Roger's Passing

#179 / Flood Time Capsule: 2016

This week in 2016, our dear friend Roger Samples — co-founder of The Flood four decades earlier — lost his five-year battle with cancer.

When Rog was diagnosed in 2011, his doctors’ dire prediction was that he might have as little as six months to live. However, a battery of very aggressive treatments extended his life.

As a result, our friend got to see major events in his life, like his youngest child, Cathleen, graduating from high school in 2014 and, the following year, his son Kyle marrying his love Kelly. Roger also had a few more memorable sessions with his old Flood buddies.

But oh, those were tough times in those last five years. At one point, Roger was drained by weekly sessions of both radiation and chemo treatments, leading to many days of sickness and despair in between his hospital visits.

A Sad Christmas

The misery began in the last weeks of 2010. Charlie still recalls being on the phone with Roger one evening for one of their frequent marathon chats when his friend happened to mention in passing that he was going to see a doctor about the persistent cough that had troubled him lately. No big deal, he said. Probably just allergies.

But it wasn’t. On Christmas afternoon came a dreadful email.

“The news from all my tests is not good,” Rog wrote. “Looks like I have a tumor in my left lung."

Dropping everything, Charlie immediately phoned the Samples’ Mount Sterling, Ky., home. He was surprised to find Roger more upbeat than he expected. In fact, Rog was even guardedly hopeful going into further tests the following week.

The tumor, which was a little over 5 cm, was in the same location as a "spot" that was discovered 20 years earlier when fellow Floodster Dave Peyton had hooked Rog up with the specialist at a Huntington hospital. This prompted Roger to hope the tumor might be benign as the spot was. However, the doctor was not so optimistic, saying the tumor was twice the size of of the spot back in the 1990s.

“Well,” Rog concluded, “if it turns out I got to lose a lung, I would like to get some songs sung first...”

As reported here in an earlier article, that remark led to a wonderful, warm afternoon of music and stories on a cold weekend few weeks later at the Samples house.

The Pain Begins

The first weeks of January were terrible. Roger suffered a collapsed lung during the procedure to get the biopsy, resulting in a couple of miserable nights in the hospital as doctors got the lung back up and functioning.

Roger always had trouble tolerating pain medication; this visit to Lexington’s Markey Cancer Center at the University of Kentucky was especially bad. He had awful reactions to everything they tried to give him for the pain. They finally had to simply stop the procedure. They did, though, get enough evidence to confirm it was cancer.

In February, Rog started chemo, with a treatment every day for a week, then a three-week break before the next round. In addition, a five-day-a-week radiation regime started.

March was a roller coaster of bad days and good days. “Both my doctors said I was doing well," Roger said in an email at one point. "I'd hate to be doing badly if this is well. I guess I should not complain, though. So far, I'm able to get around and I am eating well. Some I see here are not doing as well."

When the good days came, The Flood family tried to find ways to play music with him.

One day in mid-March, for instance, Joe and Charlie hit the road to Mt. Sterling to join fiddler Buddy Griffin and Rog’s brother Mack, who drove in together from Glenville, WV. It was a good afternoon of picking and story swapping. Click the button below for a 12-minute track from that day, four tunes the group played (including “Uncle Pen,” “My Clinch Mountain Home,” “Beans Taste Fine” and “Sally Ann”).

Meanwhile, Rog even tried to keep his wry sense of humor by writing a new tune. "Lawed, Lawed. got them chemo blues," he wrote, “from the top of my bald head to the bottom of my dragging shoes." Click the button for Roger’s “Chemo Blues,” as featured in an edition of The Flood’s weekly podcast:

Roger’s Rebound

For the next seven or eight months, it appeared the worst just might be over. In April, when Charlie and the Peytons traveled to Mount Sterling to spend the day with Rog and Tammy and their daughter Cathleen, “it was great day,” Charlie wrote his cousin Kathy later. "Rog was feeling good and talked and laughed, remembered and made music. I think it was just what he needed. I know it was what we needed!"

A few weeks later, The Flood made another house call. Six months into his cancer treatments, Rog got a great report — his hair was even growing back in — so we were all pretty upbeat that day.

