Every Second Counts (17 page)
Read Every Second Counts Online
Authors: Lance Armstrong
Tags: #Health & Fitness, #Diseases, #Cancer, #Sports & Recreation, #Sports, #Biography & Autobiography, #Cycling
It looked like the entire lower part of
Manhattan
had turned into a junkyard. There was shredded metal scattered everywhere; shards of material had even been flung onto the tops of other buildings. There was no camera that could show the 360-degree perspective, the utter scope of the damage. The metal and broken glass glinted in the sunlight, and in the heart of Ground Zero itself, you could see the inferno, the forklike heap of wreckage smoldering, surreal. Some of the adjacent buildings had huge gouges taken out of them, as if a giant had dragged his finger through them. In one building, what must have been a 40-foot steel girder hung out of a window, as if it had been thrown like a spear.
Afterward, I went to a rest area where rescue workers—who had come from all over the country, as far away as Texas, California, and Ohio—were sleeping in rotations in a large warehouse, on cots. I sat and chatted with them, listening to their experiences. They had driven from across the country to help with the terrible job, and they were exhausted and shattered, and yet working around the clock. Mainly, they were angry. The
New York Post
had run a fold-out picture of Osama bin Laden with the caption
WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE,
and that thing was posted all throughout the building. That’s when I realized we were in a war.
The salvage effort was an undertaking of backbreaking labor, and it changed my ideas about what real work was, because everything had been blown to smithereens, and the only people who knew what to do about it were the ones who could wield a jackhammer or drive a bobcat; the welders and grapplers and carpenters, doing a kind of work that many people aren’t familiar with anymore. It was risky
work,
too, because each time they hoisted a piece of smoldering metal, something else fell, or burned. Broken glass showered on their heads, and the heaps of smoking junk literally burned the soles of their boots away, but they kept digging, first to find anyone alive, and then just to find anyone at all.
The posters fluttered from kiosks and restaurant windows and chain-link fences and concrete walls. Brothers sisters wives husbands
cousins
friends. New Yorkers wept in taxis, on trains, and sometimes they just stood still in the middle of the street and cried. Every day the rescue and recovery workers would pry up another giant piece of steel, exposing the core of
fire,
and another plume of smoke would shoot into the air. And everybody would feel the wreckage within their own hearts, a seemingly endless interior hemorrhage.
The last thing I did was go to
go
to a wall or a fence, and look at those pictures of the missing, or go down to Ground Zero and smell that place. I was hard-pressed to believe that God was in the air. Death was in the air—that was death and burning that we smelled.
But good was there too, actual good, in the daily selfless acts of digging performed by volunteers. The concrete was pulverized, the steel was twisted, and in the midst of that a rescue worker would find a child’s toy, preserved. I didn’t know what to make of that kind of chance—or of the fact that the men who flew into those buildings did so while praying.
O
ne of the
more interesting features of death is its deniability. It’s as if the human temperament has a built-in capacity to ignore its own potential for nonexistence. How we can deny something so blazingly apparent, I don’t know. But we do, maybe because we need to in order to live productively from day to day. Otherwise we’d be so stunned by the brevity of each second that we’d never go to work and we’d all move to
Tahiti
.
I had been stripped of my capacity for denial, and now so were New Yorkers. Talking to them was like talking to newly diagnosed cancer patients. We shared the same sensations: of a dread diagnosis and a hard new eye on reality. I was reminded again that survivorship was an evolution: you had to learn to survive all kinds of things, not just your own illness.
The strangeness of that period was complicated by the fact that my five-year cancer anniversary was coming up, and meanwhile the twins were due at any moment. Previously, I’d thought of the five-year anniversary as a big damn day. That was the day my doctors would say, “Okay, guy. See you later.” Now it felt swamped by the enormity of what had happened in
When my five-year checkup finally came, it was smaller than I’d
imagined,
an anticlimax. Kik stayed home, because by now she was in the seventh month of her pregnancy. Instead I flew to
Portland
, for my last cancer checkup.
I slouched in my seat on American Airlines, brooding and sick, and not getting better. The numbers weren’t falling. By now the flight crew knew me. I was the bald guy, with no eyebrows or eyelashes and the skin that looked parched.
The guy who looked like death—and who felt like it.
A flight attendant came down the aisle.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“You know what?” I said. “It’s not going very well. It’s not going well at all.”
Even though I was on my way to my last checkup, it wasn’t the end of cancer for me. I was surer than ever that cancer would always be with me, in terms of
other
people’s cancer. It was there in the form of friends who were sick, friends who died: in the loss of my friend Stacy Pounds, and of my first great friend and benefactor in Austin, J. T. Neal, and a little boy named Billy Rutledge, and a little girl I adored, Kelly Davidson.
Kelly had been diagnosed with neuroblastoma when she was in only the third grade. We’d met and bonded when we were both in remission, bald and fearful. We both needed physical action, and we both had smart mouths. I had gotten better, but she hadn’t. The disease became increasingly hard to manage, but she kept trying.
