by Craig Sager
Thirty days?
It was like a prison sentence for an innocent man incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit. I was being punished for something that I didn’t do.
“Mr. Sager,” said a white coat, extending his hand toward me as he entered the room at 11:30 p.m., “I’m Dr. Holland.” He shook Stacy’s hand and then got right to it. “We need to start treating you immediately, and that means we must begin a round of chemotherapy to try to make some progress against the disease. Your levels,” he said, and paused, “are not good.”
“Doctor,” I blurted out, making eye contact with Stacy, “I want to go home for the night. I need to see my kids.” I was not mentally prepared to start treatment right away and get stuck in a hospital room for thirty days.
Dr. Holland looked at me, confused, and then turned to Stacy, as if to garner support for the idea that my leaving the hospital was nuts.
“Mr. Sager, I don’t think you understand. We have everything all set up, and you need to start now. I can’t force you to stay, but if you leave, we need to start the whole process all over again.”
“I am going home,” I insisted forcefully. “I will not stay here tonight.”
Seeing that he wouldn’t win, the doctor relented, and with that, I agreed to return to the hospital early in the morning to begin my treatment. I was only going to be away from the hospital for a few hours, but even one minute at home with Stacy, Riley, and Ryan was worth it.
Stacy and I drove home in the middle of the night on the dark highways of Atlanta in virtual silence.
“No way am I going to stay thirty days,” I said, breaking the ice. “I will be out in nineteen.”
As we pulled into the driveway, I felt better; fine, almost. I had regained my strength, which was why I was perplexed that I could feel and look fine but have this awful disease inside of me.
A few hours earlier, Craig had let the world in on my condition through a tweet, and my phone immediately began to ring incessantly. He hadn’t asked me if he should, or even informed me that he would. But in a way, I was relieved that everyone knew, so I did not have to pretend that everything was fine and make up excuses for missing a game.
Stacy and I got a few hours of sleep and were up early the next day to get the kids ready for school. Ryan and Riley and I sat at the kitchen table, and I was honest with them. Their dad was sick and had to go to the hospital for treatment for a few weeks, and they wouldn’t be able to come visit him. The kids were accustomed to my being on the road for weeks at a time with work, so their reaction to the news was to approach it like another work trip. I don’t think that at the time, at ages seven and nine, they fully understood what I was telling them—but quite frankly, neither did I.
“Does this mean you can’t come to lunch?” Ryan asked, keenly aware of our weekly tradition of having lunch together at school. It broke my heart.
Stacy and I drove the kids the half mile to school. I got out of the car and hugged them both harder than I ever had. I didn’t know when I would get to hug them again. I tried to be brave for their sake, as if the hospital stay were no big deal. As they walked away from the car, tears were not only pooling in my eyes, they were streaming down my face. I looked at Stacy, and she was crying as well.
9
HIGH HOPES
As we had promised, we arrived at Northside Hospital early in the morning on Friday, April 18. I was struck by just how crowded the hospital was. The waiting rooms were packed, the hospital rooms were full, there were sick people everywhere. We made our way up to the Blood and Marrow Transplant floor. When the elevator doors opened, I took a deep breath as I followed Stacy out.
The first day was kind of a blur. I was shuffled from sterile room to sterile room. First to have my blood pressure and temperature taken, then to undergo another very painful bone marrow biopsy, then to have my blood drawn. I started out interested in what was happening, but I eventually settled on being a human pincushion and crash test dummy, and getting my education from brochures the hospital had given us that read like “Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) for Dummies.”
Perfect.
Leukemia is, simply, a cancer of the bone marrow. When we are a fetus inside our mother’s womb, our spleen and liver produce our healthy red and white blood cells and our platelets, but when we’re born, our bone marrow takes over production. Our red blood cells are critical, as they supply oxygen and nutrients to our body, and our platelets help our blood to clot and heal wounds. A healthy adult has 150,000 to 450,000 platelets at any given time, 4,500 to 11,000 white blood cells per microliter, and 4.5 million to 6 million red blood cells.