That evening, The Flood and The Samples Brothers Band headed into the downtown Mount Sterling to do a benefit concert to help raise funds for the local arts center, a former church, that the Samples family actively supported. Here are a couple of tunes from The Flood set that evening, starting with Roger's introduction.

Later that month, for the first time in years, Rog trouped back to Huntington one night to jam with The Flood. “We had such a good time at last night's jam session that afterward I couldn't get to sleep right away,” Charlie told Kathy in a later email. “What an evening! Rog arrived about 3. Pamela and I took him to dinner, and then we got back and people just kept arriving. We must have had 25 people here.” Here’s a video from the night:

The Setback

But it wasn’t to last.

By the December, test showed the cancer was back and worse than ever.

“As you may remember,” Charlie wrote to Kathy, “last summer and again in October, it appeared that the cancer was gone. The doctor was even using the word ‘remission.’ However, this afternoon, when he was all alone at the home, Roger got a phone call out of the blue from his radiologist with bad news. Cancer now has appeared in three different locations: in the original spot, but also in his adrenal gland and near his kidney.”

Even worse, the doctor this time said it didn’t appear radiation would be option, because the cancer was too close to vital organs.

Later tests and biopsies found the cancer had spread to both lungs. The oncologist said they could resume chemotherapy, but that she wasn’t optimistic. In fact, she actually told Rog and Tammy that, considering his weakened condition, chemo might give him only another six months.

Stunned, they asked if the Markey Center had experimental research going on that he might be qualified for. Yes, it did have research, she said, but he was no longer strong enough to participate. The only hope she held out was that with chemo, he might built his strength and later be able to be part of such experiments.

It was then that Roger decided on a change in directions, contacting the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, which he had seen reported on television. Soon, he and Tammy were on a flight to CTCA’s Tulsa facilities, where he would spend a week for tests and examinations.

"This place looks like one of those R&R planets you used to see on Star Trek,” Roger wrote from Tulsa. “It is unbelievable!"

In subsequent months, Roger traveled back to Tulsa and to other CTCA facilities. Initially, results were promising. The group put him on heavy meditation for the pain — oxycontin and hydrocodone — but with resumed chemo, the side effects were familiar, except that the nausea was worse than ever.

Still, as usual there were occasional good days. One weekend, Rog’s older brother Mack reported “the best talk we have had in days." Mack had gone down to Clendenin earlier in the day to check on the family homeplace. "I gave him a report on that," Mack wrote to Charlie. "He seemed happy to talk about the old place."

On Facebook, Roger posted a picture of a streamer that had been erected in front of their house by Tammy's K-1 class at school, made up of hawks that were constructed and colored by the children. "This is the most inspired I've been for a long time," Rog said. The local newspaper got wind of the story and did a spread on Roger and Tammy, which you can read right here.

Play One More

On one of those rare good days, the Peytons and the Bowens returned to Kentucky for a summer afternoon of laughs, stories and, of course, music. Pamela was wise enough to capture videos of some of the tunes we did together, songs that dated back to the very beginning of the band.

Of course, we had no way of knowing that day would the last time we would all be together, but … oh, perhaps there was an unspoken suspicion of that sad reality. Days later, Roger had yet another round of chemo, and more good days and bad days. Sadly, though, after that summer, it was more bad than good.

Joe and Roger’s Reunion

The last of us to see Roger was Joe. In January 2015, Joe and his dear friend Margaret Ray had escaped the cold West Virginia winter for a little while with a trip to the South.

On their way home to St. Albans, they swung by Mount Sterling to spend a day with Rog and Tammy. Roger had been feeling pretty bad, but he perked up when Joe and Margaret came to the door. This was last time the old friends saw each other. Joe passed away eight months later; Roger was gone four months after that.

Rog and Joe always had an especially close relationship. Right from the start, they beautifully complemented each other’s music.

Joe credited Roger with introducing him to Beatles tunes, but it was another song — Bread’s “If,” the 1971 David Gates composition — that would come to be the big memory from those earliest days. (These days we cherish 40-year-old recordings of Roger and Joe playing “If” at party after party in the mid-1970s.)

So, it was natural for them to play it one more time on their last day together. We will always be thankful that Margaret was there to record this final Joe-Roger duet: