It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (17 page)

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.

KIK

LOVE AND CANCER WERE STRANGE COMPAN-

ions, but in my case they came along at the same time. It was hardly the ideal situation in which to meet my future wife–but that’s exactly what happened. Why do two people get married? For

a future together, naturally. The question was whether or not I had one.

I didn’t have cancer anymore, but I didn’t not have it, either. I was in a state of anxiety called remission, and I was obsessed with the idea of a relapse. I would wake up in the night with

phantom pains in my chest, and I’d lie in bed in the darkness, covered in sweat and listening to the sound of my own breathing, convinced the tumors had come back. The next morning I’d go

directly to the doctor and ask for a chest X ray to calm myself down.

“The chemo works or it doesn’t,” Dr. Einhorn once said. “If it works, the patient lives a normal, cancer-free life. If it doesn’t and the cancer comes back, he will usually be dead in three or four

months.” It was that simple.

Getting on with my life, on the other hand, was much more complicated. I finished chemotherapy on December 13, 1996, and I met Kristin Richard a month later, at a press

conference to announce the launching of my cancer foundation and the Ride for the Roses. We spoke just briefly. She was a slim blond woman who everyone called Kik (pronounced Keek), an

account executive for an advertising and public-relations firm in town, assigned to help promote the event. I know I’m supposed to say the light changed when I saw her, but actually, it didn’t. I

just thought she was smart and pretty. She told me later her first impression of me was equally inconsequential. I was “a cute bald guy with a great smile.” It would be spring before we had

deeper feelings, and summer before we acted on them. For one thing, we were seeing other people, and for another, the first time we ever talked at length we had a fight.

It started on the phone. She represented a corporate client, a major title sponsor of the Ride for the Roses, and she felt I wasn’t doing enough to please them. One afternoon she got testy with a

foundation staffer. Who is this chick? I thought, and dialed her number, and as soon as she answered I said, “This is Lance Armstrong, and what do you mean by talking to my staff that

way?” I went off, barking at her. On the other end of the receiver, Kik rolled her eyes, thinking, Tliis guy acts like he is so big-time.

For the next ten minutes we argued back and forth. “Obviously, this conversation is going nowhere,” she snapped. “Damn right it’s going nowhere!” I snapped back. “You know what?”

she said. “We need to talk about this over a beer. That’s all I have to say to you.”

I was nonplussed. “Oh, uh, okay. We’ll go have a beer.”

I invited her to meet up with me and a couple of friends at a local bar. I don’t think either of us expected to be as drawn to the other as we were. I was still pale and washed out and fatigued

from the illness, but she didn’t seem to care. She was funnier and more easygoing than I had anticipated, and very bright. I asked her to join the weekly foundation meetings at my house,

and she agreed.

The foundation seemed like the perfect answer to the limbo I was in: I had completed chemo, and beaten back the cancer for the time being, but I had to figure out what to do next. To work

on something outside myself was the best antidote. I was a cancer survivor first and an athlete second, I decided. Too many athletes live as though the problems of the world don’t concern

them. We are isolated by our wealth and our narrow focus, and our elitism. But one of the redeeming things about being an athlete–one of the real services we can perform–is to redefine

what’s humanly possible. We cause people to reconsider their limits, to see that what looks like a wall may really just be an obstacle in the mind. Illness was not unlike athletic performance in

that respect: there is so much we don’t know about our human capacity, and I felt it was important to spread the message.

One of the more important events of that winter-spring was that I met a man named Jeff Garvey, a prominent Austin venture capitalist who would become a close friend in time, but

who at first I simply hoped would help guide the foundation. A mutual acquaintance introduced us, and Jeff invited me to lunch. I drove up to his place in my Explorer in shorts and a T-shirt.

We had a long rambling lunch, and talked about cycling–Jeff was an avid amateur rider and each year he made a trip through Spain, following the famous Camino de Santiago. Jeff had lost both

of his parents to cancer, and he was looking for some charitable work to do in fighting the disease. A few weeks later, I asked Jeff to have lunch with me again, and over the meal I asked

him if he would take over the running of the foundation. He agreed, and became our CEO.

