When Courage Hurts: The Decision That Saved Curt Gear’s Life

In this episode of the Courageous Crossroads podcast, host Jeff Johnson sits down with Iowa native and devoted Cyclone fan Curt Gear to unpack what real courage looks like when life takes a hard turn. Curt shares his journey from growing up in small-town Iowa Falls to building a career in business development for precast concrete in central Iowa, and then into the unexpected world of cancer after being diagnosed with an extremely rare spindle cell sarcoma of the bone.
He talks candidly about hearing he had a 50% chance of surviving five years, choosing to undergo brutal additional rounds of chemotherapy despite permanent hearing loss and constant tinnitus, and how his Christian faith, formed in his late twenties at Valley Church, carried him through. Now living in the West Des Moines area with his wife Carrie and their two sons, Curt is passionate about using his story to encourage others facing cancer and to walk alongside people
in deep struggle with honesty, hope, and quiet strength.

Thank you for listening! We hope you feel inspired and encouraged by our conversation today. If you did, be sure to share this episode with others.

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See you in the next episode! Be blessed!

Full Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to Courageous by Crossroads Apologetics, a look into what motivates us to step out in courage, and the everyday bravery of men and women like you. In each episode, we hear a personal story of bravery centered around this question: What’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done? And now your host, founder of Crossroads Apologetics, Jeff Johnson.

Jeff Johnson: Hey everybody, this is Jeff. Welcome back to another edition of the Courageous Crossroads podcast. You guys have probably heard me say before, one of my favorite quotes is that if you want somebody to know the truth, you should tell them. But if you want somebody to love the truth, you should tell them a story. And I just think that that is so spot on.

Everybody has a testimony. Everybody’s got a story to tell about the courage that they have experienced inside of them, the courage that they’ve witnessed in somebody else, the courage that’s been called out of them in a difficult scenario. And that’s what we celebrate here at the Courageous Crossroads podcast. And we’ve got another testimony that’s going to be told to you today. Somebody that has an amazing story. Our next guest is Curt Gear, a friend of mine, somebody that I very much admire. And we tell you here this. So without further ado, here’s Curt.

Well, welcome everybody to the Courageous Crossroads podcast. My guest Curt Gear is here with me. Curt, thanks for joining us today.

Curt Gear: Yeah, thank you for inviting me.

Jeff Johnson: And Curt and I know each other through Cross-Trainers, through a men’s group. And how long have you been going there?

Curt Gear: Well, off and on probably for about 15 years, but not as consistent as I’d like to be.

Jeff Johnson: Okay, that’s a lot. And you said you go with your dad and your uncles?

Curt Gear: My dad and my two uncles are there on a regular basis. They go every week. They usually don’t miss until they winter down south. But yeah, I’ll join them every chance I can.

Jeff Johnson: That’s wonderful. So do you have any brothers or…?

Curt Gear: I have one sister who lives down in Springdale, Arkansas area, but no brothers.

Jeff Johnson: Okay. Well, I appreciate you joining us on the podcast. Yeah, we’re going to talk about, I’m going to get down to this question: What’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done? And before that, kind of like everybody just to get to know you a little bit. So what kind of background—the Curt Gear short story from the beginning to where you’re sitting right now—whatever you want to share to bring us up to speed.

Curt Gear: Sure. So, grew up in small town Iowa Falls, up in North Central Iowa, moved to West Des Moines in 5th grade, and was basically in West Des Moines all the way through high school, graduated from Dowling in 1995. And then went to Iowa State for four years, graduated from Iowa State in 1999. It started a career in the IT world just a little bit, and then quickly transitioned to the construction side of things. And for the last 22 years, I’ve been doing business development sales types activities for precast concrete in the construction world.

Jeff Johnson: So, do we run into each other?

Curt Gear: We have. Yeah. Yeah, so a lot of insulated architectural precast wall panels and your company obviously does structural steel and other stuff like that. So I’m guessing out there there’s a lot of buildings where your material touched my material for sure.

Jeff Johnson: Wonderful. Yeah. Okay, so schooling?

Curt Gear: Iowa State had a College of Business degree in the MIS, which was Management Information Systems. Not technically using that degree very much for the last 22 years. But it did get me a jumpstart into the professional world and then my dad’s connections with several of the constructors and subcontractors is what kind of drug me into the world that I have been doing for 22 years now.

Jeff Johnson: How far does your concrete work go? So, state of Iowa or just…?

Curt Gear: Generally, it’s always been the state of Iowa and maybe a little bit in Nebraska, a little bit in Southern Minnesota for the most part. I would say the majority of the projects that I’ve been a part of have been the Central Iowa region, you know.

Jeff Johnson: Okay. Well, I feel duty bound to share with our listeners that I am a diehard Hawkeye and Curt is sitting in front of me wearing a quarter zip from Iowa State. And he’s circling it with his finger right now. And he and his wife are headed up to the women’s Iowa-Iowa State basketball game, which is going to be a throwdown up in Hilton Coliseum tonight. And so if the audience senses a little tension during the interview, that’s what it is. No, my dad’s an Iowa State guy. So I root for Iowa State as well. It’s just when you’re playing, when you’re beating up on my poor beloved Hawkeyes, it’s hard for me.

Curt Gear: And I find that very true of Hawkeye fans that they always root for Iowa State when they’re not playing Iowa. But for some reason, that’s not the case with Cyclone fans. We don’t generally root for Iowa even when they’re not playing us. And I think it’s from years and years of being the “loser little brother” and never being on the other side. It’s harder to cheer for the team you could just never beat for 20-some years.

Jeff Johnson: Oh my gosh. We need to go right to Matthew and the section on forgiveness right now. Oh my gosh. Okay, Curt, it’s an absolute blessing having you here. So I want to know a couple of things about courage before I ask you that big question. How do you define it? What does it mean to you?

Curt Gear: You know, I think I would define courage as doing the most difficult thing you have to even when you really, really don’t want to. And generally we’re all forced with choices in life that we didn’t see coming—choices that we didn’t want to have to make. But ultimately you come to some crossroads or fork in the road and you have to make a choice. And generally the more difficult one is the one that you end up knowing is the right choice to make. And it generally takes a lot of gut courage to walk down that path that you know you need to, even though you know it’s going to be hard and difficult and you just don’t want to do it.

