Every Second Counts (18 page)

A race is an exercise in leaving others behind, and sometimes that can include the ones you love. It’s a delicate problem, one I’ve yet to solve. For instance, one day I took my son bike-riding with me. I put him in a little trailer and hitched it to my bike, and we went pedaling off.

Luke said, out of nowhere, “No more
airplane
, Daddy.”

“What?” I said, turning around.

“Daddy, no more
airplane
. Stay home with me now.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

Spending life on the seat of a bike is a solitary exercise, and things go by in constant accelerated motion. Speed is a paradoxical equation: a thousand small, dully repetitive motions go into the act of going really, really fast, and you can get so fixed on the result, on the measurements and numbers and cadences, that you miss other things. Your strength as an athlete can be a weakness: the qualities that make someone fast don’t always make them perceptive. Life becomes a blur.

Like every other season of my adult life, I entered the 2001–2002 cycling season with a sense of urgency, put there by cancer. When I wasn’t trying to pedal faster on the bike, I was still trying to outrun the disease, and I focused on two sets of numbers, my pedaling cadence, and my blood markers, to tell me how I was doing. But maybe I missed some things, too.

That September, I had an irrational sense that the cancer was back. The battle with cancer is started and ended, and won and lost, on a cellular level, and I worried that the disease could lie dormant, hide out, and come back in ten years, or 20 years, just when I had strolled off into the sunset. I didn’t ever want to disrespect the illness, or its track record. You could never turn your back on it.

I wasn’t feeling well, and it made me uneasy. I was tired, and it wasn’t from drinking unseemly amounts of beer, either, though that may have had something to do with it. I was stressed and physically exhausted from the long year, but I felt more than the usual fatigue. I was sleeping for 12 and 14 hours every night, long bouts of black, unconscious sleep.
Monstrous sleep.
It reminded me exactly of how I’d felt when I was sick.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought about it. I thought about it every hour.

Finally, I called my friend and general practitioner, Dr. Ace Alsup.

“Ace,” I said, “I gotta come in for some tests.”

“Why?”

“I just don’t feel good. I’m nervous, and I don’t want to be nervous.”

“What do you want to do about it?” Ace asked.

“I want you to take my blood, and test it,” I said. “I want blood tests, and I want them today. Please, call me the second you get the results, because I’m nervous as hell.”

He said, “Okay. Come on down.”

That afternoon, I slipped out of the house. I pocketed my keys and walked out the door without telling Kik. By now she was near the end of the pregnancy, and while she carried the twins with her usual grace, it couldn’t be easy on her. I didn’t want to worry her needlessly, didn’t want to say to her, “Oh, I’m driving down to Ace’s office for some blood work.” I kept my worry to myself. Nothing else would reassure me—I just needed those numbers. So I made up some excuse about what I was doing that afternoon, and I snuck out.

I drove down to Ace’s office, and he drew blood, and then I drove back home, and I sat by the phone. He promised he would call me as soon as he got the results. All I cared about was my HCG level, the critical blood marker for testicular cancer. HCG is a hormone that’s perfectly common in pregnant women, but it shouldn’t be present in more than trace amounts in a young man. If my HCG level was more than two, it would mean only one thing: the cancer was back. When it came to cancer, numbers were everything. All I wanted to know from Ace Alsup was that it was less than two.

When I was sick, my HCG skyrocketed. One morning, College called and asked how I was doing. I said, “The numbers went up.” My HCG level was over 109,000. The cancer was spreading and now it was in my brain. My mother had spent the morning crying, but I was strangely relieved. College took me to lunch, to get me out of the house.

“I don’t know why she keeps crying,” I said. “I’m cool with this. At least now I know everything. Now I know what to do.”

