Bouncing back from rock bottom
Tiburon man finds new love of life after surviving cancer, overcoming addiction
Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the Oct. 25, 2017, edition of The Ark. It earned second place for Best Profile Story in the California Newspaper Publishers Association’s 2017 California Journalism Awards contest.
By MATTHEW HOSE
mhose@thearknewspaper.com
Steve Melen has lived almost a decade without a stomach or a spleen, and the 47-year-old has never felt better.
Melen’s life veered out of control after he was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2008. He subsequently became addicted to alcohol and pain medication and nearly lost custody of his only daughter when his wife divorced him.
Now cancer-free and sober for more than four years, Melen has one question left about his new outlook as he looks to write a memoir.
“How do people get this feeling without having to go through what I went through? That’s what I don’t know,” Melen says.
A daunting diagnosis
Melen, a financial adviser who lives in Paradise Cay, was 38 years old when recurring stomach issues revealed that he had gastric cancer.
One month later, he was getting ready to have his stomach, spleen, half of his pancreas and part of his esophagus removed.
“Steve’s … just starting to go through something that somebody at that age shouldn’t go through,” says Erik Oberthier, who has been friends with Melen since they were young children.
The first surgery was successful, and as Melen recovered, his friends and family crowded around his hospital bed.
“He was in great spirits,” Oberthier says.
But then, he began leaking fluids and had to undergo an emergency surgery to repair the leak.
“That’s when things got really scary,” Oberthier says.
In and out of a state of semi-consciousness, Melen would spend a month recovering from the two surgeries at the hospital.
At the time, Melen was put on hydromorphone, also known as Dilaudid, a strong and highly addictive pain medication.
“When I got out of the hospital, I didn’t know this but I was basically an addict. I was hooked on these things,” Melen says.
Melen began daily radiation and chemotherapy five days a week for six weeks, a process that he says “almost killed me.”
He couldn’t eat, so he had to use a feeding tube and carry a backpack full of nutrients to keep functioning. Melen, who is 6 feet, 1-inch tall, weighed 95 pounds.
“I went in my last day of radiation, I was crying, I was like, ‘I can’t take much more,’” Melen says.
As he was going through the chemotherapy and radiation, he kept increasing the amount of pain medication he was taking.
“No one was monitoring me,” Melen says. “They were just giving me whatever I wanted because I think they thought I was going to die, so they thought: ‘Let’s just ease his pain.’”
Oberthier says his friends could tell Melen was becoming dependent on the pain medication, but it was hard to say anything.
“He was doing something that made him feel better, but at the same time here was something that was addictive,” Oberthier says.
Oberthier says friends started to notice a transition in his dependence.
“When he started getting to a place where he was (finished with) the treatment, then it kind of turned … celebratory: ‘I’m not going to die, the cancer’s gone.’”
That was when alcohol became a problem.
Recovering from a ‘tailspin’
Growing up, Melen was always popular — the life of every party, a socialite and a true role model, says Oberthier.
But, Melen says, when he got out of college, some festering emotional problems started to bubble up.
“Everything was great, but deep down there’s always something that kind of gets you, and those things start to come out when you really have to deal with life after college, being independent and maturing,” Melen says.
Those feelings stemmed from early in his life, Melen says.
Melen’s mother got pregnant with him while she was in high school. When he was nine months old, she brought him from Minnesota to California and then told his biological father the boy had died in a car accident.
His mother, than 19, was unable to care for him and gave him up for adoption when he was 2½. He was taken in by a family from Saratoga.
Both of his adoptive parents died before he got his diagnosis, and feelings of isolation and abandonment started to fester over several years, even as he built a life with his wife and child.
When Melen was diagnosed, he had a sort of mentor in his friend J.P. Gallagher.
Gallagher’s situation served as a blueprint for Melen — he was diagnosed three months before Melen with the exact same type of gastric cancer at the same age, and he was treated by the same doctors.
He was, in essence, going through exactly what Melen would endure.
