Rocky Road - Ups

The road to healing - a double scoop of Rocky Road

The Challenge Grant

April 20, 2020

2020 wears on. We all go into covid-19 lockdowns. Phil's condition continues to deteriorate. He moves into a clinic for more intensive chemotherapy and to begin the process for a bone marrow transplant.

I can't imagine how crazy he went while being cooped up in that clinic day after day after day, week after week, as the months dragged on. He could never just sit around inside. He always wanted to be out enjoying the sun and observing nature. Being outdoors was up there with air, food, and water as necessities in his life. He had a hammock set up in the backyard of the house that we lived at during our fifth year at UNO, where he'd lay relaxing on most sunny days. He had this weird habit of napping on the roof of his beat-up white Nissan 350Z with a convertible top that leaked when it rained. I once pulled up to the house to find him dozing on the car in the driveway. Another time, I took a UNO shuttle through Elmwood Park and spotted him snoozing on his car in a parking lot on some miscellaneous afternoon. It was pretty weird, but he loved being outdoors.

Covid-19 had hit the US in full force and access to the cancer clinic where Phil was at was shut down, limiting all visitors to the clinic. Phil, one of the most adventurous, active, and people-oriented and individuals I knew was firmly stuck in a hospital room with no end in the foreseeable future. He spent his 25th birthday confined in the clinic. The cabin fever must have eaten him alive inside.

Returning to the house to find Phil napping on his car roof

(2020).

And yet, Phil's true character shone through during these trials. He never complained in our group calls. We'd chat and catch up. We'd hypothesize if Tiger Woods would take home more trophies. We'd reminisce about traipsing southern Europe. Sometimes just sit there and spends hours on Minecraft while his chemotherapy was administered. Phil took the struggles in stride and was always optimistic about the next steps.

Phil was several states away, but he always thought about how he could support his friends back home at the John Paull II Newman Center next to UNO's campus. And in typical Phil fashion, he went all in. Phil donated a $40,000 challenge grant to the Newman Center to offset income lost when students moved out due to covid-19 restrictions. Take a moment to think about how convicting that is. $40,000 from a 25-year old stuck in bed, missing eyebrows due to the chemo. $40,000 from someone who's medical bills were going to be astronomical if he ever got out of there. $40,000 from the insurance money he received and kept following his mother's fatal car accident when he was a toddler.

I don't know where you learn that kind of generosity, but it can't be ignored. It's an impossibly high standard. Whenever I feel greed tug on my wallet, I take a step back and consider where my priorities lie. Phil knew where his priorities lied. And I pray that I can follow his example.

Playing some Facebook Messenger games during a video chat (2020)

Phil decided to keep a blog with updates about his battle with Lymphoma. Some of my favorites were about the friendships he developed with the nurses and his reflections on friendships back home. I'd always give him crap about not updating it enough though.

Home | Our Story of Beating LymphomaPhillip Baumberger's blog about his journey through cancer treatment, Our Story of Beating Lymphoma

Competition

May 27, 2019

This is a hard pill for me to swallow due to my competitive nature, especially in academics. But Phil was one of the most intelligent people I knew. To the point where it consistently rubbed me the wrong way and I never wanted to acknowledge it. I got a front-row seat to experience it through many shared courses on the way to his computer science and math degrees and my computer science degree with a math minor. I always wanted to earn the top grades in the class, in every class. It was my competitive outlet and a source of pride. I spent countless hours taking notes, completing homework, and preparing for exams. Meanwhile Phil would show up to exams and quickly glance through notes for 15 minutes before the test started. These notes were frequently from other classmates because Phil hadn't bothered taking his own notes. I was well aware of Phil's lack of preparation because he was often just hanging out late in the dorm room playing video games with my other roommates while I studied the night prior to the test. And yet, it was nearly a coin flip for whoever would achieve a better grade on the test between the two of us. The times he aced tests, despite barely preparing, drove me insane and wounded my ego.

