Love is as much of an object as an obsession, everybody wants it, everybody seeks it, but few ever achieve it, those who do will cherish it, be lost in it, and among all, never… never forget it.
Curtis Judalet
Liên Kết Nhanh
Biên tập viên
Cập nhật: It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life
ePub
A4CHAPTER SIX
C
HEMOTHE QUESTION WAS, WHICH WOULD THE CHEMO
kill first: the cancer, or me? My life became one long IV drip, a sickening routine: if I wasn’t in pain I was vomiting, and if I wasn’t vomiting, I was thinking about what I had, and if I wasn’t
thinking about what I had, I was wondering when it was going to be over. That’s chemo for you.
The sickness was in the details, in the nasty asides of the treatment. Cancer was a vague sense of unwellness, but chemo was an endless series of specific horrors, until I began to think the
cure was as bad as, or worse than, the disease. What a casual bystander associates with cancer–loss of hair, a sickly pallor, a wasting away–are actually the side effects of the treatment.
Chemo was a burning in my veins, a matter of being slowly eaten from the inside out by a destroying river of pollutants until I didn’t have an eyelash left to bat. Chemo was a continuous
cough, hacking up black chunks of mysterious, tar-like matter from deep in my chest. Chemo was a constant, doubling-over need to go to the bathroom.
To cope with it, I imagined I was coughing out the burned-up tumors. I envisioned the chemo working on them, singeing them, and expelling them from my system. When I went to the
bathroom I endured the acid sting in my groin by telling myself I was peeing out dead cancer cells. I suppose that’s how you do it. They’ve got to go somewhere, don’t they? I was coughing
up cancer, pissing it out, getting rid of it every way I knew how.
I had no life other than chemo. My old forms of keeping dates and time fell by the wayside, substituted for by treatment regimens. I spent every major holiday that fall and winter either on a
chemo cycle or recovering from one. I spent Halloween night with an IV in me and passed out bags of candy to the nurses. I went home for Thanksgiving and recuperated on my couch while
my mother tried to persuade me to eat a few bites of turkey. I slept 10 to 12 hours a night, and when I was awake, I was in a funk that felt like a combination of jet lag and a hangover.
Chemo has a cumulative effect; I underwent four cycles in the space of three months, and toxins built up in my body with each phase. At first it wasn’t so bad; by the end of the second set of
treatments I just felt sickish and constantly sleepy. I would check into the Indianapolis medical center on a Monday, and take five hours of chemo for five straight days, finishing on Friday.
When I wasn’t on chemo, I was attached to a 24-hour IV drip of saline and a chemical protectant to shield my immune system from the most toxic effects of ifosfamide, which is
particularly damaging to the kidneys and the bone marrow.
But by the third cycle I was on my hands and knees fighting nausea. A wave would come over me, and I’d feel as if all of my vital organs had gone bad inside my body. By the fourth cycle–the
highest number prescribed for cancer patients, and only in the most severe cases–I was in the fetal position, retching around the clock.
Dr. Nichols offered to let me do the chemo as an outpatient in Austin. “You can do it at home and we’ll consult,” he said. But I insisted on commuting to Indianapolis so that I could be
constantly monitored.
“If I get sicker, I want you to be able to see it,” I told him. “And if I get better, I want you to see that, too.”
Chemo didn’t look like anything. It was hard to believe that a substance so deadly could appear so innocuous. The drugs came in three clear plastic 50cc bags, labeled with my name, the date,
the dose, and the volume of fluid. The silvery clear liquids floated harmlessly in their plastic containers, without any precipitate. They could just as easily have been bags of sugar water. The
giveaway was the pair of heavy latex gloves the nurse used to handle the bags, and the stamp that said “Hazardous Materials.” The nurse would insert tubing into a bag, and infuse it through
another tube into my catheter, and thus into my bloodstream. One bag took an hour, another took 90 minutes, and the last one took 30.
But those liquids were so destructive they could literally evaporate all of the blood in my body. I felt like my veins were being scoured out. The medical explanation for the sensation I
experienced was myelo-suppression, the most frequent and severe side effect of chemotherapy, which is the inhibition of red blood cell production and maturation. Chemo weakens your blood.
During the third cycle, my hematocrit– the percentage of total blood volume flowing through my body–fell to less than 25, and the normal count is 46. Ironically, I was given a red blood cell
booster called Epogen (EPO). In any other situation, taking EPO would get me in trouble with the International Cycling Union and the International Olympic Committee, because it’s
considered performance-enhancing. But in my case, the EPO was hardly that. It was the only thing that kept me alive.
Chemo doesn’t just kill cancer–it kills healthy cells, too. It attacked my bone marrow, my muscle, my teeth, and the linings of my throat and my stomach, and left me open to all kinds of
infections. My gums bled. I got sores in my mouth. And of course I lost my appetite, which was a potentially serious problem. Without enough protein, I wouldn’t be able to rebuild tissue after
chemo had eaten through my skin, my hair, and my fingernails.
Mornings were hardest. I would finish a treatment shortly before dinner. I’d try to eat something, and then I’d lie in bed, watching television or visiting with my friends. The drugs would
penetrate into my system through the night, and I would wake up the next day in a thick cloud of nausea. There was only one thing I could tolerate: apple fritters from the hospital cafeteria. It
was strange, but the crispy dough, the icy sugar, and the jam-like apple filling were soothing on my tongue and stomach.
Every morning Jim Ochowicz would show up with a box full of them. He’d sit at the foot of the
bed, and we’d eat them together. Och brought me those fritters every single day, long past the point when I was capable of actually eating them.
Chemo was lonely. My mother finally went home to Piano after the brain surgery; she had exhausted her vacation time and couldn’t afford to take an unpaid leave. She hated to go; she
thought that just by being there she could make a difference.
