It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (30 page)

complete, compassionate, and intelligent man, and therefore more alive. The one thing the illness has convinced me of beyond all doubt–more than any experience I’ve had as an athlete–is

that we are much better than we know. We have unrealized capacities that sometimes only emerge in crisis.

So if there is a purpose to the suffering that is cancer, I think it must be this: it’s meant to improve us.

I am very firm in my belief that cancer is not a form of death. I choose to redefine it: it is a part of life. One afternoon when I was in remission and sitting around waiting to find out if the

cancer would come back, I made an acronym out of the word: Courage, Attitude, Never give up, Curability, Enlightenment, and Remembrance of my fellow patients.

In one of our talks, I asked Dr. Nichols why he chose oncology, a field so difficult and

heartbreaking. “Maybe for some of the same reasons you do what you do,” he said. In a way, he suggested, cancer is the Tour de France of illnesses.

“The burden of cancer is enormous, but what greater challenge can you ask?” he said. “There’s no question it’s disheartening and sad, but even when you don’t cure people, you’re always

helping them. If you’re not able to treat them successfully, at least you can help them manage the illness. You connect with people. There are more human moments in oncology than any

other field I could imagine. You never get used to it, but you come to appreciate how people deal with it–how strong they are.”

“You don’t know it yet, but we’re the lucky ones,” my fellow cancer patient had written.

I will always carry the lesson of cancer with me, and feel that I’m a member of the cancer community. I believe I have an obligation to make something better out of my life than before,

and to help my fellow human beings who are dealing with the disease. It’s a community of shared experience. Anyone who has heard the words You have cancer and thought, “Oh, my

God, I’m going to die,” is a member of it. If you’ve ever belonged, you never leave.

So when the world seems unpromising and gray, and human nature mean, I take out my driver’s license and I stare at the picture, and I think about LaTrice Haney, Scott Shapiro, Craig Nichols,

Lawrence Einhorn, and the little boy who likes cereal for their shapes. I think about my son, the embodiment of my second life, who gives me a purpose apart from myself.

Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night and I miss him. I lift him out of his crib and I take him back to bed with me, and I lay him on my chest. Every cry of his delights me. He

throws back his tiny head and his chin trembles and his hands claw the air, and he wails. It sounds like the wail of life to me. “Yeah, that’s right,” I urge him. “Go on.”

The louder he cries, the more I smile.

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