by Stuart Scott
“Hey, man,” I said softly, “that was my doctor. I don’t have to do any more chemo. They couldn’t find any cancer in my latest scan.”
I said this almost like a question—as if I were asking if it could be true. It felt weird to hear the words leaving my mouth.
I don’t remember what Mike Breen said, but it was entirely appropriate for the situation and our relationship. He was happy for me, but we were subdued. There were no high-fives or end-zone-like gyrations. Poor guy. He’d wanted a little afternoon escape and now he found himself in some all-too-real drama. But he handled it like the pro he’s always been. Later, that day would form a bond between us. Whenever we were in a big group of media types at the Finals or All-Star Weekend, I’d say, “This is the first man I told when I learned I had my first clean scan,” and we’d nod at each other.
But that day, I don’t recall if I was even fully aware of Breen’s presence. Even in the car after our round, I felt foggy and disjointed. It was only later, hours later, that it hit me. And it wasn’t a feeling of relief that hit me, like you’d think. No, it was a feeling of anxiety. Two words occurred to me, and they kept bouncing around my brain:
Now what?
• • •
A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, a study of cancer patients showed something very interesting. Two years after a cancer diagnosis, the average level of depression among patients tends to drop back down to match the general population. But after completing a course of cancer treatment, the level of anxiety among patients booms.
I totally get it. One day, you’re in the fight: Your calendar is filled with scans, blood work, biopsies, and doctor’s appointments. You hang on your doctor’s every word. Then—just like that—you hear that it’s gone, that “there are no visible signs of cancer” in your body, and you’re as mentally unprepared for that as you were when you first got your diagnosis.
Don’t get me wrong. Being in the fight sucked. Going to chemo once every two weeks, dealing with its aftereffects, living in CancerWorld—all of it sucked. But at least you were in the fight. Once you’re told your cancer is gone, so is the thing you’ve made your single focus every day.
Now what?
I’d seen it in sports: Once your nemesis is gone, you feel a letdown. When Björn Borg retired, Johnny Mac went into a funk. Frazier was so set on chasing Ali to the ends of the earth that he lost to big George Foreman. I should have been jubilant, I know. But I couldn’t wrap my head around what could be next. I’d been this warrior cancer guy. “Cancer fighter” had become the way I thought of myself.
Now, suddenly, I was being told I wasn’t who I thought I was. What hits home at a moment like that is just how much you are forever changed once you have cancer. A study released by the Duke Cancer Center in 2011 found that four out of ten cancer patients are plagued by symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder for as long as a decade after the end of their treatment. It was like having been to war: flashbacks, depression, anxiety. I felt it every day. Cancer robs you of the ability to grow old, to have the same aches and pains of aging that your contemporaries experience. My buddy Brian wakes up feeling sore in the morning and thinks, Man, this getting-old thing is a pain. I wake up feeling sore and think, Is that cancer? Is it back?
That anxiety never leaves you. In fact, it only gets worse—because you’re no longer taking proactive steps to combat the disease. I guess that’s what this really comes down to: Like so many patients, I didn’t believe that my cancer was gone, not really. I’d learned what a worthy opponent cancer was. I was scared it was rope-a-doping me.
That’s why, in the days following the news from Dr. Baker, I felt like I’d been sent out to fight without live ammo, like I was now cut loose from my support and would be shooting blanks against cancer from now on. I know, I know: You’re probably thinking, C’mon, dude, can’t you just accept good news for what it is?
I understand the logic of that reaction, but I gotta tell you: I know from talking to other patients, it just doesn’t work that way. You want me to stop worrying now? I’ve done nothing but worry since the day of my diagnosis. Add to that how hard it is to detect rogue appendiceal cancer cells, and that my type of cancer doesn’t really go into true, all-out remission, and you have a recipe for more anxiety, not less.
Once, when I was a few years into the fight, I asked Lance Armstrong if he still thought about cancer—and dying from it—every single day. “No, not anymore,” he said.
