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Marianne Kanzius was startled from sleep by the sound of metal banging on metal. She reached across the bed for her husband, John. He wasn't there.She slipped out from under the covers and quietly walked down the hall to the kitchen. There, half- hidden behind the black granite countertop, looking worn and emaciated from his cancer treatments, stood her husband of 38 years. He was cutting apart aluminum pans with a pair of shears.
"What the hell are you doing?" she asked, wondering if the stress had finally gotten to him. "Those are my good pie pans."
"I'm working on an idea," he answered.
"John, you have chemo in the morning."
"Okay, okay. Go back to bed."
Marianne knew her husband, who called himself a "Type-A Plus," well enough to leave him alone with his midnight obsession. His ceaseless drive had made him a success in business. She understood he had no choice but to fight cancer the same way.
Kanzius spent hours that evening in December 2003 banging away at spare ham-radio parts, combining tightly wound metal coils and his wife's pie pans -- trying to make something that would let him modify the signal from a radio transmitter. His late-night tinkering was fueled by the steroids and painkillers used to treat his lymphoma. By now an idea obsessed him: that directed radio waves could be used to heat and destroy cancer cells.
Early on Good Friday 2002, Kanzius played a round of golf at the Forest Country Club in Fort Myers, Florida. He'd worked 40 hard years building a chain of radio and TV stations around Erie, Pennsylvania, and now was reaping the rewards in retirement.
In the late 1990s, he and a partner sold their stations and took home millions. Strong, slender and still only 58 years old, Kanzius bought a 4,000-square-foot, three-level white stucco home on Sanibel Island. He threw himself into retirement, growing hibiscus and orchids, playing golf, trolling for redfish and snook in a 16-foot flat-bottom boat, or pleasure cruising the Gulf of Mexico with Marianne and friends in his Sea Ray.
But on that Good Friday afternoon, the long, happy retirement dream ended. Following a doctor's recommendation after a physical, he went for an exam at a Fort Myers radiology center. He feared something was wrong, but didn't tell Marianne. Maybe it was just a false alarm.
Then the results came in. Though doctors weren't sure if he had a deadly strain of lymphoma or a more curable form of Hodgkin's disease, they knew it had to be treated aggressively.
He laid it all out for Marianne, and on Easter Sunday, they began the battle. They drove north back home, where he would start chemotherapy at a cancer center in Erie.
In fall 2002, after six months of chemo, Kanzius was in remission. He and Marianne headed for Sanibel. But the following March, a CAT scan revealed the cancer had returned. He was later diagnosed with leukemia, and told he had 9 to 12 months to live.
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