Leukemia attacks the blood system, and acute myeloid leukemia, which is what I was diagnosed with, creates a rapid reduction in healthy blood cells. AML usually builds over the course of a few weeks, and most symptoms reveal themselves moderately at first—fatigue, a fever, excessive bleeding. There are no cures for AML, beyond a stem cell transplant, and even then the odds are not great. It’s been more than thirty years since any new treatments for the disease were approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
So what causes AML? Doctors still do not know. Some believe exposure to the chemical benzene, a by-product of cigarette smoke, can trigger it. But we do know what AML does in a typical patient: it changes. It mutates. Just when doctors feel they have found the right medicine to kill or slow the disease, the leukemia fights back by changing its makeup. Chemotherapy attacks a specific area, but after a while that area becomes immune to the effects of the chemo and the cycle starts over again. Eventually, most patients with AML in the advanced stage die from infection, bleeding, hemorrhaging, or systematic failure of the heart or lungs.
One of the positive things that I learned from the reading material was that Northside had a 100 percent one-year survival rate for AML patients, the best in the country. That’s the kind of statistic that I love. But AML kills about ten thousand men and women every year, with close to twenty thousand new cases diagnosed every year, and the five-year survival rate is less than 25 percent.
“Three years” is what the doctors at Northside initially gave me. Three years on the outside, and that’s only if I got the right kind of treatment and the best care and didn’t get an infection and could have a successful transplant and my body took chemo well.
Three years. Bull. I am living another thirty, I thought.
I had to do the NBA playoffs in a few weeks, and then the PGA Championship, and then the baseball playoffs. My plate was already full for 2014.
“Denial” is a funny word. We’re all living in denial to some extent. And even though it’s fair to say I was living in denial regarding my diagnosis, the fighter mentality kicked in. I knew leukemia was serious, but I never thought it would defeat me or challenge me as much as it has. And yet I think I am even more optimistic and positive in my outlook now.
Statistics are just numbers, and you can take from them what you want to see. I’ve been a gambler my whole life, and I know all about odds. I will bet on anything. A shot in golf, a game of Go Fish, the number of beers I can drink in five minutes. It makes me feel alive. I have been known to make cross-country trips to Las Vegas to play a little craps and wager in the sports books and then be home by dinner. In fact, over most of my career, I mandated that any time I flew west of the Mississippi River, I had to have a layover in Vegas.
Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between a realist and a pessimist. So when a pessimist or realist tells me the odds of my surviving with leukemia are low, I think about Stacy. I take a step back and think about the odds of a fifty-something divorced father of three, who Kevin Garnett once said looked like a Christmas ornament, having a shot with a woman who, as you’d find out if you’re lucky enough to meet her, is even more beautiful inside than she is outside. If there was ever a time to be grateful for inheriting my mother’s joie de vivre, this is it.
I bet on me.
So with that optimism and resolve, I began my fight with l
eukemia in a corner room with a five-day dose of chemotherapy. Most adults have heard horror stories about chemotherapy and its side effects—nausea, vomiting, hair loss, weight loss—and I knew well what I was facing. Interestingly, “getting chemo” is really just having an IV in your arm. The chemo is a mixture of medications—some of them toxic—that doctors use to kill off the leukemia cells. Surprisingly, in those first few days—and, in fact, throughout my fight—I have been fortunate enough to not feel many of the side effects. No nausea or vomiting, though there has been hair loss after some intense chemo.
Over the first few days, Stacy educated herself in the world of cancer, asking questions of doctors and nurses, consulting over the phone with doctors she knew and didn’t know, and spending hours researching treatment options and experimental drugs. She figured that doctors in all fields barely touched the surface of the options available to them, and she always insisted on multiple opinions when it came to health. I never had the urge to ask a lot of questions about the disease or the future—ironic, I know, because my entire life I have been curious and my profession has groomed me to be inquisitive. Maybe I was in denial. Maybe I knew that as long as Stacy knew, I was fine. All I wanted to know was what the doctors wanted me to do to get better. I want to live to see Ryan win Wimbledon and Riley invent the next groundbreaking technology. I want to walk Krista down the aisle and watch Craig and Kacy write their magnum opuses. I want to have many more years left to enjoy life with Stacy, and I want to get back on the sidelines to witness history.