And how long did it take him to get to the point that it wasn’t on his mind daily?
He smiled. “About twelve years,” he said. “It took me a while.”
It took a lot for me to ask Lance that question. I know they say you should ask a lot of questions as a cancer patient, but sometimes I found just the opposite. I started to avoid asking questions if I thought the answers to them could make me more worried and scared. Had Lance said, “Oh, the minute I had a clean scan, I put cancer behind me,” I would have obsessed over what was wrong with me: Why couldn’t I do the same?
Instead, Lance’s example was one of many that proved to me how complicated it is to live with cancer now as a part of your biography.
• • •
IN MAY 2008 I went in for the first of my six-month scans. It was a stat PET-CT scan. If you remember early episodes of the TV show ER, you remember a young doctor who would later become George Clooney yelling at a young nurse who would later become Julianna Margulies something like: “The patient’s heart just stopped! We need a defibrillator in here stat!”
In medical lingo, “stat” means immediately. I was scheduled to get immediate results. The radiologist would call my oncologist, who would call me right after the test, often before I got home. On the one hand, this meant there would be no sleepless nights spent wondering if the cancer had returned. But it also meant that the anxiety was now front-loaded. On my way to the hospital, I steeled myself for hearing the words “Your cancer has returned.”
Once the scan was over, I reminded the nurse that this was a stat scan. I had just reached my car when Dr. Baker called.
“We don’t see anything,” he said.
And so it went. A succession of clean stat scans followed: November 2008. May 2009. November 2009.
Still, I wasn’t satisfied. I kept wondering, When’s it going to come back? When I was fighting cancer—doing chemo, kicking its butt in the gym—at least I felt like I was taking back some control from the disease. Even though I was still doing my thing in the gym and had gotten into the craziness that is mixed martial arts, the wait now between scans was long and hard. It felt like I was being passive—something I promised I’d never be. In January 2010, I went to see Dr. Milsom, my surgeon. I told him I wanted to do something. “Is there some preventative chemo I could take? Or can we go in arthroscopically to see if anything is happening in there?” I asked.
I prevailed upon him to go in and take a look. There was nothing there besides the scar tissue that had formed after my last surgery. He scraped it away.
I’m a positive person—the way I’d stared down cancer in the first place should show that—but despite the scans and Dr. Milsom’s findings, I kept wondering, Is the cancer back? I was hyperaware of my body. The simplest twinge or gas bubble set off alarms. I even did a round of preventative chemo. I wanted to make sure I was doing everything I could to avoid it coming back.
Then came November 2010. After the scan, getting into my car, my phone rang. “Stuart, it’s Dr. Baker,” he said. He knew me well enough by now to dispense with the small talk. “It’s another clean scan,” he said. “I see no signs of cancer cells.” Keep it up, he said.
Nine days later, I took Taelor and Sydni to a matinee showing of A Christmas Carol at the Hartford Stage, a great theater in Hartford, Connecticut. A buddy of mine from junior high school was the stage director. I was thrilled to be there with my girls, but halfway through the performance I started to worry that I was being visited by the ghost of cancers past. I had a bad stomachac
he, and that set off the alarms. It was only nine days since a clean scan, so it couldn’t be cancer, right? Or could it be?
When the pain wouldn’t subside, I called my doctors. Tests were ordered. An endoscopy. An ultrasound. “I don’t see anything definitive,” Dr. Milsom said. “But this area right here”—he pointed—“looks a little cloudy. That doesn’t look right. I’d like to go in and take a look.”
So we planned it for right after the holidays and New Year’s. I was dating a woman who was a professional dancer. She and her troupe were performing New Year’s Eve at a party on the rooftop of a hotel in Tampa, Florida. She asked if I wanted to be in it. I could do a waltz, and if I was feeling confident, I could also dance in one of their hip-hop routines. Bring on the hip-hop. I handled my business that night.