“He was the only one I knew that had actually survived longer than me, and he had everything identical,” Melen says. “So as long as he was alive, I thought I would be alive.”
About three years following his diagnosis, Gallagher died, throwing Melen into a “tailspin.”
Melen started to feel a constant fear of dying. Nerve-wracking visits to the oncologist would end with tears of joy as Melen found out he would survive until at least the next CT scan.
“I’m kind of just this lonely kid trying to get through life, trying to survive,” Melen says.
At that point, Oberthier says friends noticed a change in Melen’s drinking habits.
“There were times when he would just start to break down,” Oberthier says.
“It was tough, because he wasn’t in a mindset of reality at the time, all I could do was be there. His reality was gone and he was dependent on the alcohol and not making good decisions.”
Melen began spending time alone at home, drinking and ignoring his relationships.
“I was choosing to kill myself when I spent so many years trying to survive, and it didn’t make sense,” Melen says. “I’m smart enough to know this, but I couldn’t stop. I would wake up in the morning shaking.”
He checked into rehab and got clean for a while but then relapsed.
His friends were planning on intervening, but he beat them all to it and checked himself into rehab for a second time in 2013.
At that point, with his alcoholism wearing on the family, his wife asked for a divorce. Unless he got sober, Melen faced the distinct possibility of losing custody of his young daughter, Ava, according to Tim Kane, a friend of Melen’s from college.
“That will get you straight,” says Kane. “Some serious, sobering decisions were being made for him, and I think all of that had to revolve around his daughter.”
Oberthier says that was a turning point for Melen, as it started to become clear that if Melen didn’t stay sober, he would lose custody of Ava.
“He’s always had a strong mind. When he sets his mind to something, he goes after it,” Oberthier says.
When Melen got out of rehab, he says he “hunkered down,” moved into his own apartment in Tiburon and started going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings — sometimes three times a day.
“I ended up doing great,” Melen says. “I just put my head down and went to my meetings and got back and just tried to do the right thing every day.”
He started dating an old friend, Tanya Brandt, who says he came into the relationship with “so much baggage” but showed her he was willing to change.
“Putting himself in the position where he said, ‘I need to get help’ showed me how strong he was and how committed (he was) that finally he needed to take control of his life,” Brandt says. “And he did.”
He has been sober for more than four years — and he says he has his daughter, Ava, to thank.
“She was my inspiration to get sober and to stay alive,” Melen says. “So I had that to help me. If I didn’t have (her), I don’t know what I would’ve done.”
Looking forward
Today, Melen works as a financial adviser for Morgan Stanley. He discovered a passion for horse racing, and he now owns 10 racehorses and started his own company, with Brandt selling lucky horseshoes mounted on plaques.
“There was a period for about four or five years where my future was dark. I didn’t see anything going forward,” Melen says. “And all of a sudden after getting sober, my anxiety level dropped, I could start planning for things in the future — I used to just be day-to-day.”
Oberthier says that’s a change from what Melen was like even before he got the diagnosis.
“I think now he’s got a love for life,” Oberthier says. “Before, he was kind of living in the moment, and on to the next thing. I think he just values life a lot more and really gets the most out of it.”
And now, Melen says, he is ready to give back.
He is currently a mentor with Debbie’s Dream Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to raising awareness about stomach cancer.
He says his story serves as a blueprint for people going through the cancer he had.
“People call me from all across the country,” Melen says. “Within the first five minutes, they say, ‘You’ve helped me more than anyone else has.’ So that’s what feeds me, it feeds me in wanting to give back more on a broader level.”
Melen says that’s the impetus for writing his memoir, called “Cause to Believe” after the name of the first horse he followed. He has set a tentative release date for early 2018.
“If I look now, I would go back and do everything I did to get where I am now, because right now is the happiest place I’ve been,” Melen says. “To get rid of anxiety and to have love and support and have a daughter and watch her grow and to not be dying and having to be hooked up with IVs and being zapped and scanned. God, that is hell. I don’t have any of that.”
