It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (9 page)

swollen and caked with blood. I went back into the bedroom and showed Lisa, who stared at it, mute with horror. I yelled for my mother. “Mom, could you come in here!” I said. My mother

came racing into my room and examined the catheter. She didn’t panic; she just got a washcloth and calmly cleaned it out, and called the hospital. A nurse explained to her that it wasn’t

uncommon for catheters to clot, and went through a procedure with her for how to prevent it from being infected. But it still looked awful.

My mother hung up and ran to the store, and when she came back she had a box of Band-Aids that glowed in the dark. She put one on the catheter, and that got Lisa and me to laugh. Next,

she reached Dr. Youman on the phone. She said, “This catheter is not looking good. I’ve tried to clean it as much as I can, but maybe we should have it taken out.”

Dr. Youman said, “Well, don’t do anything yet, because I’ve decided Lance needs to move up his first chemotherapy treatment. He starts Monday at one o’clock.”

“Why?” my mother asked.

I took the phone. Dr. Youman explained that more results had come in from the pathology reports and blood work, and they were worrisome. In a mere 24 hours, the cancer had

progressed. Oncologists use something called blood markers to track the progress of the disease: the levels of various proteins in your blood such as human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) and

alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) indicate how much cancer is in the body. My blood counts had risen, in a day.

The cancer was not just spreading, it was galloping, and Youman no longer thought I could afford to wait a week for chemo. I should begin treatment directly, because if the cancer was

moving that quickly, every day might count.

I hung up the phone, dispirited. But there was no time to brood; I would have one chance and one chance only to go to the sperm bank in San Antonio: that very afternoon. “This is pathetic,”

I said to my mother, disgustedly.

The ride to San Antonio was grim. The only thing that relieved the tension was that Kevin Livingston had come home, and he made the trip with me for moral support. I was glad to see

him; he has an open face and vivid blue eyes under his cropped black hair, and he always looks like he’s on the verge of laughing. It was hard to be in a bad mood around him. We got more

help, too: a young man named Cord Shiflet, the son of my architect and friend David Shiflet,

offered to drive us.

I sat in the back seat silently as the miles went by, with one nervous thought after another running through my mind. I would have only one chance to bank. I might not be able to have

children. I was going to have my first chemo treatment. Would it make me sick?

Finally we arrived at the medical office in San Antonio. Cord and Kevin sat with my mother in the waiting area while a staff nurse escorted me into a private room, and Kevin managed to

crack a bad joke, trying to break the terrible mood. “Hey, Lance, you need a magazine?” he said. I grinned, weakly.

I was shown into a room with a lounge chair, a sort of recliner. The lighting was dim, an attempt at ambiance, I guessed. On a small table there was a stack of, yes, magazines. Porn, I

saw, disgusted. I hobbled over to the chair, and sighed heavily, and nearly cried. I was in severe pain; the cut from the surgery was right at the top of my groin and met my abdomen. I was

depressed and falling apart emotionally from the shock of the diagnosis, and now I was supposed to summon an erection? There was no way. As I lay in the chair, I thought, This isn’t

the way it was supposed to happen. Conceiving a child was supposed to be wreathed in hope, not this sad, solitary, desperate procedure.

I wanted to be a father–quite badly–but I had always assumed it would happen when I was in love. In my early 20s, I’d gone through romantic relationships one after the other. I’d date a

woman for a while, and then burn out after just a few months, and stray, and break it off. I dated a girl I’d gone to high school with, I dated a model from Holland, but I was never in a

relationship for more than a year. My teammates teasingly named me FedEx for the speed with which I changed girlfriends. The FedEx slogan was “When you absolutely, positively have to

have it–overnight.” I wasn’t married, I had no ties, and it wasn’t the deepest period of my life. With Lisa Shiels, though, things were different. By the time I was diagnosed we were very

close. She was a bright and serious-minded young woman who was absorbed in her classes at Texas, and the idea of marriage and kids with her had certainly occurred to me. I wasn’t sure we

were right for each other long-term, but I knew I wanted to be a husband, and I knew, too, that I wanted to be a better father than the ones I had encountered.

