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Well, it’s really a big thrill for me to be here and especially with what I’d like to talk to you about. As you can see, I am short, and that came in very handy.
I want to talk to you about my hero in life, and that is my mother. Dorothy Hamilton was an incredible woman, who came from a family of schoolteachers. She was about that tall. And she was about that wide. And she had a smile that would just change her entire being. The most extraordinary woman I have ever known.
I was adopted. My mother was a nurturer by nature. She was meant to have a house full of children, just laughing and screaming, and creating chaos. Her problem was, she could carry a child full term, but when the child was born, it wouldn’t make it through the birthing process. And it just broke her heart. It happened to her time and time again.
My sister, my older sister, is a survivor of one of my mother’s pregnancies, she’s a survivor of twins. She’s extraordinary because she’s the one person in my family that kind of looks like my parents. Anyway, I was brought home from the adoption agency and my sister took one look at me and she said, “He’s not very cute. Can we take him back and exchange him for something else?” And that’s been my relationship with my sister ever since.
But you know, it was through the process of growing up in this house and all the unknowns that came with it, that they saw me being very small, and still being very small, and still being very small, and they realized that something was wrong with me. So after going to doctors, and doctors, and more doctors, and hospital visits, all over the place, no one could figure out what was wrong with me. And my mother was just extraordinary through this whole process.
I was the smallest kid in my class. I was teased incessantly about being adopted. That whole playground thing “You were adopted. You were adopted.” And my mother wanted me to feel really good about being adopted. And so she armed me with everything I needed to have to go back to the playground. I went back, kids would start on me, “You were adopted. You were adopted.” And I looked at them square in the eye, and I said, “Yes! I was adopted. My parents chose me. Your parents got STUCK with whatever came out!”
But throughout all of this, my mother was teaching second grade, raising a family. She adopted another boy, my younger brother Steve. And it was just glorious. It was just an amazing family. And I always had my health issues, but they kind of herded me over to a skating rink. And I took one day a week and kind of got away to give my parents time to recharge their batteries. And it was through my kind of addiction to skating that I learned more about my mom than ever before.
It was a financial drain on my family. And I was a junior in high school and underperforming, poorly, in skating. And my mother came home and said, ”I’ve just come from the doctor’s office and they found three lumps in my breast, and things are going to change around here. I’m going to be going through some treatment for cancer.” (I didn’t know what that was.) “And we’re just going to make the best of it.” And she told me “You have one more year of skating, because we are out of money, and we’ll just go with it.”
So, through the whole year, and just knowing that it was my last year in skating, I worked really hard. She went through a double mastectomy and part of her left arm was removed. And she showed up at that nationals, with her arm in a sling. And she’s telling me every time I could sit down and have a private moment with her, “You know, this is so great. Take advantage of this time on the ice. We’re all given minutes, just minutes. Some people are given lots of minutes, and some people, not so many minutes. So we’ve got to take advantage of our minutes.” And I’d say, “Yeah, okay. It sounds great.” And being of that age, I sort of just let things go. And at that championship, she was suffering greatly, but she had a twinkle in her eye. And I couldn’t figure out what it was for.
Well, I found a way to win the junior national title that year in my last competition. And I go to my mom, “What’s going on with you? You seem really happy and you shouldn’t be.” And she said, “Well, on my way here, we met with a couple that wants to sponsor your skating. You can move on and skate, and skate some more.”
So I have a sponsorship. I get to skate some more. I turn 18 years old. I get my own apartment. I get my own apartment. I’m 18 years old. Well, that next year, I went out and I failed so miserably. And it was the greatest failure of my skating life, because that would be the last competition that my mother would see me skate in. She lost her battle to cancer. And it was the morning that she passed away that I woke up, my brother-in-law woke me up and he said, “Your mother is gone.” We were in her hospital room until 3:30 in the morning the night before, and all I could muster was, “I know.”
I didn’t know what to do with my grief. I had no idea what to do with my grief. She was 49 years old and she died of cancer. And I walked around, and I walked around. And it was then that I realized that I would channel my grief toward my skating. And I was I was never going to be less than she thought I could be again. And so I worked really hard. And I went from being 9th at the last competition she saw me skate in, to being 3rd in the nation, 11th in the world, made it to the Olympic team in 1980, won four straight world championships, and an Olympic gold medal, because I carried my mother with me to the ice every single day.
I didn’t know what a role model she would be until much later in my life, even though I was 18 when she passed away, I thought about her every day. And I thought about every word that she ever told me. And I thought about those minutes.
And in 1997, I was on tour with Stars on Ice, 50 cities in to a 60-city tour. Minding my own business, with a little bit of abdominal pain. And I realized that something was wrong and that I needed to get this treated right away. Well, I went to the emergency room in Peoria, and I had a doctor check me out. And he kind of gave me the once-over. Then he gave me that once-over again. And he sat me down and he said, “We seem to have found a mass.” Mass? Look at me! Do you think the word mass has ever been used? No! So I’m going, “Mass. What does that mean?” And he said, “What it means is that it is either benign, malignant, or something else. And if it were me, I’d take care of this right away.”