When I was in high school she used to believe that if she kept watch over me, nothing bad could happen to me. When a norther would hit Piano and the streets iced over, my buddies and I
used to go to the Piano East parking lot, tie a snow disc to the back of a car, and tow each other around. My mother would drive up and watch us from her car. “I feel like if I’m here I can keep
you from getting hurt,” she said. She felt the same way about chemo, but she didn’t have a choice.
Och took her place, my surrogate parent and my most constant bedside companion. He made the long drive over from Wisconsin and sat with me for every cycle, day in and day out. Och
understood the slow, corrosive effects of the chemo on a patient’s spirit, because he had lost his father to cancer. He knew how demoralizing the treatment was, and how tedious, and he
tirelessly sought ways to divert me. He taught me how to play Hearts, and he sat next to my bed, dealing the cards for hours on end, with Bill and Lisa making up a foursome. He read the
newspaper and the mail to me when I was too sick to read it myself.
He took me for walks around the hospital, wheeling my IV pole, while we talked about everything from cycling to Internet stocks. One afternoon, we talked about death. We sat in the
sun on a bench outside the medical center. “Och, I don’t feel ready to go, I think I’m supposed to live,” I said. “I’m not afraid to die if I have to. But I’m still not convinced I can’t beat this
thing.”
But chemo felt like a kind of living death. I would lie in bed half-asleep, and lose track of time, including whether it was day or night– and I didn’t like that. It was disorienting and made me
feel as if things were slipping out of joint, getting away from me. Och created a routine so I could gauge the time. He brought my apple fritters for breakfast, and chatted with me until I
dozed off in the middle of a sentence. My chin would fall on my chest, and Och would tiptoe out of the room. A few hours later he would come back with a plate of vegetables for lunch, or a
sandwich he had bought outside the hospital. After lunch, we would play cards until I passed out again, my head nodding and my eyelids fluttering. Och would take the cards out of my hand
and put them back in the deck, and tiptoe softly out. Bill and Lisa were also there for every cycle, and others floated in and out of town; loyal
sponsors and old friends took turns showing up. Och, Bill, and Lisa were the core group, my social chairmen. Every evening, the three of them would bring me some dinner, or, if I felt well
enough, I would walk with them down to the cafeteria, dragging my little IV cart behind me. But I was never really up for the meal; it was just to break the monotony. Afterward we’d watch
some TV until I began to doze, and then they would leave me at about 7 P.M., and I would be alone for the night.
It became a ritual for the three of them to eat together, along with any other visitors who had come to see me, like Chris Carmichael or Scott MacEachern. They would go to the Palomino
Euro Bistro, or to a great old steakhouse named St. Elmo, and afterward they’d go to the bar at the Canterbury Hotel and smoke cigars. It was everything I would have enjoyed, if I hadn’t been
sick. In the evening when they got ready to leave, I’d say accusingly, “You guys are going to drink your asses off again, aren’t you?”
WHEN LATRICE CAME IN TO GIVE ME THE CHEMO, NO matter how sick I was, I would sit up and be as attentive as I could. “What are you putting in me?” I’d ask. “What’s the
mix?” By now I could read a chest X ray as well as any doctor could, and I knew all the terms and anti-nausea dosages. I quizzed LaTrice on them, and told her what felt better or worse from
the standpoint of nausea. I’d say, “Try a little less of this.” Or, “Give me a little more of that.”
I was not a compliant cancer patient. I was salty, aggressive, and pestering. I personalized the disease. “The Bastard,” I called it. I made it my enemy, my challenge. When LaTrice said,
“Drink five glasses of water in a day,” I drank fifteen, draining them one after the other until the water ran down my chin.
Chemo threatened to deprive me of my independence and self-determination, and that was galling. I was tied to an IV pole for 24 hours a day, and it was a hard thing for me to cede
control to my nurses and doctors. I insisted on behaving as if I was a full participant in the cure. I followed the blood work and the X rays closely, and badgered LaTrice as if I were the Grand
Inquisitor.
“Who are my nurses today, LaTrice?”
“What’s that drug called, LaTrice?”
“What does that one do, LaTrice?”
I questioned her constantly, as if somehow I was the one in charge. LaTrice coordinated the chemo with the nurses on the unit: she made out my schedule and the anti-emetic regime, and
managed the symptoms. I kept track of everything, I knew exactly what I was supposed to get, and when, and I noticed every slight variation in the routine.
LaTrice adopted an air of exaggerated patience with me. This was a typical day for her:
“What dose am I getting, LaTrice?” I’d ask.
“What’s that based on?”
“Am I getting the same thing as yesterday?”
“Why am I getting a different one?”
“What time do we start, LaTrice?”
“When do I finish, LaTrice?”
I made a game out of timing the completion of treatments. I would look at my wristwatch, and stare at the IV bags as they emptied into my body by droplets. I tried to calculate the rate of
drip, and time the end of the treatment down to the last second.
“When, exactly, is my last drop, LaTrice?”
As the time went on, LaTrice and I developed a kidding relationship. I accused her of withholding anti-emetics out of cruelty. They were all that kept me from cringing with illness
from the chemo. But I could only have a dose every four hours, so I’d hassle LaTrice for
more.
“I can’t give you more,” she’d say. “You got it three hours ago,
you’ve just got an hour left.”
“Come on, LaTrice. You run the show around here. You know you can do it. You just don’t want to.”
Every once in a while, I’d give in to the retching, and vomit so hard I thought I might pass out. “I feel much better now,” I’d tell LaTrice, sarcastically, once I was through.
Sometimes food triggered me, especially breakfast food. Finally, I stopped them from bringing the tray at all. One morning I stared balefully at a plateful of eggs that seemed hopelessly gooey
and toast that looked like plasterboard, and I exploded.