I sat there, alone, waiting for Ace Alsup to call back, and I asked myself what I’d do if the disease had returned. I told myself,
Okay, you’ve got a choice: you can give in . . . or fight like hell and hope to live forever
. When I was first sick, some doctors told me that my chances of living were 50 percent, some said 40 percent, and some said 20 percent. But one thing was for certain: any odds at all were better than 0 percent.

The phone rang. I picked it up—it was Ace.

“Just tell me it’s less than two,” I said. “If I hear that, I hang up the phone, and I’m done.”

“It’s less than two,” he said.

I thanked him, and I hung up, and that was the end of it. But it wasn’t the end of my unease on the subject.

I live with a constant sense of being pressed for time. I have to do everything
now
—get married, have children, win races, make money, ride motorcycles, jump off cliffs—because I might not have the chance later. It’s an odd gift, that sort of concentrated living, and perhaps I don’t always apply it to the right things. I’m either going at 150 percent, or I’m asleep.

When I get locked on to something, I don’t hear, see, or notice anything around me. I hired a young Aussie guy named Christian Knapp to be my training aide. Christian was a jack-of-all-trades, a masseur and physical trainer whose job was to help me work out, and accompany me on a motorbike when I went on long rides, to protect me from traffic. One spring afternoon we rode out together and spent seven hours on the bike, battling through a rainstorm. Toward the end of the day we finally came down, relieved, from the foothills into a beautiful green valley—and got hit by a sudden blast of wind, rushing straight into us. Chris idled next to me on the motorbike.

“Man, I bet you’re bummed about this headwind,” he said.

I looked at him.

“What headwind?” I said.

W
e spent that
November in
Austin
, waiting out the last month of Kik’s pregnancy peacefully; the twins were due right around December 1. But then, on the day before Thanksgiving, Kik went in for a routine checkup and mentioned to the doctor that she’d felt a little peculiar that morning. Dr. Uribe examined her briefly and said, “What’s your husband doing today?” Kik replied that I was scheduled to leave for a series of business meetings.

“Well, you better call him to tell him to cancel the rest of his day, because you’re having these babies. You need to go home and get a bag.”

Kik called me, and said, “Can you cancel your meetings?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Good. We’re having these kids.”

Kik drove home and walked in the door, and she said, “Pack our bags.” We stood there and smiled at each other. It was the last time, Kik noted, that we would be together, just us, without being surrounded by children. We arranged for Luke to be picked up by his grandparents, and then, giggling with excitement, we threw some things into a suitcase. I was standing in the foyer holding the bags when the doorbell rang. I opened the door.

“Random drug control,” the woman announced.

“You gotta be kidding,” I said.

The lady thrust a piece of paper at me. “These are your rights.”

I just stood there helplessly. “Ha,” I said. I put down the bag.

She handed me the paper.

“You know what?” I said.

She stared at me.

“My wife is in labor. So it better be fast.”

She gasped, and she whirled around to her male companion, who was still coming up the walk, and said, “Oh, my God, hurry up, hurry up.”

But even in a hurry, the drug-testing procedure takes 15 to 20 minutes. I had to pee in a container, and then it had to be distributed into two other different containers, and the pH had to be tested, and then there was a bunch of paperwork to fill out. It seemed like there were 50 forms to get through. “Sign this form, and read this one,” the lady said. I shoved the papers around and scribbled my name, while Kik stood there with her eyes wide and pleading, about to pop.

Finally, we got them out of the house, and I hustled Kik to the car and we drove to the hospital, and settled Kik into a room.

College met us there; we’d called him to tell him the good news. He had ordered his Tex-Mex lunch to go, and he brought it along with him. He settled into a couch in Kik’s room and opened his lunch, and we chatted and ate chips and salsa. We teased College, who was a confirmed bachelor, and he teased us back. He called Luke “The Seducer Child,” because he claimed that Luke was the kind of kid who seduced you into wanting one of your own. College claimed, “If you don’t want to have a baby, don’t bring your girlfriend around Luke, because he’s the kind who makes you think every kid is great. He grabs you by the hand, wants you to play with him or read him a book. And pretty soon the girl says, ‘Honey, why don’t we have one of those?’ That Luke’s a trouble kid. Keep your girlfriend away from that kid.”