Jeff Johnson: This is not something that you want to do, but it’s something that you feel duty bound that you need to do.

Curt Gear: Yep. And that’s where the courage is defined.

Jeff Johnson: Have you seen that demonstrated lately in society or…?

Curt Gear: Wow, in society.

Jeff Johnson: I reserve the right to ask all kinds of difficult questions.

Curt Gear: Yeah, that’s a great question. I don’t know if I could point to any one person in society and I certainly wouldn’t want to say anything political because I don’t think anybody in our political world is perfect. I don’t know if I have a direct example of seeing that in society. I would say that it feels like our society has moved away from the path of choosing the difficult road. And if there is an easier one available, we tend to go there. Or society encourages us that it’s not so bad to take the easy road.

Jeff Johnson: Well, that was another question I was going to ask you, if you think that there’s a deficit of courage in society. 100% you’re answering that. And you’re saying it’s because of people taking the path of least resistance.

Curt Gear: Yeah, and I think a lot of it comes back to—and we both know Gary Rosberg very well—but I think just the failure of the family over the years, single parenting, kids not having a… you know, fatherless homes. Matt Meckle is a great friend of mine and he runs a camp that’s 100% there because of what the damage of a fatherless home looks like. And I do work with Matt down there helping whenever I can; love that place. But I think that that’s the epitome of what’s happened to the family when you lose the father or two-parent household. And when they lose their rudder, they start making the easy choices even though they’re the wrong ones.

Jeff Johnson: Yeah, yeah, that’s good. Okay, so instead of something that happens in society that demonstrates courage, because that’s really a little bit of an unfair question—but are there people that you particularly look up to as being courageous people? Could be a past historical figure, it could be somebody contemporary. And you think, “Man, that person is courageous.”

Curt Gear: You know, I think what I saw—and I have these unbelievable brain lockups—but the gentleman… the gentleman who just got assassinated. Yeah, I can’t say his name…

Jeff Johnson: Charlie Kirk?

Curt Gear: Yes. I think what his wife did post his public assassination and how she handled it in the way she presented herself on National TV was one of the most courageous things I’ve ever seen anybody do. For her to be able to stand up there and give the glory to God after the entire world witnessed her husband being shot in the head by a horrible person who was soaked in evil. And for her to stand up there and tell the world that she forgives him… I mean, it was just for her to be there and be that strong. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.

Jeff Johnson: Right, right. No, I absolutely agree with you. The other thing is—I wish I had this quote, it’s a CS Lewis or a W Tozer or one of these guys—but they talk about how when people operate as Christians, when they really operate as Christians, it comes off as pompous or so abnormal that it just looks very odd. I remember people making that comment about Eric [Kirk] that she was a little bit full of herself. She came off a little bit like that when she was doing that. And I think that’s not the case. I think it’s exactly the case that she was anchored in her faith. And she was able to be courageous and stand up, stick her chin out and say what she had to say. And it looked odd. Do you agree with that?

Curt Gear: I mean, she could have easily just slunk into a dark room and nobody would have blamed her. Right? I mean, everybody would have said, “Oh, that poor woman, what she’s going through,” but she felt convicted to stand up and share the gospel in that moment.

Jeff Johnson: Yeah. Talk about a tough time to share the gospel. That’s a very courageous thing. So you’re a believer?

Curt Gear: Yes.

Jeff Johnson: Where did your faith come from?

Curt Gear: Mine was older in life. I was in my late 20s, 27. And I was not a believer most of my life. I went through my high school years, my college years, and even a few of my post-college years living like a typical man, enjoying life. And my parents both became Christians later in life as well. My dad was always raised Catholic; I went to a Catholic high school, but none of it ever resonated with me. And then in my early or mid 20s—actually early 20s—my parents started really pushing me on a regular basis to come to church with them, come to church with them. And they’re members of Valley. That’s where they’ve been since they became Christians.

And Sunday mornings were not something I wanted to get up for after being out till 2:00 AM Saturday night. So I would put them off and put them off and put them off. And I think like most things, it’s a slow burn. My parents stayed persistent, and I stayed stubborn for a long time. And then I think there was one particular Sunday morning where I finally kind of caved, got my you-know-what out of bed and went.

And Satan had such a strong hold on my heart at that point that when Pastor Quentin was talking, what I was hearing was, “He’s saying anything and everything he can to get us to give more money to the church.” I was just not… I was not able to hear God’s word. I was hearing Satan’s filter on God’s word. And I think that was true of the first two or three times that I attended. And that was probably over the course of like three or four months that I went only two or three times.

And then I don’t know if I can say that there was any one particular day that something changed, but the church had small groups. The only one that was really suited for me was the college ABF, because they didn’t have anything for single people basically, and I was a mid-twenties single person. And so I went to the college one and I just didn’t fit in. Everybody was still in college; I was three or four years removed. And then like two weeks later, all of a sudden they made an announcement that they’re going to start a post-college ABF for people that are out of college but are not newly married. Because that was kind of the first ABF after the college one.

And on the first day of that group, after they had announced it for two or three weeks, they hosted it at Jordan Creek Elementary right next door to the church. And they put out about 14 chairs in the hallway. 58 people showed up on the first day.

Jeff Johnson: Wow.

Curt Gear: And of that 58, there was something like 12 marriages that came out of that initial 58 people.

Jeff Johnson: Really?

Curt Gear: All 12 of those marriages are still together today.

Jeff Johnson: Wow.

Curt Gear: Isn’t that nuts? You want to tell you like… what about that? There was a need obviously. There were a lot of people that were living in West Des Moines that were out of college, that were single people that were going to church, but there was no small group. You’d go to service and then you went on with your dead connection. But boy, once that group started… it started at 58 and I think it grew into the upper 60s at one point. I mean, we had this little hallway; there were chairs for 30 yards on both sides before you could get enough chairs to seat everybody. And I met my wife—well, I saw her that very first day.

Jeff Johnson: Wow.