For the next two months Kik and I worked together on the foundation. At first, she just seemed like a stylish girl who always had a quick comeback. Gradually though, I found myself noticing

her long fine blond hair, and the way she would make the most casual clothes look classy somehow. And then there was her Colgate commercial of a smile. It was hard not to get lost in

the view. Also, I liked her sass. Meanwhile, Kik had started reading up on me in her spare time, under the pretext of doing research for business purposes. But neither of us was willing to admit

how we felt yet.

We held the inaugural Ride for the Roses in March, and it was a big success. We raised over $200,000, and the Wallflowers played a concert, and friends and colleagues came from all over

the world to ride, including Miguel Indurain, Eddy Merckx, and Eric Heiden.

There was one donation I’ll never forget. I was sitting at a table doing an autograph signing, with a huge line stretching down the block, scribbling my name as fast as possible. I signed over

and over, barely glancing upward as each person stepped in front of me. A checkbook flew in my face and flopped open on the table. “How much do you want?” a voice said. Without

looking up, I said, “Goddamn.”

I started to laugh and shake my head. I knew that voice. It was the long-lost Jim Hoyt, my homeboy from Piano, the man who put me on my first bike and then took my beloved Camaro

away. He was standing right in front of me, and so was his wife, Rhonda. I hadn’t laid eyes on them since our bitter disagreement a decade earlier. I looked Jim in the eye.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I figured I owed him that.

“Accepted,” he said. “Now, how much do I make it out for?”

“Jim, you don’t have to do that.”

“No,” he said. “I want to help.”

“Aw, come on, don’t do this,” I said.

“How about five grand? Does that sound good?”

I burst out laughing. Five grand was what I had put into that Camaro.

“That’d be fine,” I said.

He wrote out the check, and we shook hands.

Every year, Jim always comes back for the Ride. And I mean to tell you, homeboy goes crazy with his checkbook, and he never asks me for a thing in return.

A little while later, another memorable person stepped in front of me: a little girl whose head was semi-bald like mine. Our eyes met, and we connected instantly. As I signed an autograph

for her, she recited all of my stats: she knew everything about my career. Her name was Kelly Davidson and she was a cancer patient, and for days afterward I couldn’t get her out of my

mind. I tracked her down and called her, and we became good friends.

I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN I WAS IN TROUBLE WITH KlK

when we kept thinking up reasons to see each other after the Ride was over. We would exchange e-mails a lot, and talk on the phone, and find excuses to meet now and then beyond

foundation meetings. She continued to come to the weekly gatherings at my house, and one night she stayed after everybody else left. It was just the two of us, sitting in my living room

sipping beers and talking. I remember thinking, What am I doing? Why am I here alone with her? She was thinking the exact same thing. Finally, she stood up to call a cab, and I offered to

give her a ride home.

We drove through the empty dark streets, not saying much of anything, but feeling a lot. There was something there, but neither of us was ready to touch it yet. So we just drove.

BY SPRING OF ‘97, I WASN’T EXACTLY READY TO GO out for margaritas. The medical uncertainties were still a constant, nagging worry. “What’s it going to be?” I’d ask Dr. Nichols.

“Am I going to live or die? What?”

I felt pressure to get back on my bike, and yet I was unsure of my body. I counted and recounted my financial assets and sweated every mortgage payment, wondering if I would ever make

another dime from cycling. Finally, I decided to at least try to race; I could still lock Cofidis into the second year of the contract and relieve myself of financial worries if I appeared in four

events. I told Bill, “Let’s find some races.”