“What is this shit?” I said. “LaTrice, would you eat this? Look at this. You/eed this to people? Can someone please get me something to eat? ” “Lance, you can have whatever you want,”
LaTrice said serenely. LaTrice gave as good as she got. She would tease me back, even when I was too ill to laugh.
“Is it me, Lance?” LaTrice would ask with exaggerated sympathy. “Am I what’s making you sick?”
I would just grin, soundlessly, and retch again. We were becoming friends, comrades in chemo. Between cycles I went home to Austin for two-week rest periods to regain my strength, and
LaTrice always called to check up on me and make sure I was drinking my fluids. The chemo could damage my urinary tract, so she was always after me to hydrate. One night she called
when I was fooling around in my carport with a present from Oakley. It was a small remote-control car made out of titanium that could do up to 70 miles per hour.
“What’s that loud buzzing noise?” she said. “I’m in my garage,” I said. “What are you doing?” she said. “I’m playing with my toy car,” I said. “Of course you are,” she said.
ONE DAY I NOTICED STRANGE MARKS ON MY SKIN, AL-
most like faint brown stains. They were chemo burns.
The drugs were scorching my tissues from the inside out, leaving patches of discoloration on my flesh. By now I was well into the third cycle, and I didn’t look like the same person. My
physique was shot, compared to the one I entered the hospital with. I took hobbling walks around the floor to get a little exercise, pushing my IV pole, and I remember looking down at
myself in my gown. It was as though my body was being steadily diminished: my muscles were smaller, and flaccid. This is the real McCoy, I thought. This is what it means to be sick.
“I need to stay in shape,” I’d murmur. “I need to stay in shape.”
I kept losing weight, no matter how hard I tried not to. I didn’t have much to lose to begin with–I had a very low percent of body fat, and the toxins ate away at me like a school offish,
nibbling. “LaTrice, I’m losing weight,” I’d lament. “What can I do? Look at my muscles! Look what’s happening to me. I need to ride. I’ve got to get toned back up.”
“Lance, it’s chemo,” LaTrice would say, in that supremely tolerant way. “You’re going to lose, it’s automatic. Chemo patients lose weight.”
I couldn’t bear to stay in bed, dormant. As I lay in the sheets, doing nothing, I felt like something that had washed up on a beach.
“Can I exercise, LaTrice?”
“Do you have a gym here, LaTrice?”
“Lance, this is a hospital,” she’d say, with that great sighing forbearance of hers. “However, for patients who have to stay with us for a long time, and for people like you, we do have stationary
bikes.” “Can I do that?” I shot back.
LaTrice asked Nichols for an okay to let me use the gym, but Nichols was reluctant. My immune system was almost nonexistent, and I wasn’t in any condition to work out.
For all of her mocking exasperation with me, LaTrice seemed to sympathize with my restless urge to move. One afternoon I was scheduled for an MRI scan to check my brain, but the
machines were fully booked, so LaTrice sent me over to the nearby children’s hospital, Riley. An
underground tunnel of about a mile attached the two facilities, and the usual way to transport patients between them was either in an ambulance, or in a wheelchair via the tunnel.
But I was determined to walk to Riley, not ride. I informed the nurse who showed up with a wheelchair, “No way I’m getting in that thing.” I told her we would be taking the tunnel to Riley
on foot, even if it meant walking all night. LaTrice didn’t say a word. She just shook her head as I set off. The nurse dragged my IV cart behind me.
I shuffled slowly through the tunnel, there and back. I looked like a stooped, limping old man. The round-trip took over an hour. By the time I got back to my bed, I was exhausted and damp
with sweat, but I was triumphant.
“You just had to do it different,” LaTrice said, and smiled. It became the biggest fight of all just to move. By the fifth straight day of my third cycle of chemo, I was no longer able to take my
walks around the ward. I had to lie in bed for a full day until I regained enough strength to go home. An attendant turned up Sunday morning with a wheelchair and offered me a ride to the
lobby to check out. But I refused to give in to it. I turned it down, angrily. “No way,” I said. “I’m walking out of here.”
THE FRENCHMAN HOVERED OVER MY HOSPITAL BED, attempting to present me
with a $500 bottle of red wine as a token of his esteem. I stared at him from the depths of my narcotic haze, half-conscious and too nauseated to respond. I did have the presence of mind to
\vonder why anyone would waste an expensive Bordeaux on a cancer patient.
Alain Bondue was the director of the Cofidis racing organization, and he had come to pay what appeared to be a social call. But I was in no shape to make polite conversation; I was in the late
throes of my third cycle of chemo, and I was deathly pale with dark circles under my eyes. I had no hair or eyebrows. Bondue spent a couple of awkward minutes pledging the support of the
team, and then took his leave.
“Lance, we love you,” he said. “We’re going to take care of you, I promise.”
With that, he said goodbye, and I squeezed his hand. But as he left my bedside, Bondue gestured to Bill Stapleton–he wanted him to come outside for a conversation. Bill followed
Bondue into the hallway, and abruptly, Bondue told Bill he had come to discuss some business matters, and they needed to go someplace private for a meeting.
Stapleton and Bondue and a third man, a friend named Paul Sher-wen who spoke French and offered to help interpret, gathered in a small, dimly lit conference room in the hotel across the
street from the hospital. Bondue began to chain-smoke as he explained to Bill in French that, regrettably, Cofidis would be forced to renegotiate my contract because of my illness. My
agreement with the team was for $2.5 million over two years–but that would no longer be possible.
Bill shook his head in confusion. “I’m sorry?” he said. Cofidis had CHEMO publicly pledged to stand by me while I fought the illness, he said. Surely this wasn’t the time to
discuss contracts, not in the middle of my chemotherapy.
“We love Lance; we want to take care of Lance,” Bondue said in French. “But you have to understand this is a cultural thing, and people in France don’t understand how somebody can get
paid when they’re not working.”
