It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (13 page)

get out of the hospital and move around. People stared, but it didn’t matter. Tomorrow, my head would be shaved.

HOW DO YOU CONFRONT YOUR OWN DEATH? SOME-

times I think the blood-brain barrier is more than just physical, it’s emotional, too. Maybe there’s a protective mechanism in our psyche that prevents us from accepting our mortality unless we

absolutely have to.

The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful

surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have

been better–but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn’t care.

I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, I wished hard, but I didn’t pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the

capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking, and honorable. If

I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn’t a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the

end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book,

or whether I’d been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn’t say, “But you were never a Christian, so you’re going the other way from heaven.” If so, I was

going to reply, “You know what? You’re right. Fine.”

I believed, too, in the doctors and the medicine and the surgeries– I believed in that. I believed in them. A person like Dr. Einhorn, that’s someone to believe in, I thought, a person with the

mind to develop an experimental treatment 20 years ago that now could save my life. I believed in the hard currency of his intelligence and his research.

Beyond that, I had no idea where to draw the line between spiritual belief and science. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter

hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe– what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we

imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no

remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery.

To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing, I decided. It had to be.

Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn’t fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the

creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or

cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit. So, I believed.

WHEN YOU CAN’T REMEMBER SOMETHING, THERE’S A reason why. I’ve blocked out much of what I thought and felt the morning of my brain surgery, but one thing I remember

clearly is the date, October 25th, because when it was over I was so glad to be alive. My mother and Och and Bill Stapleton came into my room at 6 A.M. to wake me up, and various nurses

came by to prepare me for the surgery. Before you undergo a brain operation, you have a memory test. The doctors say, “We’re going to tell you three simple words, and try to remember

them for as long as you can.” Some brain-tumor patients have lapses and can’t remember what they were told ten minutes ago. If the tumor has affected you, it’s the little things that you can’t

recall.

A nurse said, “Ball, pin, driveway. At some point we will ask you to repeat these words.”

It could be 30 minutes later, or it could be three hours, but I would be asked for them eventually, and if I forgot, that would mean big trouble. I didn’t want anyone to think I had a

problem–I was still trying to prove I wasn’t really as sick as the medical experts thought. I was determined to remember those words, so they were all I thought about for several minutes: Ball,

pin, driveway. Ball, pin, driveway.

A half hour later a doctor returned and asked me for the words.

“Ball, pin, driveway,” I said, confidently.

It was time to go to surgery. I was wheeled down the hall, with my mother walking part of the way, until we turned into the surgical room, where a team of masked nurses and doctors was

waiting for me. They propped me up on the operating table, as the anesthesiologist began the job of administering the knockout punch.

For some reason, I felt chatty.

“Did you guys ever see the movie Malice?” I asked.

A nurse shook her head.

Enthusiastically, I launched into a summary of the plot: Alec Baldwin plays this gifted but arrogant surgeon who is sued for malpractice, and at his trial, a lawyer accuses him of suffering

from something called the God Complex–believing that he is infallible.

Baldwin gives a great speech in his own defense–but then he incriminates himself. He describes the tension and the pressure of surgery when a patient is lying on a table and he has to make

split-second decisions that determine life or death.

“At that moment, gentlemen,” he declares, “I don’t think I’m God. I am God.”

I finished the story, doing a dead-on imitation of Alec Baldwin.

My next word was “Unnnnnhhh.”

And I passed straight out from the anesthesia.

The thing about that speech is that there is an element of truth in it, absolute truth. As I passed into unconsciousness, my doctors controlled my future. They controlled my ability to sleep, and

to reawaken. For that period of time, they were the ultimate beings. My doctors were my Gods.

Anesthesia was like a blackout: one moment I was cognizant, and the next moment I didn’t even

exist. The anesthesiologist, in testing the levels, brought me to consciousness just briefly before the surgery began. As I woke up, I realized that the surgery was not over; in fact,

no it had not even gotten under way, and I was furious. I said, woo/ily, “Damn it, let’s get started.”

I heard Shapiro’s voice say, “Everything’s fine,” and I blacked out again.

All I know about the surgery, of course, is what Dr. Shapiro related to me later. I was on the table for roughly six hours. He made the incision and went about the job of removing the

lesions. As soon as he scraped them away, he gave them to a pathologist, who put them right under a microscope.

By examining the tissue immediately, they could tell what sort of cancer it was and how likely it was to spread. If it was a lively and aggressive form of cancer, then there was a likelihood that

more of it would be found.

But the pathologist looked up from the microscope, surprised, and said, “It’s necrotic tissue.”

“They’re dead?” Shapiro said.

“They’re dead,” the technician said.

It was impossible to say that every cell was dead, of course. But they had every appearance of being lifeless and nonthreatening. It was the best possible news, because it meant they weren’t

spreading. What killed them? I don’t know, and neither do the doctors. Some necrotic tissue isn’t uncommon.

Shapiro went straight from the surgery to find my mother, and said, “He’s in the recovery room and doing well.” He explained that the tissue was necrotic, which meant there probably wasn’t

any more of it, they had gotten it all.

“It went much better than we ever expected,” Shapiro said.