Curt Gear: And I didn’t meet her till two or three weeks later. But she was a big component of why I kept going to church for sure. Just that beauty connection—I wanted to go see her every Sunday.

Jeff Johnson: Thank you, Lord. We’re wired, right?

Curt Gear: Yeah. For sure. But then I also met some really great guys. And it was those great guys that really started to work on me. It wasn’t just about going there because Carrie was going to be there. It was the reason… what we were talking about. And there were some great adult leaders that led that group too. And I think ultimately between the men in my life that were part of that group and the leaders of that group, they pushed me. And I realized that I needed to make changes in my life. I needed to become a different person. And I accepted Jesus and got baptized, I don’t know, two or three months later when they had an adult baptism in the church.

Jeff Johnson: Okay.

Curt Gear: Yeah. And then obviously continued to pursue Carrie. And now we’ve been married 21 years. 21 years as of September.

Jeff Johnson: Wow. Yeah. I wasn’t planning on asking this, but I’ll ask you this anyway. What’s kept you anchored in your faith? Because I’m noticing lately there’s a lot of people that… I don’t want to say “waffle,” that sounds like such a pedestrian kind of a term. But you know, people fall in and out of their faith. They walk away from it. So what is it about your faith that’s kept you anchored?

Curt Gear: Well, I don’t know as far as if there’s an anchor, I can tell you that I definitely haven’t been a perfect Christian for the last 20 years.

Jeff Johnson: Me either.

Curt Gear: 28 years or five, six years… God. I’m old. I just turned 49. And most people might say that’s not old, you’ve got a long way. But for me, it feels old. But I think my anchor has just been that God is… I’ve always felt Him do the big things for me, even though I haven’t been perfect to Him all the time. And so there’s just that—I think I call it my constant reminder that I need to be thankful for all the things that He helped me do that I just didn’t know what I was doing. I mean, it’s like anything else. You build that muscle up, you know.

Sometimes you make big decisions and you don’t ask God’s help when you make those big decisions. And boy, do things go bad. And then one time you say, “Alright, this time I’m going to make sure I’m praying and asking for God’s guidance.” And then wow, look at how everything came together. And I’ve just had enough of those things happen to me now that I just know (A) that He’s real, He’s there, He loves me. And as long as I come to Him, He’s going to show me the right path. It’s when I try to do things on my own that things go really bad.

Jeff Johnson: See, I love that. That’s like… that’s attacking it like a scientist. Here’s the answer because I have empirical evidence. Because I’ve done this and this and this and He’s always been true and He’s always been gracious and He’s always been guiding and He’s always been there.

Curt Gear: Yeah. I’m batting a thousand when I let Him make the decision. And I’m batting zero when I’m like, “I got this, I know what I’m doing.”

Jeff Johnson: You do. Yeah. Oh my gosh, we’re the same that way. Okay, so let me go ahead and ask you. We’ll see where the conversation goes from this. What’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done?

Curt Gear: To answer the question, I probably need to step back to the start. But the answer to that question is that I had to make a decision to continue to do chemotherapy and a cancer treatment that I was going through when I didn’t have clarity from any of my doctors as to whether I needed to. And there were going to be real ramifications to continue it, and there were possible benefits.

But if you don’t mind, I’d like to back up a little bit. In January of 2022, I was playing basketball at Valley Community Center on a regular basis with a bunch of really great guys. And my knee started hurting and I went in and saw my orthopedic surgeon and he said, “Yeah, you’re 40-something playing basketball. You probably tore your meniscus.” He said, “But we need to get an MRI to find out.”

So in January, I get an MRI. Sure enough, he sees a flap tear in the meniscus and schedules surgery. I also was having shoulder problems. So I did a surgery on my knee in February, a surgery on my shoulder in March, and recovered from those throughout the summer months. I took my family to Florida—this was in the throes of COVID-21, August of ’21. Went to Florida with the whole family to do kind of a vacation just to get away from Iowa for a little bit. Made the mistake of going to a wonderful children’s museum down there in Orlando. And we all came back with COVID, the Delta variant.

And my wife spent six days in the ER, the hospital at Methodist, on a breathing machine and on an antiviral medicine. And I was home for 10 days down. Both of my boys obviously recovered from it like young kids; they just bounced back from it. So it hit me hard. My wife even harder. She had an oxygen concentrator that she had to cart around with her at home for three months after she got out of the hospital. And it was very, very hard on her.

And when I started feeling better, I wanted to get back to playing basketball again. And so I went and I started playing basketball again. And the very first time I played, the next day, my knee hurt really bad again. And I said, “Well, that’s not right.” So I went back to my orthopedic and he said, “Well, maybe I didn’t do the surgery perfect or maybe you retore the meniscus again. But let’s get another MRI.”

And in October 1st-ish, I had that second MRI in nine months after the first one. And he’s like, “Yes, you tore your meniscus again. But we also now see something in your femur that we don’t know what it is and we need to figure it out.” So I was referred to a specialist at John Stoddard to do a bone biopsy where they basically drive a needle into your bone and use a CT machine to dig into the mass that they see. We didn’t know at that time it was a tumor, it was just a mass.

Jeff Johnson: In the bone.

Curt Gear: In the bone. Like the bottom of your femur where it’s right above the knee where it thickens up. It was like a little 1.6 centimeter round egg in the middle of my femur. And so they had to take a needle and shove it in there and pull some of the material out and do a test. And the Des Moines Pathology Department came back right before Thanksgiving with results saying that they didn’t think it was anything; they thought it was a fibrous benign growth. Nothing to worry about.

But they also said they were going to send the slides to Mayo Clinic for reread and confirmation kind of thing. And I think that’s pretty standard operating procedures. But so Thanksgiving, my family all knew that they had found this tumor, but I was able to share with everybody at Thanksgiving that it’s a fibrous growth, nothing to worry about.

And then I was obviously also thinking about my meniscus and needing to do another knee surgery to fix the meniscus that I retore. And basically I was pushing my doctor to do the surgery before the end of the calendar year. I had already hit my out-of-pocket max, you know, all the stuff that goes along with insurance. I wanted to get the surgery done. He said, “I’d rather not until we know what Mayo’s…” but Mayo was not getting any answer back to us quickly.