Bill was stunned. He said, “I don’t believe what I’m hearing.” Bondue pointed out that my contract had a clause stating I was required to pass a medical examination. Obviously, I was in
no condition to do that. Therefore Cofidis had the right to cancel the contract. They were offering to renegotiate, which they felt was generous under the circumstances. They wanted to
honor part of it, but not all. If I didn’t accept the new terms they offered, they would force me to undergo the medical exam, and terminate the contract in its entirety. Bill stood up, looked
across the table, and said, “Fuck you.” Bondue was startled.
Bill said it again. “Fuck you. I cannot believe you came all the way here at a time like this, and you want me to go back in there and tell him that now.”
Bill was beside himself–not so much that Cofidis would try to extricate themselves from the contract, which they had the right to do, but at the timing, and the backhandedness of it. Cofidis
had made a statement to the world that they would stick with me, and they had reaped the favorable press for it, but behind closed doors was another matter. Bill was fiercely protective of
me, and he flatly refused to raise the subject with me while I was in the midst of chemo.
“I’m not doing it,” Bill said. “I’m not interested in talking about this, not right now. Do whatever you guys want to do, and let it play out in the court of public opinion.”
Bondue was unmoved. Legally, he intoned, surely Bill knew that we
didn’t have a leg to stand on. Cofidis had the right to terminate that very day. Instantly.
“You understand it’s subject to the medical exam,” Bondue said again.
Bill said, “Are you going to send a doctor over here? Are you going to send a doctor over here to do an exam?”
“Well, we might have to,” Bondue said.
“Great,” Bill said. “I’ll have all the television cameras there, and you guys knock yourselves out.”
Bondue continued to insist that Cofidis was willing to keep me under some kind of contract–but
only if a set of conditions was imposed. Bill calmed down and tried to persuade Bondue that, despite my appearance, I was getting better. Surely they could work something out? But
Bondue was firm, and after two more hours, they had gotten nowhere. Finally, Bill stood up to leave. If Cofidis was pulling the rug out from under me while I was in the hospital, fine, he said,
“I’ll let the whole world know you abandoned him.” Abruptly, Bill ended the meeting.
“Do whatever you have to do,” he said.
Shaken, Bill came back to my hospital room. He had been gone for over three hours by now, so I knew something was wrong. As soon as the door to my room opened, I said, “What?”
“Nothing,” Bill said. “Don’t worry about it.”
But I could see by the look on his face that he was upset, and I suspected I knew the reason why.
“What?”
“I don’t know what to say,” Bill said. “They want to renegotiate this thing, and they’ll make you take a medical exam if they have to.”
“Well, what are we going to do?”
“I’ve already told them to fuck off.”
I thought about it. “Maybe we should just let it go,” I said, tiredly.
I couldn’t help wondering if the real reason for Bondue’s trip was to appraise my health. I thought then, and I still think, that he came to the hospital with a choice to make: if I looked
healthy, then he would take a positive attitude and let the deal stand, and if I looked very ill, he would take the hard-line approach and renegotiate or terminate. We felt that it was nothing
more than a spy mission: see if Armstrong is dying. Apparently Bondue had taken one look at me and decided I was on my deathbed.
Bill was crushed, and apologetic. “I’m sorry to give you one more piece of bad news.”
But I had more important things to dwell on than Cofidis. Don’t get me wrong, I was worried about the money, and I was hurt by their timing, and by their halfhearted words of support. But
on the other hand, I had a more immediate problem to concentrate on–not puking.
Bill said, “We’ll stall. We’ll keep negotiating.” He thought if he could put them off until February, I might just be healthy enough to pass the medical exam. “We’ll just see how this
plays out,” he said. I just grunted, too nauseated to really care. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
Over the next three or four weeks, Cofidis pressed the issue and made it clear they weren’t bluffing, they would have no problem subjecting me to a medical test. They would fly their own
doctor over from France and cancel the entire contract. I continued to resist talking to Bill about it, because I was at my sickest point in the chemo cycles. But Bill sat down in my room one day
and said, “Lance, they’re serious.” We had no choice but to accept whatever terms they gave me.
he said.
In the end, Cofidis paid less than a third of the original two-year contract and required an out clause for themselves for 1998.
It felt like a vote of no confidence. It felt like they thought I was dying. I got the message Cofidis was sending: I was a dead man.
THE IRONY WAS, THE WORSE I FELT, THE BETTER I GOT.
That was the chemo for you.
By now I was so sick there were times I couldn’t talk. So sick I couldn’t eat, couldn’t watch TV, couldn’t read my mail, couldn’t even speak to my mother on the phone. One afternoon she called
me from work. I whispered, “Mom, I’m going to have to talk to you another time.”
On the really bad days, I would lie on my side in bed, wrapped in blankets, fighting the noxious roiling in my stomach and the fever raging under my skin. I’d peek out from under the blankets
and just grunt.
The chemo left me so foggy that my memory of that time is sketchy, but what I do know for sure is that at my sickest, I started to beat the thing. The doctors would come in every morning
with the results of my latest blood-draw, and I began to get improved results. One thing unique to the disease is that the marker levels are extremely telling. We tracked every little fluctuation
in my blood count; a slight rise or downturn in an HCG or AFP marker was cause for either concern or celebration.
The numbers had incredible import for my doctors and me. For instance, from October 2, when I was diagnosed, to October 14, when the brain lesions were discovered, my HCG count had
risen from 49,600 to 92,380. In the early days of my treatment, the doctors were sober when they came into my room–I could tell they were suspending judgment.
But gradually they became more cheerful: the tumor markers began to drop. Then they began to dive. Soon they were in a beautiful free fall. In fact, the numbers were dropping so fast that the
doctors were a little taken aback. On a manila file folder, I kept a chart of my blood
markers. In just one three-week period in November, they fell from 92,000 to around 9,000.
