How Lance Armstrong faced and fought cancer.

[Guest guest]

>From the book, "It's Not About the Bike", by Lance Armstrong, cyclist, who won

several championships, the last after he fought cancer and won.

 

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The more I thought about it the more cancer began to seem like a race to me.

They shared grueling physical aspects as well as a dependence on time and

progress reports every interval , with checkpoints and a slavish reliance on

numbers and blood tests . The only difference was that I had to focus better and

hard up than I ever did on the bike .

 

I became a student of cancer . I went to the biggest book store and bought

everything there on the subject . I came home with ten different volumes: diet

books, books on coping emotionally ,meditation guides. I was willing to consider

any option no matter how goofy.

 

>From that moment on my treatment became a medical collaboration. Previously I

thought of medicine as something practiced by individual doctors on individual

patients. The doctor was all-knowing and all- powerful, the patient was

helpless. But it was beginning to dawn on me that there was nothing wrong with

seeking a cure from a combination of people and sources and that the patient was

as important as a doctor. No one doctor could take sole responsibility for the

state of my health, and most important I began to share the responsibility with

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 .

 

What if I had lost ? What if I relapsed and the cancer came back ? I still

believe I would have gained something in the struggle , because in what time I

had left , I would have been a more complete , compassionate and intelligent man

, and therefore more alive . The one thing the illness convinced me beyond all

doubt is that we’re much better than we know . We have unrealized capacities

that sometimes only emerge in a crisis. So if there is a purpose to the

suffering that is cancer , I think it must be this : it’s meant to improve us.

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