Lifestyle & Culture Science & Health

Learning and healing from cancer

By Isabella Cabral

His sister died of breast cancer, his stepdad of aggressive prostate cancer. And, now, as Dion Summers sat, nervous and uncomfortable, tissue paper of an oncologist’s exam table crinkling underneath him, he heard what he didn’t want to hear.

“Oh, this needs attention,” said a nurse, looking at a scan of his thyroid, then immediately leaving the room. 

Nine days after the 35-year radio DJ veteran’s diagnosis, a Mount Sinai Hospital surgeon spent 10 hours stripping cancerous tissue off the gland that regulates body temperature, metabolism, blood pressure, and other functions. Worse, the physician took a knife to Summers’ vocal cords, removing cancer cells that had spread through to his throat and inserting a tracheal tube.

“Then, the reality hit me. Like, ‘Okay, cancer’s out. But you have no voice,’” said Summers, who interviews celebrities and DJs for Sirius XM. “And my voice, I always felt, was like my calling card.” 

His voice, added Sirius’ vice president for urban music programming, had been “…a pretty cool voice for the radio” and for Northern American listeners. His voice gave him his career. “I felt like the one thing that made me unique was gone. And I felt like the one thing that made me special was taken.”

Why had this happened to him? At such a high point in a career begun at a small radio station in Baltimore? “What did I do? Do you know? Why did God take the one thing that He gave me  that made me special–or that I thought made me special?” 

Repeatedly, he asked himself those questions. As he was recovering from surgery, he also leaned in. “[I] got into real, real powerful conversations with God,”  he said. The questions made him stronger and more reassured. Had he not kept asking them, he added, “I would have lost myself in a sea of depression.”

Talking with God helped him realize several things about life and to hear what described as heaven-sent affirmations: “‘You’ve always been a beacon of positivity. So, why not now take this new message and continue to be that. That guy, that beacon. This is why I built you the way I built you.’”

Hearing those assurances, he realized, “It was never about the voice.” It was about more clearly seeing and working daily toward his “purpose.” 

“It was never the voice; you thought it was,” he said, making an analogy. For Dorothy, in “The Wizard of Oz,” “it was never about the slippers … I tried to walk in that now every day.” 

“Dion,” said Karen Amos, his friend, “said always believed in God’s existence, but through his ordeal, he has come to understand the boundless depth of God’s love and presence in his life.” 

Today, almost a year and a half later, Summers is on the air again, and has returned to hosting The Hotness on Sirius XM’s The Heat channel. “You know, I always hear in my head. ‘Do you trust me? Do you trust me?’ ‘Yes.’ Like. the answer is always yes.”