“You’re a responder,” Nichols told me.
I had opened up a gap on the field. I knew that if I was going to be cured, that was the way it would go, with a big surging attack, just like in a race. Nichols said, “You’re ahead of schedule.”
Those numbers became the highlight of each day; they were my motivator, my yellow jersey. The yellow jersey is the garment worn by the leader of the Tour de France to distinguish him
from the rest of the field.
I began to think of my recovery like a time trial in the Tour. I was getting feedback from my team right behind me, and at every checkpoint the team director would come over the radio and
say, “You’re thirty seconds up.” It made me want to go even faster. I began to set goals with my blood, and I would get psyched up when I met them. Nichols would tell me what they hoped to
see in the next blood test, say a 50 percent drop. I would concentrate on that number, as if I could make the counts by mentally willing it. “They’ve split in half,” Nichols would say, and I
would feel like I had won something. Then one day he said, “They’re a fourth of what they were.”
I began to feel like I was winning the battle against the disease, and it made my cycling instincts kick in again. I wanted to tear the legs off cancer, the way I tore the legs off other riders on a
hill. I was in a breakaway. “Cancer picked the wrong guy,” I bragged to Kevin Livingston. “When it looked around for a body to hang out in, it made a big mistake when it chose mine.
Big mistake.”
One afternoon Dr. Nichols came into my room and read me a new number: my HCG was just 96. It was a slam-dunk. From now on it was just a matter of getting through the last and most
toxic part of the treatments. I was almost well.
But I sure didn’t feel like it. That was chemo for you.
BACK HOME IN TEXAS BETWEEN CHEMO CYCLES I WOULD gradually recover some
strength, until I could begin to move again. I craved air and exercise.
Friends didn’t let on how weak I had become. My out-of-town visitors must have been shocked at my pale, wasted, bald appearance, but they hid it well. Frankie Andreu came to stay with me
for a week, and Chris Carmichael, and Eric Heiden, the great Olympic speedskater-turned-physician, and Eddy Merckx. They cooked for me, and took me on short
walks and bicycle rides.
We’d leave my front door and go up a curving asphalt road that led to Mount Bonnell, a craggy peak above the Austin riverbank. Normally my friends had to sprint to keep up with my
gear-mashing and hammering pedal strokes, but now we moved at a crawl. I would get winded
on a completely flat road.
I don’t think I had fully admitted the effect chemotherapy had on my body. I came into the cancer fight very brash and fit and confident, and I could see with each cycle that I was being
drained somewhat, but I had no idea how incapacitating it truly was until I almost collapsed in a stranger’s front yard.
Bike riding wasn’t part of Dr. Nichols’ recommendation. He didn’t outright forbid it, but he said, “This is not the time to try to maintain or improve your fitness. Don’t stress your body.” I didn’t
listen–I was panicked at the idea that I would be so deconditioned by the chemo that I might never recover. My body was atrophying.
When I felt up to it, I would say to Kevin or Bart, “Let’s go out and ride the bike.” At first we would ride for anywhere from 30 to 50 miles, and I pictured myself as defiant, indefatigable,
head down into the wind, racing along a road. But in reality the rides weren’t like that at all; they were fairly desperate and feeble acts.
By the end of my treatments we would ride for half an hour, a simple loop around the neighborhood, and I told myself that as long as I could do that, I was staying in tolerable shape.
But then two incidents showed me exactly how weakened I was. One afternoon I went out with Kevin, Bart, and Bart’s fiancee, Barbara, and about halfway through the ride we reached a short,
steep hill. I thought I was keeping up, but the truth was, my friends were being kind. In fact, they were moving so slowly they almost fell over sideways on their bikes. Sometimes they
would pull ahead accidentally, and I would churn behind them, lamenting, “You’re killing me.” They were careful not to overwork me, so I had little concept of how fast or how slow we were
going. I actually thought I was staying with them as we worked up the hill.
All of a sudden, a figure moved up on my left. It was a woman in her 50s on a heavy mountain bike, and she went right by me.
She cruised, without even breathing hard, while I puffed and chugged on my high-performance bike. I couldn’t keep up with her. In cycling terms it’s called getting dropped. I was giving it
everything, and I couldn’t stay with her.
You fool yourself. You fool yourself into thinking you might be riding faster and feeling better than you really are. Then a middle-aged woman on a mountain bike passes you, and you know
exactly where you stand. I had to admit I was in bad shape.
It became an increasing struggle to ride my bike between the chemotherapy sessions, and I had to accept that it was no longer about fitness. Now I rode purely for the sake of riding–and that
was new for me. To ride for only half an hour. I had never gone out for such a trivial amount of time on a bike.
I didn’t love the bike before I got sick. It was simple for me: it was my job and I was successful
at it. It was a means to an end, a way to
My mother looked even younger than seventeen when she had me.
In a way, we grew up together.
(Courtesy of Linda Armstrong)
At twelve, I was a swimming prodigy, and a well-fed one. In the kitchen with my best friend and biggest supporter.
(Courtesy of Linda Armstrong)
My ninth birthday, September 18, 1980. You can tell by my pressed shirt and the size of the cake that my mom made sure I didn’t go without. (Courtesy of Linda Armstrong)
Walking into the sunset in Santa Barbara. (Baron Spafford)
get out of Piano, a potential source of wealth and recognition. But it was not something I did for pleasure, or poetry; it was my profession and my livelihood, and my reason for being, but I
would not have said that I loved it.
I’d never ridden just to ride in the past–there had to be a purpose behind it, a race or a training regimen. Before, I wouldn’t even consider riding for just thirty minutes or an hour. Real cyclists
don’t even take the bike out of the garage if it’s only going to be an hour-long ride.
Bart would call up and say, “Let’s go hang out and ride bikes.”
“What for?” I’d say.