The smell of the food made Kik starving, because she wasn’t allowed to eat anything all day to prepare for the birth. She said, “Come on, College, give me five chips.
Just five.”
Finally he relented and dealt her out five chips.

Then a nurse came in, and told Kik to turn over. It was time for her epidural. The nurse prepared the long needle, and College didn’t even know what it was. Kik said, laughing, “Hey, College, can you excuse me while I get this shot?” College jumped up like he’d been electrocuted and lunged into the hallway.

Then it was time to go to the delivery room, and I stayed next to Kik as we waited for our girls. The process of delivering twins was more involved and complicated than a single delivery, and there were lots of staff in the room—doctors, nurses, and neonatal specialists. This was more formal, more intense, and scarier, but in the end everything went smoothly, actually more smoothly than when Luke was born, in part because Kik was so brave and self-assured. She seemed to just push twice, and here they came, Grace Elizabeth at
8:54
P.M
.
, and Isabelle Rose at
8:57
.

Nothing has ever made me feel more alive than watching those children come into existence; the appearance of each of them was utterly momentous. Like Luke, they were true miracle babies, possible only through the marvel of IVF. I didn’t care if they were girls or boys, large or small, blue-eyed or brown. All I cared about, and all I care about to this day, was that they existed, and were healthy.

I cut the umbilical cords, and cleaned them up, and we looked them over, beaming. Grace and Isabelle were instantly distinct to me, two very different little souls, though equally gorgeous. Later, it would puzzle me when other people had trouble telling them apart. How could anyone ever confuse the two? I wondered. Grace was slightly smaller and amazingly calm for a baby, and she seemed to accept kisses and adoration complacently, as if they were her due. Isabelle was the image of me, down to personality, just a tiny, wriggly version. She had small features and a kind of brightness in her eyes, and as she grew she would become a comical, almost antic baby. Right from the start we hardly ever called them by their full names. Grace was “Gee” or “Gracie” and Isabelle was “Izzy,” or as Luke called her, “Isabo.”

The next day was Thanksgiving, and we had dinner at the hospital, and it was awful—bad coffee, and warmed-up food, even recirculated air—but we didn’t care because we were so tired and happy. A day later, we brought the girls home and settled in, trying to adjust to a new schedule of dual feedings. Luke was instantly the warm, protective brother and wanted to play with the babies. I hired a night nurse to help Kik so she wouldn’t be exhausted. The nurse brought the girls to her for middle-of-the-night feedings, and then took them back to the nursery while Kik grabbed some sleep.

One morning about a week after they were born, Kik and I were luxuriating in a quiet breakfast together when there was a knock on the door. We looked at each other, frustrated; it was only
seven
A.M
.
, and all the babies were asleep, and we were drinking coffee in our bathrobes. There was another knock on the door, and the dog started barking. Kik and I were almost never alone. We both wanted to kill whoever was out there.

Kik opened the door.

“Random drug control,” the woman said.

Kik couldn’t believe it. “It’s seven in the morning,” she snapped.

The woman just stuck out the paperwork.

I came to the door.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“Random drug control,” she repeated.

“Random? What’s random about this? Are you kidding?”

Kik was so angry she was trembling. She’d always faintly resented the drug testers because of their lack of cordiality, the way they barged into the house and gave orders. “If only they’d say, ‘
How
are you?’ ” she’d say. But this felt like an outright violation, for them to show up on the doorstep while we were in our bathrobes, with newborns in the house. They had seen Kik in labor, only a week earlier, and it had been all over the
Austin
paper when we brought the children home from the hospital, and they knew exactly how invasive a test must have been at this time in our lives. I was all for random testing, but this went too far. It felt like needless harassment in the game of “Gotcha.”