I had no choice; I closed my eyes and I did what I had to do.

Out in the waiting room, my mother and my two friends sat, silently. I learned later that while they were sitting there, my mother suddenly turned to Cord and Kevin and said to them, almost

angrily, “Now, you boys listen to me. When he comes out, I don’t want to hear one word from you. Not one word!” She knew. Somehow, she knew that this was one of the most distressing

and utterly cheerless experiences of my life.

When it was over, I came out and handed the vial to a doctor. Cord and Kevin were quiet. I filled out some papers, hastily, and told the nurses I would send the rest of the information in

later. I just wanted to get out of there. But as we were leaving, the doctor came back out.

“It’s a very low count,” he said.

The doctor explained that my sperm count was only about a third of what it should have been; it seemed the cancer had already affected my reproductive capacity. Now the chemo would take

its toll, too.

The drive on the way back was even grimmer than on the way down. I don’t even remember if we ate. I talked to Kevin and Cord about the magazines. “Can you believe they give you that

stuff to look at?” I said. Kevin and Cord were great; they acted like it was no big deal, nothing to be embarrassed about, just a very sensible errand, something that had to be done. I was

appreciative, and I took my cue from them; it was the last time I was self-conscious about the nature of my illness.

I SPENT THE REST OF THE WEEKEND ON THE COUCH RE-

covering from the surgery. The anesthesia made me woozy, and the incision was excruciating. I rested and watched football while my mother cooked for me, and we both read up on cancer,

exhaustively. “No stone unturned,” my mother said. In between our reading sessions, we talked about what to do. “How are we going to get rid of this stuff?” I asked her. We acted as if we

could somehow formulate a plan to beat it, like we had trained in the old days.

That first week my mother picked up all of my prescriptions, collated my medical records, scoured bookstores for cancer material, and organized my schedule. She bought me a journal to

keep notes in and a visitors’ book to keep track of who came to see me. She would schedule my friends in staggered fashion, so that I would never feel too alone. We called it the “community

calendar,” and I had revolving vision its, never too many at one time, but never so few as to leave me time to get low, either.

She drew up a three-month calendar to keep track of my chemotherapy treatments, and made lists of my medications and at what time I should take each one. She ran my illness as if it was a

project and she was the project manager. She had colored pencils, charts, and timelines. To her, organization and knowledge would facilitate a cure.

She made an appointment with a nutritionist. I limped off the couch and we drove over, and the nutritionist gave us a guideline for fighting cancer and a list of foods compatible with the

chemotherapy drugs: a lot of free-range chicken, broccoli, no cheeses or other fats, and a lot of vitamin C to help combat the toxins of chemo. Immediately, my mother began steaming huge

bowls of broccoli for me.

But beneath all of the manic activity, I could tell that my mother was struggling. When she talked to other members of our family on the phone, I could hear a tremor in her voice, and

finally she quit calling them when I was around. She tried not to show me all that she felt, but I knew that at night she would go into her room and cry.

On Monday morning, it was time to go public. I held a news conference to announce that I was ill and would not be cycling. Everyone was there, Bill, Lisa, my mother, and several sponsors,

and there was a conference call for reporters from Europe as well. Also on the phone were representatives from Cofidis, the French team I was supposed to join in the upcoming season.

The room was filled with cameras, and I had to deliver a prepared speech. There was an audible murmur when I said the word “cancer,” and I could see the shock and the disbelief on the faces

of the reporters and cameramen. A gentleman from Cofidis chimed in on the phone: they pledged their total support in helping me get through the illness and back on the bike.

“I’m determined to fight this disease,” I concluded. “And I will win.”

THAT AFTERNOON, I WALKED INTO YET ANOTHER NON-descript brown brick medical building for my first chemotherapy treatment. I was taken aback by how informal it

was: a simple waiting room with some recliners and La-Z-Boys and assorted chairs, a coffee table, and a TV. It looked like somebody’s living room full of guests. It might have been a party,

except for the giveaway–everybody was attached to his or her very own IV drip.