I was uplifted when my three oldest kids came to visit in those first few days. I put on a strong face, as they were not used to seeing their father so vulnerable, and I tried to steer the conversation toward their work or sports, but I could tell from their faces that they had other things on their minds. They didn’t know it, but I could see my daughters burst into tears the minute they exited my room. It broke my heart. I couldn’t stand the sight of my children in pain or worrying.
In the first few days of my hospitalization, Marv Albert, Charles Barkley, Ernie Johnson, and Kenny Smith all visited me at Northside, of course wearing the required garments and accessories—gown, shoe covers, mask, gloves, and cap—all of which looked hysterical on Charles. Text messages and phone calls from everyone from Phil Mickelson to NBA commissioner Adam Silver buoyed my spirits, as did a huge flower bouquet from Kevin Garnett. I even received a letter from a chicken.
Dear Craig,
Jane and I hope this card finds you further along in your success to recovery. Millions of people love you and we trust you are feeling the warmth of that glow.
Your fortitude is boundless! But then, you’ve proven that with your jackets, my friend! This is your championship time, Craig. And Coach Pop will be interviewing you about your win soon.
We love you, Craig.
Ted & Jane Giannoulas
Ted was the original San Diego Chicken.
*
But the most surprising and moving act of kindness that I received in those first few weeks would come not from a colleague or a friend, but rather from my namesake.
10
A New Normal
Tracking my father’s work schedule was an innate skill in the Sager family. His fleeting homecomings were a weekly game to see how much we could squeeze in before his spasmodic circuit around the country continued. Each day was its own battle in our perpetual war with time, but the month of April was in a league of its own. By the time the NCAA Tournament wrapped up in early April, there was one golden week for us to spend time together, chart the next two and a half months, and restock the wardrobe, because the NBA playoffs were around the corner.
Phone calls have always connected his world with mine, and over the years we’ve drifted further and further away from a standard dialogue. A compressed vernacular developed that kept us informed at light speed. We could turn weeks of our lives into an elevator pitch of information that only another Sager would be able to understand and reassemble. We’d recap the previous night’s game with a single exchange. Context clues weren’t necessary for understanding the humor or purpose of a story. By the second ring of my phone, I could guess where he was probably calling from based on the time of day. From this I could deduce what game he was covering and exactly what I needed to update him about since our last conversation.
Then I got the call that changed everything.
Almost a week had passed since Shabazz Napier and the Connecticut Huskies had defeated Kentucky in the 2014 NCAA national championship game. I expected my dad to arrive home, or at least be on his way home, after his NBA game in Dallas on the 10th. But now, three days later, it was Masters Sunday, and the playoffs were just seven days away. After rushing to a television to watch the final hole of Bubba Watson’s second title at Augusta, my girlfriend gave me a concerned look and said, “You need to call your dad. I don’t know what it is, but I have a bad feeling that something is wrong.”
I looked at her like she was crazy. I had called him earlier that day and gotten his voice mail, but I wasn’t concerned. Phone tag was another inborn skill in our family. I reminded her that he was watching the exact same thing we were and that I would call him after Bubba put on the green jacket. Minutes later, however, it was my phone that was ringing. The real-time reaction to Bubba’s victory that I was expecting to hear from Dad was instead “I’ve been in a Dallas hospital for three days and just arrived at Piedmont today.”
The only other words I remember are “It could be leukemia” and “I’ve already had six blood transfusions.”
Hearing the word “leukemia” come out of my father’s mouth was a punch in the stomach. I felt my entire world change before I could catch my breath. I knew that leukemia was a blood cancer and that it was a devastating disease, and hearing that he had already had six blood transfusions, I recognized that it must be serious. I had never seen my father go to the doctor in my entire life, let alone heard him mention anything about his health. He was in phenomenal condition and still ran miles every day. What were we in for?