But now I not only loved the bike, I needed it. I needed to get away from my problems for a little while, and to make a point to myself and to my friends. I had a reason for those rides: I
wanted everyone to see that I was okay, and still able to ride–and maybe I was trying to prove it to myself, too.
“How’s Lance doing?” people would say.
I wanted my friends to say, “Well, he seems pretty good. He’s riding his bike.”
Maybe I needed to tell myself that I was still a rider, not just a cancer patient, no matter how weak I had become. If nothing else, it was my way of countering the disease and regaining the
control it had stripped from me. I can still do this, I told myself. I might not be able to do it like I used to, but I can still do it.
Then one day Kevin and another friend and local cyclist, Jim Woodman, came over to take me for our usual little ride. I still had the scars from my surgery, so I wore a helmet, and we moved
at a very slow pace, just idling along. Again, it wasn’t anything I would have previously classified as a ride.
We came to a small rise in the road, nothing difficult at all, just an incline that required you to rise from your seat and stroke down on the pedals once or twice. I’d done it a million times. Up,
down, and then sit and coast into a left-hand turn, and you’re out of the neighborhood.
I couldn’t do it. I got halfway up the incline, and I lost my breath. My bike wobbled beneath me, and I stopped, and put my feet down on the pavement. I felt faint.
I tried to breathe, but I couldn’t seem to draw in enough air to revive myself. Black and silver specks fluttered behind my eyes. I dismounted. Kevin and Jim wheeled around and stopped
short, concerned.
I sat down on the curb in front of a stranger’s house and dropped
my head between my knees.
Kevin was at my side in an instant. “Are you okay?” he said. “Just let me catch my breath,” I wheezed. “Go ahead without me, I’ll get a ride home.”
Jim said, “Maybe we should get an ambulance.” “No,” I said. “Just let me sit here for a second.” I could hear myself trying to breathe. It sounded like Whoo. Whoo. Suddenly, even sitting up felt
like too much effort. I felt a rushing light-headedness, similar to the sensation you get when you stand up too quickly–only I wasn’t standing.
I lay back on the lawn, staring at the sky, and closed my eyes.
Is this dying?
Kevin hovered over me, distraught. “Lance!” he said, loudly.
“Lance!”
I opened my eyes.
“I’m calling the ambulance,” he said, desperately.
“No,” I said, angrily. “No, no, I just need to rest.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, calming us both down.
After a few minutes, I gradually recovered my breath. I sat up, and tried to pull myself together. I stood. I tentatively straddled my bike.
My legs felt shaky, but I was able to ride downhill. We coasted very slowly back the way we
came, and made our way back to my house. Kevin and Jim rode right next to me, never taking their eyes off me.
Between deep breaths, I explained to them what had happened. The chemo had robbed me of healthy blood cells and wiped out my hemoglobin count. Hemoglobin transports oxygen to your
vital areas, and a normal value of hemoglobin for a fit person is about 13 to 15.
I was at seven. My blood was totally depleted. The chemo had attacked my blood relentlessly every two weeks, Monday through Friday, and I had finally overdone the bike riding.
I paid for it that day.
But I didn’t stop riding.
THERE ARE ANGELS ON THIS EARTH AND THEY COME IN subtle forms, and I decided LaTrice Haney was one of them. Outwardly, she looked like just another efficient,
clipboard-and-syringe-wielding nurse in a starched outfit. She worked extremely long days and nights, and on her off hours she went home to her husband, Randy, a truck driver, and their two
children, Taylor, aged seven, and Morgan, four. But if she was tired, she never seemed it. She struck me as a woman utterly lacking in ordinary resentments, sure of her responsibilities and
blessings and unwavering in her administering of care, and if that wasn’t angelic behavior, I didn’t know what was.
Often I’d be alone in the late afternoons and evenings except for LaTrice, and if I had the strength, we’d talk seriously. With most people I was shy and terse, but I found myself talking to
LaTrice, maybe because she was so gentle-spoken and expressive herself. LaTrice was only in her late 20s, a pretty young woman with a coffee-and-cream complexion, but she had
self-possession and perception beyond her years. While other people our age were out nightclubbing, she was already the head nurse for the oncology research unit. I wondered why
she did it. “My satisfaction is to make it a little easier for people,” she said.
She asked me about cycling, and I found myself telling her about the bike with a sense of pleasure I hadn’t realized I possessed. “How did you start riding?” she asked me. I told her about
my first bikes, and the early sense of liberation, and that cycling was all I had done since I was 16. I talked about my various teammates over the years, about their humor and selflessness, and
I talked about my mother, and what she had meant to me.
I told her what cycling had given me, the tours of Europe and the extraordinary education, and the wealth. I showed her a picture of my house, with pride, and invited her to come visit, and I
showed her snapshots of my cycling career. She leafed through images of me racing across the backdrops of France, Italy, and Spain, and she’d point to a picture and ask, “Where are you
here?”
I confided that I was worried about my sponsor, Cofidis, and explained the difficulty I was having with them. I told her I felt pressured. “I need to stay in shape, I need to stay in shape,” I
said over and over again.
“Lance, listen to your body,” she said gently. “I know your mind wants to run away. I know it’s saying to you, ‘Hey, let’s go ride.’ But listen to your body. Let it rest.”
I described my bike, the elegant high performance of the ultralight tubing and aerodynamic wheels. I told her how much each piece cost, and weighed, and what its purpose was. I
explained how a bike could be broken down so I could practically carry it in my pocket, and that I knew every part and bit of it so intimately that I could adjust it in a matter of moments.
I explained that a bike has to fit your body, and that at times I felt melded to it. The lighter the frame, the more responsive it is, and my racing bike weighed just 18 pounds. Wheels exert
centrifugal force on the bike itself, I told her. The more centrifugal force, the more momentum. It was the essential building block of speed. “There are 32 spokes in a wheel,” I said.