Afterward, it felt like another descent into CancerWorld. I was now a veteran and had learned how to decode things. This felt different from the procedure Dr. Milsom performed in January. Before surgery, the anesthesiologist asked if I should be given an epidural. In early 2010, Dr. Milsom’s answer to that question was “Not necessary.” Now it was “Yeah, let’s go ahead, just in case.”
Before I went under, I remember thinking, Uh-oh. Not a good sign. When I woke up, I learned that Dr. Milsom had removed three big tumors and a lot of scar tissue. He went in through the same twelve-inch scar as before. He took out part of the small intestine and part of the colon.
I was back in the fight.
CHAPTER TEN
BACK IN THE RING
I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it,” Nelson Mandela once said. “The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
Amen, brotha. Talk about resilient dudes. I never got to meet Mandela, but early in my career I covered a speech he gave in Atlanta on his first trip to the States after he was released from prison—after twenty-seven years. Think about that: twenty-seven years behind bars for your beliefs. I remember watching him that day and thinking, This is one tough ol’ dude. You didn’t want to step to him in the street. No surprise that he’d been a boxer. He could take a punch.
After my surgery, I had to do what Mandela was talking about. I had to look my fear in the face. I had plenty of time to think. I got an infection and was in the hospital for fourteen days. I had wanted to be back and healthy for the Super Bowl, Giants versus Patriots, Eli versus Tom Terrific, but now I’d be lucky just to be back home where I could watch it on my hi-def flat-screen. I was so down and so scared that I called the wisest person I know, my big sister Susan. And I told her: “You’re going to have to start working on my eulogy.”
And this is one of the ways Susan is so wise. She didn’t say, “Oh, c’mon, you’ll be okay.” She didn’t panic. She didn’t try to talk me out of my feelings. She didn’t give me a pep talk. Instead she said, “Let me get this straight—you want to talk about something that is probably not going to happen until you are ninety and I’m ninety-seven? Okay, if that’s what you need me to do.” She knew this was a process and, right now, I was facing something and needed to work my way through it.
Fear’s an interesting thing. I come from the macho world of sports. Growing up, we’re taught to not be afraid. But now I was learning what that whole mind-set was really about—denial. I was learning it’s okay to be afraid. It’s okay to be afraid of dying. This idea of be brave, don’t cry, get over it—whatever the phrase is—was bull. I’m so glad I was raised in a family where crying was never seen as showing weakness. Having emotions is healthy. Fear is normal.
Look, it’s complicated. Our culture tells us not to give in to fear, to be brave. I totally believe that. That’s why the Mandela quote resonates with me. That’s why I would keep going to the gym, keep fighting. But it’s not totally black-and-white. Sometimes it’s smart to listen to your fear. Once, I had the opportunity to fly with the Blue Angels, the Navy flight show. No, thank you, not this brotha. I passed on it and I don’t mind telling you why: I was afraid. Now, part of that had to do with the pressure in my eyes. If a plane went too fast, it could do me some damage. But mostly it was just this: Something could go wrong. I didn’t want to take that chance.
My boys were, like, “Man, you scared.”
I was, like, “Damn right I’m scared.”
See, I believe in looking straight at your fear—but that doesn’t mean you always gotta go mano a mano against it. And you should never, ever feel like you’re “less than” if you don’t do something because you’re afraid. Man, you got cancer: You should be afraid, and that should change your calculations. But you also should never stop dealing with it—which is what Mandela was getting at.
Knowing that my cancer was back—though, in reality, it probably had never left and was instead just undetectable—I lost some hope. But it also gave me a jolt of necessary realism. Now, when I thought back to when Dr. Baker told me in 2008 that my scan showed no signs of cancer but that some cancers were hard to see this way, I remember feeling bullheaded at the time, like, You’ll be able to see mine. That kind of cocky confidence was now long gone. After all, these tumors were found nine days after a clean scan. From now on, I realized, I’ll never know for sure. Now my mind-set was going to be more fatalistic as I went home to heal and then start a new round of chemo: Okay, let’s do this. And let’s wait and see how long it takes to grow back again.