Long story short, I did a second knee surgery on December 10th. And two days later I got a call from my orthopedic surgeon and I thought it was just his typical follow-up, “Hey, how you feeling?” two days post-surgery. And he’s like, “I got some bad news.” I said, “What’s that?” He says, “The Mayo Clinic came back and said that it’s a very rare form of a very unique cancer.” And I probably won’t say the full diagnosis correctly, but it was an undifferentiated spindle cell sarcoma of the bone, but it was non-osteoid based—which is a lot of technical jargon that at the time just hit me like a ton of bricks.

You know, here I was post-Thanksgiving thinking I was free and clear, just had knee surgery. And now all of a sudden right before Christmas, it’s a cancer diagnosis. And I’ve never had a firsthand experience with cancer with anybody in my immediate family. At this point, knew nothing about what I was getting into. I was totally green.

But at Christmas, I had to share with the whole family that I had a cancer that was a very aggressive form of a sarcoma, extremely rare, and that I was going to be starting a very difficult regimen of chemotherapy treatments—two of them—and then there’d be a very major surgery to resect or cut out eight centimeters of my femur and basically rebuild my knee and my leg after that. And there wasn’t a lot of time.

I mean, I found out I was diagnosed and then within two days I had to make a decision as to whether I was going to use… there were basically two experts that could do this surgery. And they had the protocol set up. They were like, “This is what you do.”

Jeff Johnson: Well, the protocol—remove this, treat with chemotherapy, rebuild?

Curt Gear: And the protocol for this cancer is a pediatric protocol because it generally only happens to… it happens to children when their bones are in a state of growth. I was one of two people in the entire Midwest at the time over the age of 40 that got diagnosed from this cancer. There was only two of us.

Jeff Johnson: Wow.

Curt Gear: And there was one at Mayo Clinic and then I was at University of Iowa hospitals. And I had to pick a doctor basically. And so I did a little bit of research in the gentleman in Iowa City. Everything I read about him… this guy was a couple years younger than me, but probably the most renowned sarcoma orthopedic surgeon in the country. He was the head of some national board. And I just got this overwhelming sense of comfort. And I was like, you know, God telling me this is the guy. This is who you’re going to go see.

And so sharing everything with everybody at Christmas was tough. And then between Christmas and New Year’s, I had to go get a PET scan to see if there was any other cancer anywhere else in the body. That came back negative. There was the clear one in the femur, and that was it.

Jeff Johnson: Can I jump in and ask—what’s your faith doing to you?

Curt Gear: Oh, I would say the best way is in the middle of this… so this morning at Cross-Trainers, he was talking about the lake and how flat it is on top, but how much was going on underneath of it. I was projecting probably a level of confidence that I wasn’t feeling on the inside. I had two kids that were at that time… you know, now they’re a senior and a sophomore. So three years ago, I had a sophomore and a seventh grader or eighth grader. So I had two boys that I didn’t want to show any kind of fear or doubt. So I just… I kind of kept my face flat.

But I think after a little while, I realized that I had to at some point change the heart. Because this was only going to last so long—the facade. And I remember when I went in for my PET scan, I was in a good place and the tech who was giving me my infusion of dye or whatever before the PET scan was asking me questions. And he was like, “Are you a Christian by chance?” And I said, “Absolutely. How do you know?” He’s like, “You’re really in a good mood for someone who just found out all this stuff.” And I was like, “Well, you know, whether I wanted this or not, I have it. And I can handle it one of two ways. I can be angry and fearful and I can project a horrible [attitude], or I can project light and share and use these as opportunities to talk to my nursing staff and others.”

And let them know that I’m just not afraid of it. Which I probably was deep down inside. I mean, we all are when it comes right down to it. There’s going to be a little bit of that fear of what’s next and what’s going to happen.

The two things that hit me the hardest over the next six months were how horrible chemotherapy is. I mean, I had known or heard, but my first two rounds of chemo were the worst.

Jeff Johnson: Yeah.

Curt Gear: And because they only had a pediatric course—there was only a pediatric treatment for this type of cancer—they didn’t have anything for adults because it just never happens to adults. But generally the kids… who are really unbelievable, what they go through. But they go through three different drugs. And one of the drugs is called high-dose Methotrexate or something like that. And if an adult over 40 gets a dose of it, it almost always causes permanent paralysis instantly. So that was out.

Jeff Johnson: So they can give it to kids?

Curt Gear: They can give it to kids.

Jeff Johnson: But you can’t.

Curt Gear: Under the age of 30 is about their cut-off. But generally, again, this only happens to kids 18 or so and under once your growth plates fuse and you stop growing. Generally, this isn’t a cancer that happens in the bone anyway. So yeah, I was only able to take two of the drugs. One of them was going to cause hearing issues and they knew that. But that was the course of action.

So in the first two doses that I took—and they were 21 days apart—in the first two doses I lost about 27% of my hearing. And it’s a neurological damage, not temporal or anything that they could fix with hearing aids. It was a neurological damage to where I can’t… like I said, I’m about 20% down.

Jeff Johnson: It doesn’t come back?

Curt Gear: No. And I have both… it’s both ears. And the other thing is that I have 24/7 tinnitus. So right now, all day, every day, awake, sleep, breathing, I have ringing in both ears. And it’s not unnoticeable. It’s there. But man, your brain is an amazing tool because somehow your brain somehow ignores it until you’re sitting in that deep quiet area. And then all of a sudden it’s just really loud.

But it was something I was very fearful of, like losing hearing. And then after the first two rounds of chemo, then there’s the surgery. They want to try to kill… the doctor said they were hopeful that the first two rounds of chemo would cause anywhere from 80% to 90% necrosis of the tumor. So they wanted to see a 90% death rate. So the surgery was to cut out 8 centimeters of the femur so that the tumor that was inside of the bone would be fully enveloped. They kept talking about, “Don’t want to crack the egg. Don’t want to crack the egg.”

