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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.
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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]