A month after leaving the hospital, I’d flown to France to appear at a Cofidis press conference. The team officials were shocked that I showed up, but I wanted them to see that I was not the

pale, bedridden victim they had left in Indianapolis. I told the Cofidis people that I wanted to try to come back in the spring, and I even spent a couple of days riding and working out with the

team. They seemed pleased. I began to train seriously, riding four hours a day, as much as 100 miles over some of the old routes I used to love, ranging from Austin to Wimberly, to Dripping

Springs, to New Sweden, towns with nothing but cotton fields and tractors and solitary church steeples in the distance. But I didn’t like how I was feeling. Sometimes I would ride for an hour

or so, just a little cruise, and it wore me out and I’d have to take a long nap afterward. I rode at a moderate pace, only about 130 heartbeats per minute, but I would feel strong one day and weak

the next.

I had a vague, run-down sensation that was all too familiar: it was the way I had felt before the diagnosis, I realized, with a knot in my stomach. Then I got a cold. I was sleepless and paralyzed

with fear for an entire night, certain the cancer had come back. Before the illness I had never been susceptible to colds; if I was coming down with something, it had to be cancer.

The next morning I raced to see Dr. Youman for a checkup, certain he would tell me I was ill again. But it was just a common infection that my body wasn’t strong enough to fight off. My

immune system was shot, and I was what the doctors called “neutrophilic”: my white blood cell count was still down, which meant I was susceptible to every little germ that came along.

My X rays had not entirely cleared up, either. There was a spot of some kind in my abdomen. The doctors didn’t know quite what it was, and decided just to keep an eye on it. I was a

nervous wreck.

That was it. Dr. Nichols recommended that I take the rest of the year off, and I agreed; there would be no serious cycling for me in ‘97. I was still convalescing, Nichols explained, and my

immune system hadn’t fully rebounded from a chemo regimen that had been far more strenuous than I realized. My lack of fitness was in no way related to lack of will, Nichols said, it was a

simple matter of how much the illness had taken out of me.

My friends and colleagues felt like I did, nervous. “Look,” Och said. “Whatever you decide, make sure the doctors know exactly what you’re doing, training-wise, how much you’re

working. Give them the details so they can make the determination as to how hard you should go.”

I had to admit it: I might never legitimately race again at the top level. Maybe my body just couldn’t deal with the rigors of a full-time training regimen.

Chris Carmichael called me and wanted to know what was going on.

“Chris, I’m scared,” I said. “I’m scared to train. I’m scared if I push myself too hard, it will come back.”

IN AN ODD WAY, HAVING CANCER WAS EASIER THAN RE-

covery–at least in chemo I was doing something, instead of just waiting for it to come back.

Some days I still called myself a bike racer, and some days I didn’t. One afternoon I went to play golf with Bill at a local country club. We were on the fifth hole, a par-5, and Bill hit a beautiful

six-iron for a chance at eagle. “I’ll be able to do that some day,” I said, admiringly.

Bill said, “It’s going to be a while before you play enough golf to hit a shot like that.”

“Bill, you don’t get it,” I said. “I’m retired.”

Bill and I had this argument all the time. I vacillated–one day I would plan my big comeback, and the next day I would tell him my career was over.

On the first tee, I’d say, “Well, now we’re just friends because I don’t need an agent anymore. I’m never riding again.” A few minutes later I’d be standing on the next tee, waggling a club,

and I’d say, “When I start riding again, what are we going to do, what’s the plan?” By the next hole, I would have reversed myself again.

“I hope you’re not hanging out with me because you think I’m going to make any more money,” I’d say. “Because I’m not riding.”

Bill knew I was prone to making sweeping statements, and he had learned to make a joke, or to put me off. He’d say to me, “Okay, fine, we’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

Then something happened that deepened my ambivalence: Bill’s assistant, our good friend Stacy Pounds, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Stacy had been a tremendous help to me during my

own illness and an integral partner in launching the foundation. She was a 55-year-old Texas

belle and chain-smoker, -with a gritty voice and exquisite manners. Stacy could basically tell you that you were the biggest jerk in the world, and to never call again, and that you smelled, too,

but you would hang up thinking, “That was the nicest lady.”

Stacy was not as fortunate as I was; her cancer was incurable. We were devastated, and all we could do was try to support her and make her more comfortable. My mother came across two