So the tumor that’s inside the bone… they want to get it out of the body while it’s completely encapsulated in something. So after the surgery, there was a pathology done on it. And they found that there was 0% necrosis of the tumor. The two rounds of chemo had done nothing. They had caused zero death to the cancerous cells. And this is where this talk leads to.

Jeff Johnson: Because it took your 27% of your hearing and gave you tinnitus.

Curt Gear: And I still had four more rounds of chemo that they wanted me to do.

Jeff Johnson: Were you—just stepping back one little step—you knew, you said you knew the pitfalls of chemotherapy. And I’m sure your doctors were telling you, “These are some of the potential outcomes,” etc. Especially because it’s a pediatric treatment, etc. When you walked in, were you ready to deal with that or were you full of fear? How do you handle that first round of chemotherapy? Because I would have been my fist balled in just “What’s going to happen?” I would have been thinking the worst.

Curt Gear: I went into my room and I had a big Iowa State blanket, which I know you don’t like to hear. But I was at the University of Iowa hospitals and I was sitting… and so I took over a duffle bag that had an Iowa State logo on it. And I pulled out my giant Iowa State blanket and I laid it across my bed. I wanted every nurse and doctor and patient to know. And I wore this exact quarter zip on my first round of chemo.

Jeff Johnson: Good for you.

Curt Gear: And I allowed my extravertedness and a little bit of humor to try to keep me as light as I could. And I had no idea what I was getting into. I just went into it with the doctors telling me that this is what we needed to do. And I was just trusting that they were right. And really they were.

But one of the momentous things that happened to Carrie and I was when we met with our oncologist. You know, he shared with us about the type of cancer and the chemotherapy drugs and what they were going to be like and everything else. “And when do you want to get started?” I mean, we met with him on January 3rd in Iowa City. And I was back there two days later checking into the hospital on the 5th to start my first round of chemo. There was no gestation period. This is what we need to do. And we need to start ASAP. We can come back and it was, “We’ll see Wednesday.”

But when we were done with that meeting, I thought we had kind of finished everything up. And he’s standing up and getting ready to leave the room. And he says, “The only thing we haven’t talked about yet is prognosis.” And in full disclosure, when he said the word “prognosis,” I had no idea what he meant. But what I didn’t know was that he was about to tell me that I had a 50% chance of being alive in five years. And he told me.

Jeff Johnson: Wow.

Curt Gear: I stopped listening after he said that. I didn’t know what prognosis meant, but I learned very quickly. And that was the one thing that my wife and I made a decision right there: we weren’t going to share that with anybody. We do now. After two years clear, your prognosis goes up from 50% to like 98%. I mean, it’s like basically if it doesn’t metastasize in your lungs in the first two years, it never [does]. It’s just such an aggressive cancer that it’s going to move within two years or you got it.

And so after the two-year mark, we had a big celebration and I was kind of able to exhale a little bit and share that stuff with everybody. But that was a fact that… that’s hard to hear. Someone tells you, “You know, here’s a quarter, flip it, and in five years…” And to carry that… I mean, you carried that with your wife. Your wife helped you with that burden, but to carry that for a couple years without sharing that with anybody. Oh my gosh. That’s got to be so hard.

Curt Gear: So the real courageous part came when—and I call it courageous, I don’t know—but it was such a unique cancer in my age. And what happened when the necrosis came back at 0%. There was actually a… they call it a tumor board review meeting where the oncologists will meet with the pathologists who will meet with the surgeon after the surgery and after they have the pathology.

Jeff Johnson: So the real courageous part came when—and I call it courageous, I don’t know—but it was such a unique cancer in my age. And what happened when the necrosis came back at 0%. There was actually a… they call it a tumor board review meeting where the oncologists will meet with the pathologists who will meet with the surgeon after the surgery and after they have the pathology. And they come to a decision as to what the best course of action is moving forward. And they got in a fight is what I was told.

Jeff Johnson: They had a large dissonance in front of you?

Curt Gear: No, in the room. There was a large disagreement between the oncologist and the surgeon and pathology. They said the tumor was enveloped completely within the bone. We got great margins and there was 0% of necrosis. Why would we have them continue chemotherapy? It didn’t do anything. And the oncologist’s argument back was, well, if there’s a single cancerous cell that made it out of that tumor and is spinning around the body in the bloodstream, if we can kill it with four more rounds of chemo, then we’re going to save his life.

So, Carrie and I went to Iowa City post-surgery and we met with my surgical team. And he was like, “You know, I don’t think you need to do any more chemo.” And I—I mean, I literally, I could jump because my leg was in a, you know, a brace and I just had major knee surgery, but I was so happy. I mean, both of us were. The idea of not having to do any more of that chemotherapy that just… it basically brings you to the point of just wanting to be dead for like 11 days. And then you start to recover in about 14 days and you feel pretty good. And then you just start counting down because you know, 7, 6, 5, 4, more days, you got to go back for another dose. And it’s, it’s just so demoralizing.

Jeff Johnson: Yeah.

Curt Gear: So, when he told us, “Yeah, I just don’t think you need to do any more chemo,” we left there and we’re like bouncing around the hospital, having lunch, ready to go see the oncologist. So, we think he’s going to say the same thing. And we’re going to go home and be like, “Sweet.” And we go see our oncologist and he immediately comes in and says, “I know that you’ve probably heard, but I believe that you should do these last four rounds.” And he gave us an argument why.

And I had to listen to that argument and, you know, he made a good point. You know, this drug that they give you is so bad that you could only have six doses of it in a lifetime. And so, I’ve already had two. And if I were to ever have some other kind of cancer that needed this, I would only be able to get four more doses, which wouldn’t be a full course. So, his argument was: take the full course now. It’s going to suck. But that means we’ve done everything we can to make sure that if there is one little cancerous cell floating around your body, we’ve done everything we can to try to kill it.

And, Carrie and I came home and I was—I was tore up for a week trying to figure out what to do because the chemotherapy was torture. And if I had chosen to stop, there would have been all kinds of doctors that would have supported me. And the hard decision was to decide to do the last four rounds of chemo. And ultimately, I made that decision and I went back to that hospital four more times. And it was tough. Chemo is cumulative. So, each time you get it, the recovery gets a little bit worse. And how it hits you gets a little bit worse. So, by the last one, it kills you.