Phil would always shatter my disbelief whenever I doubted his genius. I typically attributed it to luck, but it happened way too frequently to be pure luck. Take May 27, 2019, for example. We had been backpacking Europe for three weeks by this day and the remaining squad was down to Marcus, Phil, and myself. Phil was down to his last days in Europe before returning home to the States for a wedding. We had just finished spending several days in Split, Croatia, and were migrating south to spend a few days in Dubrovnik, Croatia before he'd fly to Paris and then back home. Marcus and I would soon follow to the airport to fly further south to Athens.

We decided to seperate during that transition from Split to Dubrovnik, and looking back, this was not our smartest decision. Phil wanted to make the pilgrimage to Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina since it was on the path between Split and Dubrovnik. Marcus and I, not being Catholic, weren't interested and wanted to simply continue our journey without detours that day. We decided to split (how about that play on words, being in Split, Croatia) and find each other in Dubrovnik. The bus ride from Split was a couple hours, so Marcus and I would get there before Phil, explore the city, and meet Phil at the bus station when his bus would arrive, which was scheduled to arrive before midnight. Phil had no international cell service, so we pulled up Dubrovnik on my phone via Google Maps and pointed to where we were staying, just in case something unplanned happened. I actually didn't have cell service either, but at least I had a smart phone so I could send messages and look up maps if I had Wi-Fi. But Phil just had his classic flip phone, which was pretty much just dead weight in Europe.

Marcus and I knew we could be in trouble after our bus took several hours longer than scheduled before finally arriving in Dubrovnik. We quickly learned that the scheduled arrival time meant nothing on this route, and a couple hours of delays are just assumed by the drivers. There is a border crossing between Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina on the road from Split to Dubrovnik and each rider's passport must be collected, processed, and stamped at the border of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The time required for border control is just a guessing game. But Marcus and I eventually got to Dubrovnik, found the place we were staying (think Croatian Airbnb), and then explored the old town portion of Dubrovnik while trying to avoid the throngs of Game of Thrones tourist groups.

Dubrovnik, Croatia (2019)

We returned to the bus stop to get Phil that evening, and the waiting game started. We arrived early just in case his bus was ahead of schedule. Time slowly passed as we waited for an hour. His bus's arrival time came and went. We just kept waiting. 1 am came and went. The bus station was silent. The only movement came from a potentially homeless woman pushing a shopping cart through the parking lot. Using broken English, she told us no more buses were coming that night and that she knew a place where we could stay. We told her we were just waiting for a late bus and already had a place to stay. She seemed unconvinced, and we really wished we knew how to politely say "thanks but no thanks" in Croatian. After two hours of waiting, we decided to call it a night. There was no way for us to know if the bus was delayed and when it might finally arrive, or if it had come ahead of schedule and Phil was somewhere in Dubrovnik, or if it just wasn't coming that night. We didn't even know if Phil had been able to make all the transfers for the route, because timeliness wasn't one of his talents. We made the 20-minute trek back to the Airbnb/hotel, along major roads, side streets, and alleyways. We decided along the trek that we'd go back to the station early and see if the bus arrived overnight and maybe Phil just napped outside for the night.

We were back in the room for under half an hour before we heard voices outside, followed by the Airbnb/hotel owner walking into our room with Phil. Marcus and I quizzically looked at each other and couldn't believe it. Somehow, in the dead of night, in a city where a large portion of the Google map "streets" are actually giant staircases up and down the hillside, Phil had somehow walked over a mile, picked the right stairways, and knocked on the right door. Dubrovnik is no New York City, but it's also not a small town. The only guidance Phil had was the minute or two he glanced over the city map in the morning, by now the previous day. That same homeless lady asked Phil if he needed a place to stay too at the bus station. Safe to say, she wasn't all that helpful.

I don't know how his mind worked, but his memory was mindboggling. Whether it was notes the teacher wrote on the whiteboard, or remembering everyone's moves and cards in games, or the twists and turns of a Croatian city he'd never visited. I always wanted to attribute his grades, knack for winning, and somehow getting where he needed to be to just dumb luck, but that would be a discredit to him.

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