I WOKE UP … SLOWLY … IT WAS VERY BRIGHT AND and someone was speaking to me.

I’m alive.

I opened my eyes. I was in the recovery room, and Scott Shapiro was bending over me. Once a doctor has cracked your skull and performed brain surgery, and then put you back together

again, there is a moment of truth. No matter how good the surgeon, he waits anxiously to see if everything moves, and whether the patient is properly responsive.

“Do you remember me?” he said.

“You’re my doctor,” I said.

“What’s my name?”

“Scott Shapiro.”

“Can you tell me your name?”

“Lance Armstrong,” I said. “And I can kick your ass on a bike any day.”

I began to fade back to sleep, but as my eyes closed, I saw the same doctor who had tested my memory.

“Ball, pin, driveway,” I said.

I dropped back into the black dreamless bottomless anesthetic sleep.

When I awoke again, I was in a dim, quiet room, in intensive care. I just lay there for a moment, fighting the haze of anesthesia. It was terribly dim, and quiet. I wanted to leave. Move.

I moved in the sheets.

“He’s awake,” a nurse said.

I threw a leg over the bed.

“Stay down!” a nurse said. “What are you doing?”

“I’m getting up,” I said.

I started to rise.

Move. If you can still move, you aren’t sick.

“You can’t get up yet,” she said. “Lie down.”

I lay back down.

“I’m hungry,” I announced.

As I BECAME MORE FULLY CONSCIOUS, I REALIZED

that my head was completely wrapped in gauze and bandages. My senses seemed wrapped up, too, probably a result of the anesthesia and the IV tubes twining all over me. I had tubes in my

nose, and a catheter running up my leg and into my penis. I was exhausted, drained to the absolute center of my being.

But I was starving. I was used to my three square meals a day, thanks to my mother. I thought of heaping hot plates of food, with gravy. I hadn’t eaten anything in hours, and my last meal had

been some kind of cereal. Cereal wasn’t a meal. I mean, come on. That was a snack.

A nurse fed me a plate of scrambled eggs.

“Can I see my mother?” I said.

After a bit, my mother came in quietly and held my hand. I understood how she felt, how offended her sense of motherhood was by seeing me like that. I had come from the same skin as

hers, the physical matter that made me, every particle down to the last proton in the fingernail on my smallest finger, belonged to her, and when I was a baby she had counted my breaths in

the night. She thought she had gotten me through the hard part, before this.

“I love you,” I said. “I love my life, and you gave it to me, and I owe you so much for that.”

I WANTED TO SEE MY FRIENDS, TOO. THE NURSES AL-

lowed them to come in, two or three at a time. I had been careful to seem confident before the surgery, but now that it was over, I didn’t need to put up a front anymore, to hide how relieved I

was and how vulnerable I felt. Och came in, and then Chris, and they took my hands, and it felt good to let go of some things, to show them how afraid I had been. “I’m not

done,” I said. “I’m still here.”

I was dazed, but I was aware of everyone who came into the room, and could sense what they were feeling. Kevin’s voice was choked with emotion. He was deeply upset, and I wanted to

reassure him.

“Why do you sound so serious?” I teased him.

He just squeezed my hand.

“I know,” I said. “You don’t like seeing your big brother all beat-up.”

As I lay there, listening to the murmurs of my friends, two conflicting emotions welled up in me. First, I felt a giant wave of gratitude. But then I felt a second wave, of anger, and that second

swell of feeling met the first one like two waves colliding. I was alive, and I was mad, and I couldn’t feel the one without feeling the other. I was alive enough to be mad. I was fighting

mad, swinging mad, mad in general, mad at being in a bed, mad at having bandages around my head, mad at the tubes that tied me down. So mad I was beside myself. So mad I almost began

to cry.

Chris Carmichael grabbed my hand. By now Chris and I had been together for six years, and there was nothing we couldn’t tell each other, no feeling we couldn’t admit to.

“How you doing?” he asked.

“I’m great.”

“Okay. Now, really, how do you feel?”

“Chris, I’m doing great.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Chris, you don’t understand,” I said, starting to cry. “I’m glad about this. You know what? I like it like this. I like the odds stacked against me, they always have been, and I don’t know any

other way. It’s such bullshit, but it’s just one more thing I’m going to overcome. This is the only way I want it.”

I REMAINED IN THE ICU OVERNIGHT. AT ONE POINT, A

nurse handed me a tube and told me to breathe into it. The tube was attached to a gauge with a little red ball, and it was supposed to measure my lung capacity, to make sure the anesthesia

hadn’t done something to my lungs.

“Breathe into this,” the nurse said. “Now, don’t worry if you only get the ball up one or two notches.”

“Lady, are you kidding me?” I said. “I do this for a living. Give me that fucker.”

I grabbed the tube and breathed into it. The ball shot straight to the top. If it had had a bell, it would have gone PING!

I handed it back to her.

“Don’t ever bring that thing in here again,” I said. “My lungs are fine.”

The nurse left without a word. I looked over at my mother. My mother has always known I have a mouth on me, and I figured I would hear from her because I had been so rude to the nurse. But

my mother was grinning as if I had just won another triple crown. She saw it for herself: nothing was wrong with me. I was right back to normal.