Jeff Johnson: I mean, how long did it take for you to finish the four courses?

Curt Gear: Six months.

Jeff Johnson: Six months.

Curt Gear: Well, the total was six months. I started in January and I was…

Jeff Johnson: That would be once a month?

Curt Gear: It was every 21 days. Almost once a month. But then there was a bigger break after the second one because the surgery was so significant that they gave me like four weeks off between doses so that I could recover from the surgery.

Jeff Johnson: Yeah.

Curt Gear: But by the time that last round of chemo came, I was—I was ready to be done.

Jeff Johnson: Yeah. Everybody is.

Curt Gear: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it was—it was a very difficult decision to come to the conclusion that I’m going to get myself four more doses of this poison that just destroys you. And then you recover from it and then you do it again and you recover from it and you do it again. And it’s…

Jeff Johnson: That’s real courage. It is because you know what you’re getting into now—you’ve had two and this has happened to you and you’re like, “I’m walking right into the furnace.” Yeah. What was the driver that pushed you to make that decision? I mean, you’re listening to the professionals and like you said, you’ve got somebody over on this side that’s saying, “You’re fine. You don’t need it.” You’ve got a professional opinion. You’ve got somebody else over here that’s making an argument. Was it just a better argument was made or was it that “I got to do this for my kids? I got to do this for myself. I know it’s going to be hard, but I want to know that I know that I know.” Yeah. I mean, what… how did… was it your faith? The Lord tell you to do it?

Curt Gear: I think it was a little bit of two things. One, I felt like I had to be able to say that if it came back, if it did metastasize six months or a year down the road, I had to be able to tell myself, “Well, I did everything I could, everything that was available when I had the opportunity.” I was just saying back, it was just going to be that this was God’s plan for me because your mortality rate if it makes it to your lungs is 99%. Nobody survives it. If Sarcoma makes it into your lungs, there is nobody that survives that. That’s it. There’s never been someone who’s made it five years after it’s made it into your lungs.

But I think it was… I needed to be able to say to myself if it came back that I, at the time, did everything I could. I wouldn’t want to look back and say, “I didn’t do what was going to be tough and painful because it was easier to listen to one side of my doctoral team and kind of say, well, he said I didn’t need to do it so I’m not.”

But one of the things that happened to me—and I’m not doing a very good job of sharing this chronologically—but this is something that happened to me that I really… I don’t know how many people I shared it with. When we were going in for my very first chemo round, my wife’s brother and his wife lived in Iowa City. So, Carrie would go—because it was during COVID, so she couldn’t stay at the hospital—she had visiting hours like 9:00 to 5:00 or 8:30 to 4:30 or something. So, 4:30 she would go over to her brother’s house and sleep there. So, when we went to Iowa City, we went to his house, dropped all her stuff off, and as we were driving to the hospital is when it first really hit me that I was going in for this. And I kind of lost it, broke down in tears at a stoplight. And I remember like, not yelling, but speaking loudly, saying, “God, why am I going through this?”

First time in my life that I heard Him audibly talk. And He just—I mean, I thought Carrie heard it, we were in a car, I thought she heard it—He just, clear as day said, “I’m here with you.” That’s all He said. I heard it just like sitting here. And I looked over and I go, “Did you hear that?” She goes, “Hear what?” I said, “Oh, you didn’t hear that.” I said, “I think God just spoke to me.” And He just said, “I’m here with you.” And then we drove to the hospital and started this fun road.

Jeff Johnson: Wow. So, you’re one of the lucky few that have gotten to hear God’s audible voice. Every one of my questions that I have for you now seem like they fall so far short of… wow. Thank you for being so transparent and sharing this.

Curt Gear: Yeah.

Jeff Johnson: I mean, what a road that you’ve been on. Yeah. What’s this today for you? Are you cancer free now?

Curt Gear: Yeah.

Jeff Johnson: Do you have follow-ups and they check all your other bones and they’re going through you top to bottom and all this kind of stuff? And they know that you’re good, that you’re good, that you’re good?

Curt Gear: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I had a course of follow-ups for the first two years. I was getting chest CT scans every three months because that’s where sarcomas always go. So every three months, it was “we want to see if there’s anything in your lungs.” And for the first year or so, those were some of the most difficult times for me. You’d go get the CT scan and then you’d have a three or four hour weight period before the doctor would meet with you and tell you the results. And so for three or four hours, you would sit in this room or this waiting area and you would wait for someone to tell you whether you’re going to live or whether you’re going to die. And I went through that every three months for two years.

Jeff Johnson: Wow.

Curt Gear: Yeah. So I had… my wife will tell you we went to the ER a lot in the first six months because the human mind is a very powerful thing. And I would have phantom pains that my mind would create within my chest. I would be laying on the couch and all of a sudden I would feel something very sharp in my chest and I would just rabbit hole. And it would stay with me and it would get worse and I would go, and it would be going to the ER thinking I was having a heart attack, and everything would be clear. And I’d go home and it’d go away.

But I got to realize that there’s this term that most cancer survivors are familiar with now. It’s called “scanxiety.” Your scan anxiety—it’s real and it sucks. It’s almost worse than the diagnosis and everything else because, again, you’ve been through this war of surviving your treatment. And now you’re doing your follow-up, which sounds great because you’re post-treatment. But every three months or every six months, you go in and you get checked and you have to wait for those results. And even the days leading up to the scan, your anxiety level and your fear just starts to climb.

Jeff Johnson: And then the trigger of going to the hospital.

Curt Gear: Yeah, like I say, I think we went to the ER four times in the first four months. I was sure that it was in my lungs and I’d go there and they’d do a CT and they’d be like, “Nope, lungs look good.” And then you’d go home and the pain would go away.

Jeff Johnson: You still have that now?

Curt Gear: No, it’s like running—the more you do it, the easier it gets.

Jeff Johnson: So, scanxiety… was it through the two years and then the last one? I mean was there a last one when they said, “You know, I’m going to sign your card here and you don’t have to come back anymore, you’re good”?