I just realized that I was diagnosed with cancer, the disease that took the most important person in my life away from me. And all I did was the math of, “Oh, I’m going to suffer. And oh, I’m going to do this. And oh…” The fear is just extraordinary. That initial diagnosis is unbelievable.
And then, you don’t know when it happens. Whether it’s five seconds, a second, nanosecond, five minutes. You don’t know how long that process takes, but that fear, and that anxiety, and that sense of isolation, is replaced with a sense of power, and determination, and strength, and clarity. I remembered everything my mom went through when she had her cancer and I decided, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to be a light; I’m not going to be felt sorry for. I am not going to allow of any of that in my room.
When my mother went through her cancer, she said things like, after the chemotherapy took her hair, she got a wig and she goes, “Oh, this is so much easier. I finally found a way to quit smoking. Boy, this chemo, look at all of this weight I’ve lost! Don’t I look good?” And then she would take her prosthetic breast and she would throw it around the dinner table and we would play hot potato with it. That’s who I wanted to be when I went through my cancer experience.
And so I walk into the room to get my diagnosis, and I sit down in a chair and the doctors all walk in. You know how they do, they always have a clipboard, left arm, head tilted slightly, they walk in, they sit down, and they go, “Mr. Hamilton, we seem to have found the source of your problem.” And I go, “Okay.” And they go, “You have a germ cell, stage 3 tumor, testicular in it’s origin and we recommend…” And I go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, stop.” And they go, “What?” And I go, “I have cancer…cancer?” And they go, “Yes, you have testicular cancer.” And I go, “That’s cancer, down there cancer?” And they go, “Yes.” And I go, “Nah, that doesn’t work for me. No, that doesn’t work for me.” And they go, “No, no, this has a really successful treatment protocol and we’re 80 to 90% effective and if you had to choose a cancer, this is the one that you would need to choose.”
And I go, “No, it doesn’t work for me. No!” And they go, “Well, why?” And I go, “Well, because I’m a public person. I can’t say the work Testchitututoture.” And they go, “Testicular.” And I go, “Okay, I’ll learn. And I’m really gonna have to talk about this and there’s probably gonna be…women, that I’m gonna have to talk to about this. And I don’t really feel comfortable. Okay, when I do the Today show, I will talk to Matt about this, but definitely not Katie, okay? ‘Cuz this is a guy thing.” And they go, “No, you need to focus. You need to take this seriously.” And I said, “No. You need to take it as seriously as you need to, to get me through this. But I’m going to handle this the way I’m going to handle this. This is my time. These are my minutes. Okay, chemotherapy, that’s what’s next, right?” And they go, “Yeah.”
I go, “So they take you in a room and they replace all your bodily fluids, right?” And they go, “No. It’s just a bag of chemicals. It’s chemical therapy, chemotherapy.”
And it’s like, “Oh, OK. It’s nothing. Then what?” Then after 3 ½ months of this chemotherapy, you’re going to have some side effects. It’s like, whatever. They said, “There’s a big surgery at the end of that.” I said, “OK, let’s get started.
I would not allow anyone in my room unless they made me laugh. I would not allow the nurses to come in and be serious with me and to try to make me think that what’s going on with me is something hazardous or dangerous. I wanted to be my mom. I wanted to fill my room with light.
My nurse, Mary, who would sometimes come in kind of very serious, she walked into my room with a chemo bag and she’d say, “It’s party time!” And she decorated my chemo bag with Snoopy stickers and different languages on how to say hello. And then my second chemo bag – it was like a 5 ½ / 6-hour infusion – was covered in Mylar. My band-aids were all Sponge Bob and Scooby Doo. I had popsicles in my refrigerator.
Everybody would tend to show up in skinhead wigs or Beetlejuice glasses or from a funny movie. That’s how I wanted my cancer experience to be. I wanted it to be a positive memory. I wanted to hang on to the good things. I didn’t want it to be all about fear, all about sickness, about anything else.
The first round of chemo went great. I started to lose my hair. (God was doing that anyway!) The second round of chemotherapy, I started to feel a little bit of the side effects. The third round of chemotherapy hit me like a truck. All I wanted to do was curl up and let the disease take its course.
And that’s where your friends come in. My best friend Steve comes up to me, and he goes, “So how many rounds of chemo do you have left?” And I said, “One.” We both started to laugh.
I got through the chemotherapy. I got through my surgery, and I realized that throughout this process, life is exactly what we make it.
Eric Heiden said a long time ago, after his Olympic win, “It’s not the events in your life that make your character, it’s how you deal with them.”
When I was going through my first initial rounds of chemotherapy, I was quoted as saying, “The only disability in life is a bad attitude.” Impossible is what you make impossible. Possible is what you make possible.
A diagnosis of a life-threatening illness doesn’t need to take away your life and your happiness. You decide. You decide how you want to live this life.
I lost my mother at a very early age, but I’ve kept her with me all these years. And I’ve never met a finer, stronger, or wiser person, and she should be an example to us all. Be strong.