I gave her a bike, and some Rollerblades, and we would go racing around together. She was indefatigable on them. She was the only person who could tell me what to do. “Are you coming over to ride bikes?” I asked her one day. “Yeah, and after that we’re going fishing,” she said.
But she got sicker. She underwent kidney surgery and had a tumor removed from her abdomen.
“You fight,” I told her. “It hasn’t beaten you, and it can’t beat you. I don’t let anything kick me without kicking back.”
The kid who had threatened to zip away from her doctors and nurses on Rollerblades grew weak and needed a wheelchair. Soon she lost her hearing. First it was a matter of weeks, and then days. She entered a hospice, and failed rapidly.
I had called her from
Europe
shortly before the 2000 Tour. “Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked.
“Yeah, wear yellow for me,” she had said.
Kelly died in August of 2000. Kik and I had tried to sort through the pending grief, tried to say the right things and be there the best we could, let her know how much we appreciated her. But when we lost her, we felt helpless and empty.
We were in
Europe
and couldn’t get home, but my mother went to Kelly’s funeral in our place, and read a letter from us. For the time being, our grief got cloistered, down the dark steps, padlocked, several layers below.
When we got back to
Not through my own choice, I was thrown into this cancer kinship, and for whatever reason, I survived, while there were legions of people who did not. Tests on a bicycle were flimsy compared with this sort of test, when something happened to somebody that you loved, and it called on you to be a stronger person than you were capable of being. All you could do was try to fortify yourself. But grief was inevitable, looming out there for all of us, sometime.
On the day of my final checkup, I rose early in my hotel room and drank the barium that would show up on the
X
rays and scans. Then I headed over to the medical center for the tests. Bill and my good friend from Nike, Scott MacEachern, went with me. They drank cups of coffee and chatted, while I put on a hospital robe and had a chest X ray and then an abdominal-pelvic CT scan. Dr. Nichols watched the readings to make sure nothing ominous was there, while Scott and Bill hung out with their coffees. Next, I gave blood so they could check for cancer markers.
The testing wasn’t arduous, it was just a nuisance, and it only lasted an hour and a half or so. It was a box I was checking off, the last item on the long list. But it was evocative of everything I’d been through five years earlier: the sleeping 16 to 20 hours a day, and all the pills, and the logbook to keep track of what I was taking and when. All of the things I’d done to try to stay in front of the disease and educate myself, determined not to be helpless about my health. And it was evocative of what my ill friends went through every day.
Finally, Dr. Nichols did a last brief physical examination of me, going about his usual business in a clinical way. And then he was finished, and we sat down together.
“Your chances of ever having trouble with this again are in essence zero,” he said. “You need to put this disease out of your mind, in terms of your own cancer.”
I shook hands with Craig, and that was it, that was the big moment. I high-fived my friends and left that office for the last time. I called Kik and said, “All done.” She started screaming and carrying on, and I just grinned.
When I got back to
Austin
, we had a party to celebrate the occasion. We had about 100 friends and family out to our future home site in the hills above
Austin
, the property we named Milagro, Spanish for “miracle.” It was a cedar-studded expanse on a hillside, and I’d cleared a lot of the brush myself and had a small cabin built. I put in a huge rolling expanse of lawn for the kids, designed expressly for rolling down soft green hills, and I added a firepit, and dug out a dirt road.
For the party we put up strands of colored lights and built an outdoor stage for my friend Lyle Lovett, who
performed,
and after a while another of our good friends, Shawn (Sunny) Colvin, hopped up and joined him. Our friends spread blankets on the lawn and lounged, or fed themselves from a Mexican food buffet and drank margaritas. At the end of the evening I stood up, with Kik beside me, and thanked everybody for coming and remarked on how appropriate it was that we had named the property Milagro, because that’s what it seemed to me, miraculous. Once, I’d wondered if I would live. Now it almost felt like cheating, to have been given my health and a whole life back, to have a healthy son like Luke, and twin girls on the way, and to be able to look at things with different eyes.
But the five-year mark wasn’t the end of anything, not really. My story was encouraging for people who were beating cancer, but what about the people who weren’t doing as well, who were flagging, and who lacked the energy to fight anymore? Who were losing ground, or not responding, or struggling to face something, whether the loss of a loved one in
I couldn’t help them with the primary problem of surviving, and I couldn’t change the basic biology of cancer. I couldn’t help anybody. In the end, all I could do was try to encourage their attitude and will, try to talk about what cancer
couldn’t
do.
It couldn’t take away your spirituality, or your intelligence. It couldn’t take away your love.
Headwinds
W
hen your value is constantly measured, and you’re compensated for it, as an athlete is, you can get confused and start equating winning with a good and happy life.
The trouble
is,
nobody who does what I do for a living is happy-go-lucky. I don’t bomb down a hill at 70 miles an hour with a smile on my face. If you want to win something, you’ve got to have single-mindedness, and it’s all too easy to wind up lonesome while you’re at it.