Curt Gear: Yeah, that doesn’t happen with this type of cancer. I get scanned annually for the rest of my life. But it went for the first two years… it was every three months. For year three, it was four months. For years four and five, it’s every six months and then after year five, it’s once a year. But they’ll check me annually for the rest of my life just because I’ve had a positive sarcoma diagnosis.

But after two years and after enough of these, you get good at being more in control of your anxiety level. And after two years when the prognosis moved from 50 to 98, you know, there was this huge weight lifted off my shoulder. It wasn’t that I wasn’t trusting God and all that, but we’re humans. And we experience those doubts. Even the strongest Christians that go through cancer will tell you that there’s fear and anxiety that comes with those scans.

And you know, one of the things you ask, kind of what’s come out of this… I felt every time I was in the hospital, you know, I didn’t sleep a whole lot. In fact, the first night in my chemo after they started my drip, I couldn’t sleep. And so I took my little tower that had my pump on it with my drugs hanging from it, and I started walking around the floor. I was sitting on the fourth floor. There’s about 80 rooms that are all cancer patients just on one floor. There wasn’t a room that didn’t have two people in it.

Jeff Johnson: Really?

Curt Gear: Every room. And so I spent—according to the nurse, I didn’t come back to the room until about 4:30 in the morning because I went around and I put my hand on every single door and I prayed for them. Took me about six hours.

Jeff Johnson: Wow.

Curt Gear: I only did it the first time. And I kind of regret not doing it again. But the first time, that first night was the first time I had enough energy.

Jeff Johnson: Oh, the power of that though. Oh my goodness. Wow.

Curt Gear: And I had some of the most horrific experiences with my roommates. I was never in a room by myself until my last round of chemo. And I think that was God’s gift. He allowed me to be without a roommate for my final round. But each of my five rounds previous to that, I had roommates. And unfortunately, there was times when I had several roommates.

I had probably the hardest thing I dealt with… I had a roommate who, when I got in there, he was over there sitting up talking. His wife was there with him. There’s a curtain so you can only hear a conversation, can’t see anything. But he was just talking about how, you know, he kind of felt like something was wrong but didn’t know. And then they finally got a diagnosis. And about 10 o’clock that night, all of a sudden he started coughing a little bit. And then the cough got worse and barkier. And I’m sitting over there on my side of the room, you know, watching TV or reading or trying to sleep. And then all of a sudden I can hear him really coughing bad. And probably within two hours, they were coding him. And I could hear the doctors going just like almost yelling at each other, “We don’t know what’s wrong! We don’t know what’s going on!”

And at one point, one of the nurses finally came on my side of the curtain and was like, “Can you get up and walk?” And I said, “Yeah.” She’s like, “Would you like to go sit in like the family waiting room or something?” And I was like, “Yeah, I’d probably prefer to.” Because he went from being fine… and the hardest part of that for me was that I was the only one that heard him tell his wife, “I’ll see you in the morning. I love you.” And then she left. And I don’t think he was still there in the morning.

And so it’s motivated me to do everything I can to share my story so that I can maybe help someone else who’s going or will go through cancer. And Valley for a short time did a kind of a cancer support group and I got to help facilitate that. And we had a group of people that came in that had all kinds of different stories. Yeah, I mean, I just feel like I learned so much that I never wanted to learn, but I feel like God let me go through this. Not because I did anything wrong, but because He needed me to be able to have experienced something so that when I talk to someone who’s dealing with that, I can relate to them. Because I think that’s what He called me to do with this is to be someone who’s willing and able to go into a room and share with someone about what they’re about to go through.

Jeff Johnson: You mentioned that the last Cross-Trainers meeting was talking about the lake, how it’s calm on top, and there’s other stuff going on underneath. You know, that’s one of the reasons why I’m so grateful to talk to you today because I couldn’t tell you about your travails with the cancer diagnosis and everything from that… and the amazing survival story. What I can tell you is from what I know of you, just meeting you at Cross-Trainers, is that you project a confidence and a softness and a sweetness. And it’s radioactive. You can pick up on it with people. You know, somebody will walk into the room—I’m not trying to slobber on you, Curt—I’m just saying somebody will walk into the room and you’re like, “That guy feels good.” You know what I mean? And you just notice it. And that’s what I’ve always noticed about you. So I’m sitting here having this epiphany going, “Oh, I see. This is a man of tremendous faith that’s walked through a very difficult circumstance, walked through it with God, made difficult decisions, very courageous decisions, and is seeing it now from the other side.” Oh, I get it. Do you know what I mean? Like that you… you’re carrying something. Do you recognize that?

Curt Gear: I think I do recognize it, but there’s also that survivor’s guilt that a lot of cancer patients go through. So cancer takes so many people that are completely undeserving. None of us deserve to have cancer, but we live in a fallen world where cancer is something that exists in it. But you know, like watching my roommate go from being perfectly fine to basically passing away right in front of me in six hours and having other people that I know that have had cancers and they just… I mean, Ruth, you know, just thinking about Pastor Quentin’s wife… there’s that survivor’s guilt. And I think unfortunately sometimes that survivor’s guilt causes us to not want to share what we learned and went through because we don’t want to brag about the fact that we’re still alive when other people aren’t.

And you know, my sister-in-law passed away of a glioblastoma last Christmas and she was the closest person that I’ve ever met on this earth to Jesus. And if ever there was someone who didn’t deserve to go through what she went through, it was her. But God allowed her to go through that just like He allowed me to go through mine. And she went home to be with Him on Christmas morning. And my brother-in-law has five daughters and a son who’s now married and has his first grandchild and Amy didn’t get to meet her first grandchild. And there are all these things that he could be just angry about and bitter about. It’s just not fair and she didn’t deserve this. But he walks around and he is joyful and shares how grateful he was about the time that he had with her.

And that her death has hit me hard as someone who maybe wasn’t always the greatest person their whole life and has made plenty of mistakes. And yet I got to survive mine. Why? What did I do to deserve to survive mine? Why did she not? Those are the kind of things that if you haven’t gone through cancer, you’re just not going to realize how much of a mental fight that is—to want to come here and share your story about “I made it,” but others don’t. And it doesn’t make any sense.