Quick-release levers allow you to pop the wheel out and change it quickly, and my crew could fix a flat tire in less than 10 seconds.
“Don’t you get tired of leaning over like that?” she asked. Yes, I said, until my back ached like it was broken, but that was the price of speed. The handlebars are only as wide as the rider’s
shoulders, I explained, and they curve downward in half-moons so you can assume an aerodynamic stance on the bike.
“Why do you ride on those little seats?” she asked. The seat is narrow, contoured to the anatomy, and the reason is that when you are on it for six hours at a time, you don’t want
anything to chafe your legs. Better a hard seat than the torture of saddle sores. Even the clothes have a purpose. They are flimsy for a reason: to mold to the body because you have to wear
them in weather that ranges from hot to hail. Basically, they’re a second skin. The shorts have a chamois padded seat, and the stitches are recessed to avoid rash.
When I had nothing left to tell LaTrice about the bike, I told her about the wind. I described how it felt in my face and in my hair. I told her about being in the open air, with the views of
soaring Alps, and the glimmer of valley lakes in the distance. Sometimes the wind blew as if it were my personal friend, sometimes as if it were my bitter enemy, sometimes as if it were the
hand of God pushing me along. I described the full sail of a mountain descent, gliding on two wheels only an inch wide.
“You’re just out there, free,” I said.
“You love it,” she said.
“Yeah?” I said.
“Oh, I see it in your eyes,” she said.
I understood that LaTrice was an angel one evening late in my last cycle of chemo. I lay on my side, dozing on and off, watching the steady, clear drip-drip of the chemo as it slid into my
veins. LaTrice sat with me, keeping me company, even though I was barely able to talk.
“What do you think, LaTrice?” I asked, whispering. “Am I going to pull through this?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, you are.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said, and closed my eyes again.
LaTrice leaned over to me.
“Lance,” she said, softly, “I hope someday to be just a figment of your imagination. I’m not here to be in your life for the rest of your life. After you leave here, I hope I never see you ever again.
When you’re cured, hey, let me see you in the papers, on TV, but not back here. I hope to help you at the time you need me, and then I hope I’ll be gone. You’ll say, ‘Who was that nurse back
in Indiana? Did I dream her?’ “
It is one of the single loveliest things anyone has ever said to me. And I will always remember every blessed word.
ON DECEMBER 13, 1996, I TOOK MY LAST CHEMO treatment. It was almost time to go home.
Shortly before I received the final dose of VIP, Craig Nichols came by to see me. He wanted to talk with me about the larger implications of cancer. He wanted to talk about “the obligation of
the cured.”
It was a subject I had become deeply immersed in. I had said to Nichols and to LaTrice many times over the last three months, “People need to know about this.” As I went through therapy, I
felt increasing companionship with my fellow patients. Often I was too sick for much socializing, but one afternoon LaTrice asked me to go to the children’s ward to talk to a young
boy who was about to start his first cycle. He was scared and self-conscious, just like me. I visited with him for a while, and I told him, “I’ve been so sick. But I’m getting better.” Then I
showed him my driver’s license.
In the midst of chemo, my license had expired. I could have put off renewing it until I felt better and had grown some hair back, but I decided not to. I pulled on some sweatclothes and hauled
myself down to the Department of Motor Vehicles, and stood in front of the camera. I was completely bald, with no eyelashes or eyebrows, and my skin was the color of a pigeon’s
underbelly. But I looked into the lens, and I smiled.
“I wanted this picture so that when I got better, I would never forget how sick I’ve been,” I said. “You have to fight.”
After that, LaTrice asked me to speak with other patients more and more often. It seemed to help them to know that an athlete was fighting the fight alongside them. One afternoon LaTrice
pointed out that I was still asking her questions, but the nature of them had changed. At first, the questions I had asked were strictly about myself, my own treatments, my doses, my
particular problems. Now I asked about other people. I was startled to read that eight million Americans were living with some form of cancer; how could I possibly feel like mine was an
isolated problem? “Can you believe how many people have this?” I asked LaTrice.
“You’ve changed,” she said, approvingly. “You’re going global.”
Dr. Nichols told me that there was every sign now that I was going to be among the lucky ones who cheated the disease. He said that as my health improved, I might feel that I had a larger
purpose than just myself. Cancer could be an opportunity as well as a responsibility. Dr. Nichols had seen all kinds of cancer patients become dedicated activists against the disease, and he
hoped I would be one of them.
I hoped so, too. I was beginning to see cancer as something that I was given for the good of others. I wanted to launch a foundation, and
I asked Dr. Nichols for some suggestions about what it might accomplish. I wasn’t yet clear on what the exact purpose of the organization would be; all I knew was that I felt I had a mission
to serve others that I’d never had before, and I took it more seriously than anything in the world.
I had a new sense of purpose, and it had nothing to do with my recognition and exploits on a bike. Some people won’t understand this, but I no longer felt that it was my role in life to be a
cyclist. Maybe my role was to be a cancer survivor. My strongest connections and feelings were with people who were fighting cancer and asking the same question I was: “Am I going to
die?”
I had talked to Steve Wolff about what I was feeling, and he said, “I think you were fated to get this type of illness. One, because maybe you could overcome it, and two, because your potential
as a human was so much greater than just being a cyclist.”
At the end of my third cycle of chemo, I had called Bill Stapleton and said, “Can you research what it takes to start a charitable foundation?” Bill and Bart and another close friend and
amateur cyclist, John Korioth, met with me one afternoon at an Austin restaurant to kick around
some ideas. We had no idea how to go about launching a foundation, or how to raise money, but by the end of the lunch we came up with the idea of staging a charity bicycle race around
Austin. We would call it the Ride for the Roses. I asked if anyone would have time to oversee the project, and Korioth raised his hand. Korioth was a bartender at a nightspot where I had
hung out some in my former life, and I would even take a turn as a guest bartender occasionally. He said his schedule would allow him to put some real time into it. It was the perfect solution:
we didn’t want a lot of overhead, and whatever we raised, we wanted to give straight back to the cause.
