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Bill picked up the phone and called Mike Parnell, the CEO of Oakley. He explained what had happened.
Hesitantly, Bill asked Mike if they could help me.
Mike said he would arrange for me to be covered.
Suddenly, I had reason for optimism. But then the health care provider balked; I had a preexisting condition
and therefore they were not obliged to cover my cancer treatments.
Mike Parnell picked up the phone and called the provider. He informed them that if they did not cover my
medical treatments, his entire firm would take its business elsewhere.
"Cover him," he said.
The provider still balked.
"I don't think you understand what I just said," Mike said.
They covered me.
I'll spend the rest of my life trying to adequately convey what it meant to me, and I'll be an Oakley, Nike,
and Giro athlete for as long as I live. They paid my contracts in full, every single one even though each of
them had the right to terminate the deal and none of them ever so much as asked me about when I would
ride a bike again. In fact, when I went to them and said, "Hey, I've started this cancer foundation [more
about that later] and I need some money to stage a charity bike race," every single one of them stepped
forward to help. So don't talk to me about the cold world of business. Cancer was teaching me daily to
examine my fellow human beings more deeply, to throw out my previous assumptions and
oversimplifications.
The good news continued through that week in the hospital. After a couple of days of chemo, my blood
counts improved. The markers were falling, which meant that the cancer was reacting to the drugs. I still
had a long hard pull ahead of me, and I was beginning to feel the side effects Nichols had warned me of. As
I approached the end of the week, the euphoria of coming through brain surgery wore off, and the sickness
of ifosfamide took over. It gave me a constant poisoned sensation and left me so weak that all I wanted to
do was stare at the wall or sleep. And this was just the start of it; there were two more cycles yet to come.
Seven days after the brain surgery, I went home. I would be back in the hospital soon enough. But at least I
was beginning to talk this thing down to size.
SIX
CHEMO
THE 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]