Every Second Counts (28 page)

“How do I survive when I can’t stand the thought of another IV in my arm?” he asked.

“The misery is part of getting better,” I said. “You have to welcome it.”

What I meant was this: misery is the cure. You must embrace it, because it’s what may save you. You can alter any experience with your mind—it’s up to you to determine what the quality of each moment is. Concentration and belief can make even chemo, no matter how sickening it is, a positive experience. It takes practice, but it’s possible. I used to tell myself, when I threw up or when it burned so badly to urinate, that the sensations represented the cancer leaving my body. I was pissing it out, puking it out,
coughing
it out. I wasn’t going to dwell on whether I was going to die. There were those in medicine and those outside it who thought I
would
die—but I chose to be around doctors and nurses who believed I could make it.

I had help from LaTrice Haney, my oncology nurse. Once, deep in the misery of chemo, I asked LaTrice if I would ever get out of the hospital. LaTrice said, “Lance, each time you walk in here, you will walk out again. And there will be a time when you don’t come here anymore at all—because you’ll be cured.”

I should have told all of these things to Paul de la Garza. Or maybe I’d have been better off just sympathizing with his plight and telling him this simple, stark truth: yeah, cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me—but I don’t want to do it again.

Instead, all I said was, “When the treatment is over, you bounce back
quick
. At least, I did.”

Then a White House staffer interrupted us and I was ushered into the Blue Room for my brief address with the president. De la Garza was left in the anteroom, clearly disappointed in our meeting.

“That was it,” he wrote;

Our meeting lasted maybe five minutes. While I appreciated his time—I later learned it was his 31st birthday—and relished the trappings of the White House, he really didn’t say anything that knocked my socks off, the sort of nugget I was fishing for to get me through the tunnel. Still, the meeting helped, because it made me realize something else. On the drive home from work the night before, I actually had tears in my eyes in anticipation of our meeting. I was counting on him for some revelation to make everything better. Because of his story I was treating him as if he held the secret for my cancer cure. But what I discovered almost immediately, before I walked out the gates of the White House even, is that I don’t have to turn to the rich and famous, to the heroes of the sports world, to get me through the anxiety, the depression, and the fear of the what-ifs. My heroes are right in front of me, ordinary folks who every day
make
my life better. At the top of the list I include my wife, my kids . . . my family, my friends, my co-workers, my nurses, my doctors.

He was right; heroism is impossible to fulfill—the bar is too high. If some people want a revelatory experience, I can’t answer the request. More often than not, a hero is a person who acts without thinking, anyway. If ten people, or a million people, want to say that you’re a hero, the only thing you can do is say thank you, just keep going about your day, and understand that
trying
to be a hero is not the most useful purpose you can serve.

The most useful purpose I can serve is to tell people who are suffering that it’s an absolutely important human experience to be ill, that it can change how you live, and that it can change other lives, too.

Sometimes I’m successful in imparting the message, and sometimes I’m not. I wasn’t so successful with de la Garza. But not long after, I met a woman who was ill and had lost her hair. The only people who had ever seen her with her wig off were her doctors, but when I visited her, she took it off. We had our picture taken together. I will never get tired of befriending people with cancer, and I’ll always say, “Come on over here, get right up next to me.”

It’s not a burden, it’s an opportunity, and I’ll do it until they ask me not to. Someday there might be a 15-year-old girl who won’t know or care who I am, and someone else can step in and be her inspiration. Until then, I’ll try to meet every request, every person who can use some help.

I’d like to learn to use my influence to shape thinking about cancer on a larger level, too. Maybe I can even help shape opinions, policy, and the flow of money on cancer. After I visited the White House that day, I continued on to Capitol Hill, with the same mission, to promote cancer research and ask for more funding. I met with, in order, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), Senator Sam Brownback, a conservative from
Kansas
, and Senator Diane Feinstein (D-California). The meetings perfectly illustrated the commonality we all have on the subject of cancer.

Senator Kennedy’s son, Teddy Jr., lost a leg to bone cancer when he was a boy. The senator ushered us into his office and began showing me the pictures on his wall, of brothers and sisters gone. He talked a little about each of the people in the pictures, and then he turned to another picture, of his son.

“When my son had cancer, I tried everything I knew to distract him,” the senator said. “But the only thing that would keep his mind off of his cancer was the Celtics-Lakers series. So I got tickets to every game I could, and we would go, and for a couple of hours he wouldn’t think about it.”

He showed me another picture: Ted Jr. on a ski slope wearing a prosthetic, and raising his arms, triumphant. He had just won a gold medal at the Paralympics. As I turned to speak to the senator, I realized that tears were streaming down his face.

The next office we went to was that of Senator Brownback. I knew of the senator because he had survived a bout with cancer, like me. The senator was very certain that the cancer had altered his view of both life and the afterlife: he had become a born-again Christian. We settled onto a sofa.

“Tell me how cancer has changed your spirituality,” he said.

There it was again, that uneasy question. I wondered how to explain to the senator that my spirituality is mine, and mine alone. But before I opened my mouth, my friend Jeff Garvey, the chair of my cancer foundation, understood my dilemma and jumped in. “Lance’s wife, Kristin, is Catholic,” he said quickly. “And he has a chapel in his house.”

