was just another type of brain tumor,” Charlie said. “For some odd reason, I have a predisposition for these things to happen.”
Although there isn’t an exact pinpoint date on when Charlie – or the doctors – knew he had made a full recovery, Charlie said he knew it would happen simply because of his faith. He gives thanks and credit to God for his remarkable turnaround.
“The reason we wrote the book is so we could present both sides of the equation – there are people like me who make it, and I don’t know where they are, but they’re probably somewhere,” Charlie said. “There’s also people like me who don’t make it.
“The question would be, ‘if you don’t make it, why?’ Well, you just didn’t make it. That sounds cruel, but that’s just a fact of life, and we deal with that in the book.”