I rushed to the hospital to see him. The very thought of his vulnerability in any capacity was all I could stress about as I hurried through the hallways and counted down the room numbers racing by me.
When I opened the half-closed door, the scene was like a flash of lightning that I could feel getting stored away in my memory. As I looked at my father lying down in a hospital bed for the first time, it was heartbreaking. I couldn’t tell if it was his being hospitalized or his being absolutely exhausted that I found more upsetting. Understanding that these symptoms stemmed from the same greater danger made it even more unbearable. I walked over to the bed and gave him a half-hug, not wanting to accidently disconnect the various tubes running into his body. I used all my senses to find a clue as to what I should and could do next.
Dad launched into a CliffsNotes version of his terrifying journey back to Georgia. I had a million questions, and I wasn’t sure if I should just ask all of them or wait for another day.
So much of my life had been shaped by the fast pace of life we shared together. There was always the next game feeding our excitement. The seasons never stopped, and the cycle was always leading us a step ahead. The wayward world of sports was my circadian rhythm. Now, I was in an uncharted reality that couldn’t have felt any more backward.
He pointed to the television in the upper corner of his dimly lit room. I hadn’t looked at what was on the television since walking in, but as soon as I saw the Yankees and Red Sox on Sunday Night Baseball, he started to catch me up on the last two innings.
The gravity of the situation relaxed its grip the moment I accepted his invitation to a conversation about sports and nothing else. It was hollow commentary on a game I had no interest in at the time, but I knew exactly how meaningful this was for us. We watched until he started to doze off, and I left knowing that no matter what was about to happen, we’d always have sports.
For the next three days, we waited for
any sort of metric to define the severity of his leukemia and the subsequent treatment plan. Not having a game plan was an emotional high-wire act. One negative thought and I’d free-fall into the hypotheticals and worst-case scenarios. I had lost two beloved aunts to cancer right when I’d gotten to college, and now there was a magnifying glass over those tender scars again. My sisters and I were rallying together, and there was a positive bond of support growing between us, but that is a thorny mind-set to guard when so much is left unknown.
Since I had learned of the diagnosis on Sunday, I kept thinking about the upcoming NBA playoffs, which was my dad’s time to shine. It felt strange to be worrying about his job in the middle of the forbidding reality around me, but I understood more than most that my father’s work was not merely a job—it was the air that he breathed. Just the thought of having that taken away from him scared me more than leukemia. His love of sports, his energy, and his insatiable craving for excitement are what keep my dad going, at a pace I can’t keep up with even on my best days. He is himself in the purest form, and I didn’t know how I could possibly make him feel better as he was about to miss out on the most exciting time of the year.
Thursday evening, he called with his initial game plan. I was relieved, but also reminded of what a long road lay ahead. He was beginning a three-to-six-week chemotherapy treatment cycle the next morning at Northside Hospital, just minutes away from my office. I could tell from his voice and his words that reality had started to set in, but he was grounded with confidence and a new focus. I assured him I’d be there in the morning to check on him, and we ended the call. I let another opportunity go by without telling him all the things I wanted to say. Not talking about my fears was clearly the preferred strategy, but it had been four days and I felt like the only contribution I had made was worrying and simply offering my presence. I wanted to do more.
*
The three-to-six-week chemo plan confirmed that he was going to miss the entire playoffs, and it gave me a general idea of what was on the horizon. I wished that night that someone at Turner would call and ask me to fill in for him. I wanted the name Craig Sager to make an appearance at some point during the postseason to keep his playoff streak alive. Though I had been working as a writer and editor, I had no on-air experience. No one in his or her right mind would trust me to do what I was obsessively thinking about. I didn’t even trust myself to do it. But if there was ever going to be a time to step up and be the real Craig Sager for a day, the clock was ticking.