• • •
I WAS DETERMINED TO acknowledge my fear, yes, but damned if I was going to do things to make it worse. I learned some lessons the first time around. I wasn’t about to search the Internet for information about my disease, hoping against hope that there was some magic treatment or pill out there. I knew from last time that seemingly every cancer story on the Internet is about dying.
When you have cancer and you start scouring the Internet, you find a lot of negativity. This time, I knew enough not to want to become an expert. This time, I knew enough to do what feels good for my soul. This time, I was okay with some people thinking I wasn’t as informed as I should be—because I knew it was better for my spirit to not be quite so informed. Rather than seeking out answers myself by going online, I’d get informed by calling my doctors and saying, “This is what’s going on. What do I do about it?”
Those guys are my medical dream team. At New York–Presbyterian, Dr. Milsom is a world-class surgeon and Dr. Shah is a leading oncologist. The reserved Dr. Jeffrey Baker has impeccable credentials. And my urologist in Connecticut, Dr. Hugh Kennedy, will actually text or call for no reason, just to see how I’m doing. This even though, more than once, I’ve left his office without realizing that I was still clutching his waiting-room copy of Sports Illustrated. When I’d apologize, his receptionist would tell me to just go ahead and help myself to them.
As much as I like them and am grateful for them, I’d like to not be in constant contact with my doctors. Having a standing weekly checkin, for example, would make me feel too much like a cancer patient. I want to talk to them only when I have to. They’re all very good about talking to one another—I always feel like everyone is on the same page when I make medical decisions, and that’s crucial.
I could have gone another way. Friends, relatives, and even well-meaning strangers all suggested alternative treatments. One friend took his special-needs daughter to South America for a holistic cancer regimen—there’s supposed to be some guru doctor down there with some answers.
I don’t discard that—I’m all for whatever works for you, man. But I felt like I had to make a choice: either go the traditional-medicine route or not. There are a lot of alternative treatments that focus on diet—some say that a third of the food you eat should be raw and that foods like broccoli should be eaten every day. The problem is, having now had my stomach resected a couple of times, I couldn’t necessarily digest all those leafy things. If I ate that stuff, instead of being on the toilet seven times a day, I’d be on it all day.
No, now that I was back in the fight,
I was doubling down on my medicine and my doctors. But first I had to recover enough to get back in the gym, back to work, and back on chemo. And that meant healing enough to lose my Wound VAC.
Even though I was home, the twelve-inch scar down my chest and abdomen, which was about three-quarters of an inch wide, wasn’t closed. It looked like something out of a slasher movie. It was hooked up to this vacuum that continually sucks fluid from the wound and increases blood flow to it. I ain’t gonna lie: It’s kinda gross. I tried to get the girls to name the Wound VAC in the same way we named the chemo drip, but they weren’t having that. This contraption wasn’t cute to them, like Marvin Fitzpatrick Bartholomew had been.
A nurse would come every few days to change the dressing and make sure I was healing properly. I wasn’t supposed to get the wound wet, so showers were out. I had to bathe the old-school way, standing up at the sink.
Soon I started to notice a change in the girls this time around. Taelor was now sixteen and Sydni twelve. They’d been wide-eyed and emotionally open last time around—three years ago now. They’d asked questions. Now they were more stone-faced and not as interested in talking about what I was going through. That’s natural, right? I mean, they were teenagers, or, in Sydni’s case, nearly a teenager … they’re supposed to grow more sullen and harder to read, right?
No doubt, that was it. But I also wondered if their silence was about something else: fear. After all, it looked like I was being what I’d always said I wouldn’t be: nothing but a cancer patient. I was home, all the way down to 160 pounds, and strapped to that damned Wound VAC all day.
I’d always joke with them about my toughness and physicality, and they’d roll their eyes at me—like, Look what I have to put up with. “Sydni, how many dads at your school you think can beat me in a race?” I’d ask.
She’d sigh. “Dad, no one cares.”