Miracles happen. Dennis Libbey is proof. He is a walking, talking miracle. These days he spends many of his late afternoons slapping grounders to Bangor West Side Little Leaguers. Seven months ago he was told he had a tumor larger than a football in his body and that he would not survive.

Libbey was given two choices at the time and neither was good. He could do nothing and live perhaps five or six months. Or he could take a chance on surgery, a procedure he was given just a 5 percent chance of surviving. As a friend would later say, Libbey had been given a death sentence.

Libbey decided he would take his chances on the operating table rather than sit around and wait to die. So, he closed himself off from the world in his hospital room and wrote his own obituary. He talked to his family and friends. He received encouragement from a prophetic nurse who believed that he would make it. And then he went into the operating room.

Dennis Libbey is hitting ground balls to Little Leaguers these days. Miracles happen.

Finding a ‘bear’ inside

September 17, 2001, had been a good day for Dennis Libbey. The 50-year-old president of Sargent, Tyler and West, a Brewer-based insurance company, had spent that beautiful day on the golf course at the Samoset Resort in Rockport.

At some point during the golf Libbey began to feel uncomfortable. Nothing major he thought at the time. Just uncomfortable.

That evening after returning home, his discomfort became more severe. It started with a trip to the rest room where he noticed blood in his urine. And then the pain came. In waves. Excruciating pain.

Jayne Libbey, a registered nurse, fretted over her husband throughout the evening and into the early hours of the next day. She thought Dennis had kidney stones. Their daughter Jessica had suffered through them before and Jayne thought she recognized the symptoms.

But that was before Dennis admitted to his wife there had been blood in his urine. Hearing that, Jayne decided it was time to go to Eastern Maine Medical Center.

“It totally blew me away when the [emergency room] physician came out and told us. I was blown away,” Jayne Libbey said.

The doctor told the Libbeys that a “massive” tumor had been found in Dennis’ kidney.

The tumor was described as weighing six pounds and the dimension used as an analogy was a football and a half.

“I had Grade 4 renal carcinoma. It’s as bad as it can get. Dr. Richard Long, he was just [great]. He told me the two options I had,” Dennis said.

Option number one was to do nothing and Dennis would have approximately five to six months to live. The second option was to surgically remove the kidney and attached tumor. But Dennis was also given only a 5 percent chance of surviving the eight hours of surgery.

Dennis said among the risks in surgery were that the tumor could rupture, spilling the cancer into his abdomen, where it would spread. Or that the tumor could hemorrhage, leading to his death.

The surgery would be done in two, four-hour stages.

“They honestly did not want to operate,” Jayne said. “From what they were seeing on the scan was that it was massive. They kept referring to it as a ‘bear.'”

The decision

What Dennis heard was not promising. But he is a competitor. After playing sports on the last teams of Mattawamkeag High School in 1968, (the school consolidated with Mattanawcook Academy in Lincoln the following year), he attended the University of Maine where he was a four-year starter at shortstop and captained the team in 1973. Dennis was also inducted into the University of Maine Sports Hall of Fame in 1997.

He has been involved in Bangor West Side Little League for the last 16 years and coached the 13-and-14-year-old all-star team to a fourth- place finish in last year’s Eastern Regionals.

Dennis decided a 5 percent chance of survival was better than no chance at all. He said he drew strength from Jayne, “my rock,” and his children, “my ‘A’ team. They give me the will to live.”

“[Dr. Long] explained it all to me. He had that look. He was the guy I wanted,” Dennis said.

Word began to spread that Dennis was ill. Calls, flowers and cards began pouring in. But Dennis wasn’t quite ready for them.

“I think the hardest thing through this whole ordeal was to call my son [Justin] who was a freshman at Bowdoin. That was tough. He’s really close to his father,” Jayne said.

Justin was a three-sport standout at Bangor High School. Jayne said she doesn’t recall her husband ever missing one of Justin’s games.

“Beyond that the hardest thing was when he told me he needed to be alone and asked for paper to write his obituary,” Jayne said. “After that was done, he started to let people in his space. That was like his last homework assignment.”

Jayne called several of Dennis’ friends to let them know of his situation.

“Her words were, ‘If you want to see Dennis, you’ve got to come now,'” Gilbert Coffin said.

Coffin runs Creative Printing Services in Bangor and is a regular golfing partner and close friend of Libbey’s. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“Jayne called me. It was certainly within 24 hours of when he was given what amounted to a death sentence. We were so shocked by that we needed time to digest it. He went from being healthy to close to being given last rites the next day,” Coffin said.

Coffin, along with friends Tommy Roberts, Dan Lux and Gary Tracy, gathered together and went to the hospital.

“We went in together. It felt like we were pallbearers,” Coffin said.

It was an odd moment. Tears came as Dennis explained what was wrong but the tears were gone moments later as he started making jokes. He was sick but he was bucking up his friends.

“Within three or four minutes he went right back to being Dennis,” Coffin said. “He helped us get through what was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. We left never expecting to see him alive again. [Later that day] I sat at my desk and cried like a baby.”

Word came to him that University of Maine hockey coach Shawn Walsh, himself down the hall battling a cancer that would take his life two days later, had heard of Dennis’ circumstances and was praying for him.

And there was more. A nurse visited Dennis with a message of belief that he drew strength from.

“Heidi Johnson-Black, a nurse, she sat on the edge of my bed. She said, ‘I heard what you have. I know your percentages don’t sound good. But you’ve got something special.’ She told me she’d only done this twice since she had been working there but, ‘Something tells me you’re going to make it through this’,” Dennis said. “She’s the right person for that profession because she gave a great pep talk.”

The miracle

On Sept. 21, Dennis Libbey went into surgery. Eight hours later, the news came and it was incredible news. The tumor had been totally encapsulated by the kidney. The surgeons had been able to remove it and with it all of the cancer. The cancer had not spread beyond the kidney.

“When he came to the next day he revisited everyone in his life. He went back to when he was a child and thanked everyone he had ever known,” Jayne said.

And then he had a request.

“I remember asking my wife to go home and get a radio so I could listen to the Bangor football game,” he laughed.

Dennis will preach a little to get your attention as to the importance of having a thorough physical each year, something he says he hadn’t taken seriously in recent years.

“I’m so blessed with the people around me. My family. Co-workers. The players. I got this letter from a kid, a senior at Bangor High School. I had coached him. It was so touching,” Libbey said.

He is back doing the things he loves. The doctors had to force Dennis to take five weeks off before returning to work. And he is gearing up for another season coaching Little League. He is scanned every three months and there has been no sign of cancer.

“I had the same thing as Shawn Walsh but mine didn’t spread. I think about that,” Dennis said.

Coffin talks of his friend in terms of the improbable, the impossible.

“We all talk about miracles. You know, in sports. But he has put miracles into perspective,” Coffin said.

Upon hearing of the surgery’s success, Coffin said he and his friends celebrated at his cabin in Abbot.

A few months later Dennis traveled with Coffin to the cabin. Seeing it brought back memories of his childhood, spent in the woods with his father. He told Coffin that he would get his hunting license and that he had a shotgun his father had given him when he was 13 or 14 years old.

They returned not so long ago to Coffin’s cabin and the woods.

“He said he didn’t really care if he shot anything or not,” Coffin said. “He really wasn’t fully back to health. We just went up there and walked in the woods. That night we sat down there and had a cigar and a cold drink. It was good being with my friend.”