Jeff Johnson: You’re very generous with your story, Curt. And I, again, I mean, I just appreciate it so much. A couple more questions before we close here. You said that you kept the details of the diagnosis from your family. You and your wife went through this process. When you got to the end of it and you shared more of the details, how did they react to that? Is that a fair question?

Curt Gear: It is. And I think everybody reacted differently. I would say the overwhelming response we got was, “Oh geez, I didn’t know that.” And I would say, “Yes, you didn’t know that because we didn’t share it with you.” Because we didn’t need to put that level of worry on others. It was kind of that cross I wanted to bear and carry. I made a decision to not share it, especially with our kids. But not with our parents either.

Jeff Johnson: For family members or friends? I never want… you know, we just— “Hey, this is what I’ve got. I’m going to do six rounds of chemo. I’m going to have a really big knee surgery and I’ll be fine on the other side.” And it was to not burden them, or it was so that you could walk through it the way that you needed to walk through it without any secondary concerns?

Curt Gear: I think it was to not burden them. I just knew, like, the news hit me so hard—that whole flip of the coin and you’ll be here in five years or not—that I just… I couldn’t fathom sharing that with someone else. I mean, Carrie was in the room. And if she hadn’t been, I might not have told her. But we were in the room together when he said, “Okay, last thing we need to talk about is prognosis.” And then he just blurted that out as fast as he could. And I just went, “Huh? I have a 50% chance of still being here in five years.” It took a long time for that to fully sink in. But boy, it’s like getting hit in the face with a ton of bricks when someone says those words to you.

Jeff Johnson: I can’t imagine. So they reacted the way you would have expected them to react. Right. And it sure is a lot easier to tell them that when you pass the two-year mark and can say, “Well, my prognosis now is 98, 99%.”

So the second part of that is from a courage standpoint. Is there anything that you would have done different going through that process?

Curt Gear: I think I don’t have any regrets. I would say the thing I wish I could have done more of is I wish I could have shared my faith with more of my roommates. And I did have good conversations with a few of them. One guy who was in there that was terminal… it was just a matter of time. And I said, “Hey, do you know where you’re going?” And he’s like, “Yeah, oh, yeah.” And then we had a good conversation.

But there was times when I was just so weak and sick. I mean the drugs are awful. And I felt like I didn’t lose my motivation to share with people, I just lost my ability. Like the first night I’m in the hospital, I spent six hours walking around putting my hand on 66 doors. And their names are listed on the little sheet right outside the door and I would pray for the people by name. And I went around to each and every door before I went to bed that night.

Jeff Johnson: What an act of faith, Curt. Wow. Wow. And that’s what you say when I asked you the question, what would you have done different? “I would share my faith more. I would pray for more people.” Good for you.

Okay. Somebody’s going through a difficult situation like this right now. Somebody’s getting the diagnosis today. What are you telling them?

Curt Gear: I would tell them to call me. I mean, I really feel like God wanted me to go through this so that in some way, shape or form, I can be out there to listen to people and just relate to them and empathize with them. And I say call me, but what I would recommend is I would say find a cancer support group. Find a group of people that have gone through it or are going through it because you have to talk. You have to talk through this stuff. The people that kind of do this alone and bottle it up and don’t share it with anybody and hide it… man, it’ll just eat at you. The more I tell this story, the more I feel like I’m healing. And I love the opportunity to share this. It’s hard for me to share it, obviously. It’s a vulnerable state. But what God did through all of it… you know, He put me through a fire so that I would come out on the other side and be ready to go to battle with people that need help. That’s what I’d like to do.

Jeff Johnson: That’s what you’re doing right now, Curt. You’ve heard me share this before that one of my favorite quotes is: if you want somebody to know the truth, you tell them the truth. But if you want somebody to love the truth, you tell them the story. And that’s your testimony. That’s what you’re walking around with. And I think people are going to be profoundly moved with your vulnerability and what you shared with us today.

Curt Gear: And I think the problem is this cancer has such a horrible stigma, you know, where people think they did something wrong. And so there’s this shame of, “Oh, I got cancer because I did something wrong.” And so I’m going to hide it. I’ll tell my immediate family, but I’m going to keep it quiet. But man, this is such a hard thing to go through to try to do it without a support group. It’s just got to make it 10 times harder.

Jeff Johnson: Was that eye-opening, doing the support group at Valley?

Curt Gear: 100%, yeah. I had no idea what I was getting into. I literally met with Quentin and that was right after Ruth had gotten diagnosed. And I said, “You guys, I don’t know what this looks like. But when I was in the hospital, I was asking God, not ‘Why did you do this to me?’ but ‘What do you want me to do with this?'” And I got this strong sense that He wanted me to go back to the church and find a way to help others that are going through this.

And we had a wonderful lady, Donna Nelson, who had pancreatic cancer. And she was the most profound woman I’ve ever talked to in my life. Pancreatic cancer is terminal; there is no cure for it. They wanted to do this particular procedure on her that might extend her life a little bit, but it would be a horrible recovery. And she looked at them and said, “No, thank you. I love my God and I’m ready to go see Him.” And she was the person in our group that… man, I felt this big whenever she spoke. She was just this rock. And she passed away I think just this last summer. But boy, did she live. And she shared unabashedly that she knew who God was and He had her and she was going home. It was really awesome to watch.

Jeff Johnson: Man, praise God. And now I wonder who’s sitting on the other side of the circle, saying that same thing about Curt Gear. You know what I mean? Curt, thank you so much for sharing with us today. And I admire you and I look up to you and I’m grateful to call you a friend.

Curt Gear: Thank you.

Announcer: Curt Gear, man of great courage. Thanks for being here. Very much appreciate it. Thank you for joining us today on Courageous. If you’d like to hear more about the work and ministry being done at Crossroads Apologetics, please visit our home on the web at crossroadsapologetics.org. Would you or someone you know like to be featured on Courageous? Send us an email at info@crossroadsapologetics.com or info@crossroadsapologetics.org, telling us about the most courageous thing you’ve ever done.