I was grateful for the out, but I decided to be straight. I gave him my honest answer, and said, “I relied on my doctors, and the medicine and the science, they were my hope.” I added that I believed in my personal responsibility in my cure, to educate myself, and to combat the disease.

The senator is a spirited and vigorous cancer fighter, and he said, “We need to set a date, and say that within the next ten years we want to have a cure.” It was my kind of fighting speech, very determined. But we both knew the reality, too, which is that cancer is not just one disease but 250 diseases, each with separate symptoms and treatments and potential cures. So we’re not talking about one cure, but 250. We parted with a handshake and an agreement to see each other again.

My final stop was to see Senator Feinstein, for what was the most lighthearted of our interviews. She was a charming lady without an ounce of pretense. We gathered in her office and sat down and talked for a while about the importance of funding for more cancer research, and of better information, too.

Then she said, “Let me ask you something.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I ride my bike, too. Does your butt hurt?”

I threw back my head and shouted with laughter. “Yep,” I said. “That’s why my shorts are padded.”

By the time I left
Washington
, I had new questions about my peculiar status as an athlete. Athletes are public figures, yet we tend to believe we shouldn’t engage in politics or the issues of the day because our job is just to be excellent with our bodies. But to me, that’s not quite enough. It’s not about the bike. It never has been. It’s about causes: I think everybody should have one.

I still struggle with whether or not it’s my responsibility to make public statements. For instance, as war with
Iraq
became imminent, both the American and the foreign press wanted to know my thoughts on the subject, since I’m friendly with President George W. Bush. My reply was that I wasn’t in favor of war—who is?—but that I support my president, and our troops. Somebody said, “So you disagree with him?” I said, “Well, the nice thing about
America
is that it’s the kind of place where it’s okay to disagree with a friend.”

But a far more significant answer to the question came from my friend Lee Walker. One afternoon I was sitting around visiting with Lee at his house, and I asked him what he thought about
Iraq
.

Lee said, “I’ll tell you two things. First of all, I’m not sure what I think, but I’m an American and I follow my president, I go where he goes. But the second thing is, that’s a global issue and I can’t affect it. I can’t do a damn thing about
Iraq
, and Saddam Hussein doesn’t know me from Adam. But here’s what I
can
do. I can go down to the street corner and make
that
place a better place. I can do that. I can affect the park. I can affect the bus stop. I can go affect that park bench right over there, and maybe change somebody’s day, or minute, or life. I can do that.”

Lee pointed to a bench on the sidewalk in front of his house. Lee had literally bought the bench and placed it out front, just to contribute something to the neighborhood. His neighborhood is full of elderly people, and they walk to various shops for what they need. It occurred to Lee that they might need a place to sit down and rest their feet. So now that’s what you see in front of Lee’s house, people sitting on the bench, with bags, resting their feet.

Lee says his philosophy is just to break problems down to their smallest parts, right down to the person or to the child, and work backwards from there. “There’s a lot we can’t do anything about,” Lee explained. “But we can affect the things right here in front of us, make them better, as best we can.”

So that’s what I’d like to do, too. I’d like to build park benches. Cancer is my park bench. And so are the kids in my arms.

There’s no difference between a man with no power and a man with power who doesn’t use it at all. That’s what I’ve come to believe about athletes and participating in the issues of the day. If I were religious I’d say cancer advocacy is what God would like me to do, but I’m not. So I’ll simply say that’s what I have the opportunity to do, and what I’m designed to do.

W
hen a book
is
over,
people always wonder what happened next. Does he live or does he die, does he win or does he lose, is he happy or is he unhappy? Who does he turn out to be?

Here are just a few things that happened after the summer of 2002. On
September 2, 2002
, the French doping investigation was finally, officially closed. Bill Stapleton was right—it went away quietly. After 21 months of inquiry, investigators admitted they’d found not a shred of proof, and they issued just a small discourteous announcement from the prosecutor’s office. The case was dropped for lack of evidence.

We had a party at Milagro to celebrate the six-year anniversary of my cancer diagnosis, and, after the fact, my 31st birthday. Children ran everywhere. The girls crawled around on the lawn while I put Luke on a four-wheeler and drove him around. We had barbecue, cases of Shiner Bock beer, and two cakes, one that said
CARPE
, and one that said
DIEM
.

The girls began to walk, and Kik painted their toenails pink. That fall, Luke started preschool. By then he was a seasoned world traveler, so his first trip to school was no problem. He bolted into class with a wave, and he got an excellent report in his first parent-teacher conference: he was lively and played nice with the other kids. “He participates, and he’s outgoing,” the teacher said. “He’s the leader of the class, and friends with everybody. And he loves the girls.”

When I got home, we sat down to dinner and discussed the day. I said to Luke, “Do you like your dinner?”

“Yeah, I like my dinner.”

“I also hear you like chicks.”

“Yeah.
Chicks for dinner,” he said.

As he grows, Luke has more and more questions, and I just try to have good answers. But there are things I struggle to answer for myself, let alone for him and for his sisters.