The Inspiring Journey of ‘the Energizer Bunny’ Who Penned 29 Books in 12 Years Despite Battling Cancer and Legal Blindness

If Don Rilla was writing this, it might be in the persona of a serial killer, a 13-year-old runaway girl or, even, a dog named Toby.

But this isn’t by him, it’s about him and about how he’s written 29 books in 12 years – after surviving a supposedly unsurvivable cancer and becoming legally blind.

No wonder his nickname was “the Energizer Bunny” even before the tremendous outpouring of creativity that was possible, even necessary, because he had so much mental energy. Suddenly dependent on others, unable to drive or read a book because all that was left of his vision was shadows, Rilla was able to pull stories from his memory and to two-finger type on an extra-large keyboard with an extra-large, high-resolution and -contrast screen and magnified type.

Rilla’s brain is rife with book subjects and he mined his work experiences for plots.

John le Carre was a British intelligence officer. John Grisham was a lawyer. Michael Crichton was a physician. Patricia Cornwall worked in a coroner’s office. Rilla spent most of his life toiling in the space between clinics and courts, plumbing the minds of people on the fringes of society, from neglected children to the criminally insane.

A Navy veteran who has a master’s in social work, Rilla spent six years in Children’s Services for the state of Connecticut, where he developed reports for Juvenile Court on neglected, abused, delinquent and abandoned children. He then worked five years at a Connecticut state maximum security mental hospital, evaluating its patients for the criminal justice system. He then worked for court clinics in the cities of Hartford and Bridgeport before joining clinics treating people with drug and alcohol addictions. One was in Connecticut and one was in Sarasota, Fla., where Rilla and his wife moved in late 2001 and where Rilla retired for the fourth time.

The move was a stressful time as the couple moved four times in a year while having a house built in Florida. Leaving family and friends in Connecticut and ending a life of reporting to work every day added to the load on a body, now in its 80s. Rilla believes this battering of his immune system led him to be diagnosed with cancer in 2006.

His doctor gave him no chance of surviving mucosal melanoma, an aggressive and hard-to-diagnose form of cancer affecting mucous membranes. He was enrolled in a study that enlisted interferons — proteins that can stimulate the immune system and reduce cancer cells — at high doses along with chemotherapy. Rilla believes the interferons caused hemorrhaging in his eyes that, despite treatment, reduced his sight to nearly useless shades and shadows. He was the only survivor of his doctor’s patients who survived ten years at the time with the form of cancer.

Doctors removed his septum and used part of a rib to stabilize his nose. He had a brain fluid leak; the wrong side of his jaw was treated with radiation; and he had 38 treatments in a hyperbaric chamber to help him heal.

Rilla attributes his survival, of cancer and the frustrations of his nearly useless eyes, less to treatment than to doses of good humor and to finding a new and much-needed outlet for his mental energies. For the humor, he asked friends for daily jokes and funny stories. Writing became the light in which he could burn the energy of his overcharged battery of thoughts.

He combined the two in writing about cancer and blindness in a humorous book, “This Side of the Grass,” published in 2016.

The book was difficult to write. It took two years to fill the 74 pages and the only way he could do it — and hope anyone would read it — was to try to make it funny, with a joke that related to every chapter. 

His authorial energy spent for the moment, Rilla is focused on republishing his books and dealing with the necessary paperwork.

By Terry Galvin, Rough & Ready Media