But I still wasn’t clear on the basic purpose of the foundation. I knew that because my case was such a cause celebre people would listen, but I didn’t want the foundation as a pulpit for me
personally. I didn’t think I was special–and I would never know how much a part of my own cure I was. On the meaning of it, I wasn’t really clear. All I wanted to do was tell people, “Fight
like hell, just like I did.”
As I talked to Dr. Nichols about how I could help, I decided that I wanted the foundation to involve research. I was so indebted to Dr. Einhorn and Dr. Nichols for their erudition, I wanted
to try to pay them back in some small way for all of the energy and caring that they and their staff had put into my well-being. I envisioned a scientific advisory board that would review
requests for funding and decide which ones were the best and most worthy, and dole the money out accordingly.
But there were so many fronts to the cancer fight that I couldn’t focus solely on one. I had a host of new friends who were involved in the fight, directly and indirectly, patients, doctors, nurses,
families, and scientists, and I was beginning to feel closer to them than to some cyclists I knew. The foundation could keep me tied very closely to all of them.
I wanted the foundation to manifest all of the issues I had dealt with in the past few months: coping with fear, the importance of alternate opinions, thorough knowledge of the disease, the
patient’s role in cure, and above all, the idea that cancer did not have to be a death sentence. It could be a route to a second life, an inner life, a better life.
AFTER THE FINAL CHEMO TREATMENT, I STAYED IN THE hospital for a couple more days, recovering my strength and tying up loose ends. One of the loose ends was my catheter.
The day that it was removed was a momentous occasion for me, because I had been living with it for nearly four months. I said to Nichols, “Hey, can we take this thing out?”
He said, “Sure.”
I felt a surge of relief–if he agreed to take it out, he must have been confident I wouldn’t need it again. No more chemo, hopefully.
The next day an intern came to my room and removed that ugly, torturous device from my chest. But there were complications; the thing had been buried in me for so long that it had grown into
my skin. The intern dug around, and couldn’t get it out. He had to call in a more experienced doctor, who practically ripped it out of my chest. It was agony. I even imagined I heard a tearing
noise as it came out. Next, the gash it left became infected and they had to go back in and perform a day surgery to clean out the wound and sew me up again. It was awful, maybe the
worst experience of the whole four months, and I was so mad when it was finally over that I demanded the catheter. I wanted to keep it, and I still have it, in a little Ziploc bag, a
memento.
There was one more detail to discuss: Nichols gave me a final analysis of my health. I would have to go through a period of uncertainty. Quite often the final chemo treatment did not erase
every trace of cancer, and I would need monthly blood tests and checkups to ensure that the disease was in full retreat. He warned me that my blood markers were not quite normal and my
chest X ray still showed signs of scar tissue from the tumors.
I was concerned. Nichols said, reassuringly, “We see it a lot. These are minor abnormalities, and we’re highly confident they will go away.” If I was cured, the scar tissue and markers should
resolve themselves in time. But there was no guarantee; the first year was key. If the disease was going to come back, that’s when we would see it.
I wanted to be cured, and cured now. I didn’t want to wait a year to find out.
I went back home, and tried to piece my life back together. I took it easy at first, just played a little golf and worked on plans for the foun-
dation. As my system cleaned out, my body didn’t seem broken by the chemo, I realized with relief. But I still felt like a cancer patient, and the feelings I’d held at bay for the last three
months began to surface.
One afternoon I agreed to play a little golf with Bill Stapleton and another friend of ours named Dru Dunworth, who was a lymphoma survivor, at a club called Onion Creek. My hair hadn’t
grown back yet, and I wasn’t supposed to get a lot of sun, so I put on one of those goofy caps that you pull down over your ears. I went into the pro shop to buy some balls. There was a
young guy working behind the counter. He looked at me, smirking, and said, “Are you going to wear that hat?”
“Yeah,” I said shortly.
“Don’t you think it’s warm out there?” he said.
I ripped the hat off so he could see that I was bald and scarred, and leaped across the counter.
“You see these fucking scars?” I snarled.
The guy backed away.
“That’s why I’m going to wear that hat,” I said. “Because I have cancer.”
I pulled the cap on and I stalked out of the shop, so angry I was trembling.
I was tense, admittedly. I still spent a lot of time at the doctor’s offices. I had blood drawn each week by Dr. Youman so the doctors in Indianapolis could keep track of me. I was constantly
monitored. With an illness like cancer, monitoring is critical, and you live by the results, the blood work, CT scans, MRIs. You live by knowing your progress. In my case, I’d had a
fast-growing cancer that had gone away quickly– but it could come back just as quickly.
One day after I had been back in Austin for a few weeks, LaTrice called Dr. Youman for the numbers. After she wrote them down, she took them to Dr. Nichols. He looked at the sheet of
paper she had handed him, and he smiled and gave it back to her. “Why don’t you call him this time,” he said.
LaTrice dialed my home phone. Like I say, the numbers were all-important for me, and I would wait nervously by the phone for every result. I picked up right away.
“We got the blood counts back,” LaTrice said. “Yeah?” I said, nervously. “Lance, they’re normal,” she said.
I held the thought up in my mind and looked at it: I was no longer sick. I might not stay that way; I still had a long year ahead of me, and if the illness returned it would probably happen in
the next 12 months. But for this moment, at least for this brief and priceless moment, there wasn’t a physical trace of cancer left in my body.
I didn’t know what to say. I was afraid if I opened my mouth, nothing would come out but one long, inarticulate shout of relief. “I’m so glad I can bring you good news,” LaTrice said. I
sighed.