Dr. Youman explained that the standard treatment protocol for tes-ticular cancer was called BEP, a cocktail of three different drugs, bleomycin, etoposide, and cisplatin, and they were so

toxic that the nurses wore radioactive protection when handling them. The most important ingredient of the three was cisplatin, which is actually platinum, and its use against testicular

cancer had been pioneered by a man named Dr. Lawrence Einhorn, who practiced at the Indiana University medical center in Indianapolis. Prior to Einhorn s discovery, testicular cancer was

almost always fatal–25 years earlier it had killed a Chicago Bears football star named Brian Piccolo, among many others. But the first man who Einhorn had treated with platinum, an

Indianapolis schoolteacher, was still alive.

Had I lived 20 years ago, I would have been dead in six months, Youman explained. Most people think Piccolo died of lung cancer, but it started as testicular cancer, and they couldn’t

save him. He died in 1970 at the age of 26. Since then, cisplatin has become the magic bullet for testicular cancer, and Einhorn’s first patient, the Indianapolis teacher, has been cancer-free for

over two decades–on his anniversaries they have a big party at his house, and Dr. Einhorn and all his former nurses come to visit him.

I thought, Bring it on,give me platinum. But Youman warned that the treatment could make me feel very sick. The three different anticancer toxins would be leaked into my system for five

hours at a time, over five straight days. They would have a cumulative effect. Anti-emetics would be given to me along with the toxins, to prevent me from suffering severe nausea, but

they couldn’t curb it entirely.

Chemo is so potent that you can’t take it every day. Instead it’s administered in three-week cycles; I would take the treatment for one week, and then have two weeks off to allow my body

to recover and produce new red blood cells.

Dr. Youman explained everything carefully, preparing us for what we were about to face. When he finished, I had just one question. It was a question I would ask repeatedly over the next

several weeks. “What’s the cure rate for this?” I asked. “What are my chances?”

Dr. Youman said, “Sixty to sixty-five percent.”

My first chemo treatment was strangely undramatic. For one thing, I didn’t feel sick. I walked in and chose a chair in the corner, the last one along a wall in a row of six or seven people. My

mother kissed me and went off to do some errands, and left me with my fellow patients. I took my place among them.

She had prepared me to be disturbed by my first encounter with other cancer patients, but I wasn’t. Instead, I felt a sense of belonging. I was relieved to be able to talk to other people who

shared the illness, and compare experiences. By the time my mother got back, I was chatting cheerfully with the guy next to me. He was about my grandfather’s age, but we hit it off, and we

were jabbering away when my mother walked in. “Hey, Mom,” I said brightly. “This is Paul, and he’s got prostate cancer.”

I HAD TO KEEP MOVING, I TOLD MYSELF. EVERY MORN-

ing during that first week of chemo I rose early, put on a pair of sweats and my headphones, and walked. I would stride up the road for an hour or more, breathing and working up a sweat.

Every evening, I rode my bike.

Bart Knaggs returned from Orlando with a Mickey Mouse hat he had picked up at Disney World. He handed it to me and told me he knew I would need something to wear when I lost

my hair.

We would go riding together, and Kevin Livingston often joined us. Bart made huge maps for us, as large as six feet in diameter. He would get maps of counties from the Department of

Highways and cut and paste them together, and we would stand over them choosing new routes for ourselves, long winding rides out in the middle of nowhere. The deal was to always find a

new road, someplace we hadn’t been before, instead of the same old out-and-back. I couldn’t stand to ride the same road twice. The training can be so monotonous that you need newness,

even if half the time you end up on a bad piece of road, or get lost. It’s okay to get lost sometimes.

Why did I ride when I had cancer? Cycling is so hard, the suffering is so intense, that it’s absolutely cleansing. You can go out there with the weight of the world on your shoulders, and