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So how are you all today? Good? I feel great. Just awesome.
Besides being a recovering figure skater, I am a serial, self-proclaimed, over-the-top – obnoxiously so – optimist. I can find good in just about anything. It’s so bad that a friend of mine says, “I can’t even take you seriously. It’s awful. It’s disgusting. I can’t listen to a word you say because you can find good in anything. You can find good in anyone. You can find good anywhere.”
I’m like, “Yeah, so?”
And he goes, “ Forget it.”
Here’s the type of friend that we all need. When I was dating the woman who would become my wife for two weeks, he said, “Are you going to marry her?” And I go, “I don’t know. We’ve been dating two weeks.” And he goes, “Have you looked in the mirror lately?” These are the kind of friends that you want.
He also said that if you had to write your own personal ad and be completely honest, how would it read? Mine goes like this: “Short, bald, half-neutered, chemoed, radiated, surgically repaired male figure skater of unknown ethnic origin seeks beautiful, fertile woman for laughter, long walks in the sunset, and a shared hobby of my life-threatening illnesses.” I got a taker. It’s hard to believe!
It’s in searching for the good that my life has been forever changed. I was giving a speech at a Pituitary Network Association conference after my pituitary brain tumor diagnosis. Afterwards a man came up to me, a friend of mine, and said, “This is a book.”
And I go, “Really? What’s a book? Books are hard. Tell me why this is a book.”
And he goes, “Because all this stuff that you’ve been through, and at the other end of it you find yourself to be happier than you’ve ever been, this is a book. This is something that people need to hear right now, especially now.”
I said, “Books are hard.” And he goes, “I’ll help you.” So we created the Great Eight, and it’s just amazing to look at eight different aspects of things. I won’t take you through all eight, but I’ll take you through some of the significant ones that can give you the pep you need when you get smothered by the toxicity we all live in.
It’s been this roller coaster and it’s been outrageous. Being adopted, this is the first real incident of my life. Getting sick as a child, finding skating and not being very good, and then starting to get better, and then losing my mother, and finding a sponsorship, and then failing again. After all these ups and downs, and finally becoming successful as a professional skater, only to be diagnosed with cancer and have to go through chemotherapy and surgery. It’s this roller coaster ride living in fear every single moment. For anything good that ever happened to me, something really bad was coming.
It was cancer that kind of cured me of that. I lived in fear of the next good thing that was going to happen to me because I just knew that, “Oh, man, here it comes.”
It was at a cancer survivors’ celebration after I went through my cancer that a little girl came up to me. She’d lost her leg to cancer – 15 years old, a student athlete. She said to the crowd of survivors, “The worst thing that ever happened to me was cancer, and everybody nodded their heads. The best thing that ever happened to me was cancer.”
For me, it was as if the skies parted and the angels sang. It hit me all at once that I had it all wrong. It didn’t start with the adoption. I was an unwanted pregnancy, and I was adopted. I got sick, and I started to get well. I failed at skating, and I started to get better. I lost the most important person in my life, and I found the strongest, most significant part of myself.
It was this whole thing that made me realize that surviving cancer put me in touch with a part of my being that I never would have known existed. I couldn’t believe I could be that strong. I couldn’t believe I could be that brave or optimistic. I needed all of that because after I went through a little bit of a wilderness period trying to figure out what it was all for, I met my wife.
We ended up getting married, a very small ceremony – 21 people including us and the minister. It was beautiful and magnificent. We wanted to start a family, but I’m a testicular cancer survivor. Good luck with that! Nine months and two days later, I’m looking at my son, and I can’t believe how life has changed so much.
And I’m back on the road skating, and I’m missing my family, and I’m thinking, “I don’t really enjoy this any more. Maybe I need to step away.” I stopped skating. Over that summer, I’m kind of missing it a little bit. I’m starting to get a little bit of a layer of non-functional tissue, in case you’re wondering what that is.
I realized that I was starting to suffer a little bit of depression. I’m not a depressive person. What’s this all about? Oh, well, I’ll just go back to sleep. I realized I didn’t like getting out of bed anymore. I didn’t have the energy. So I think, something’s wrong. I always preach that we need to be in touch with our bodies, with what’s going on.
I went in and I gave blood, and they said, “Well, it’s just no testosterone. Your remaining soldier probably kicked the bucket. Now we need to treat you topically with testosterone. You go back to your life.”
It’s like, “No. It’s not good enough for me.” I made an appointment with my doctors at the Cleveland Clinic. I pummeled them with questions. Finally it came to, “Why is my peripheral vision gone?”
My doctor said, “Uh-oh. Let’s get you in for a head scan just to make sure.” Walking out of the head scan, the doctor said, “There’s something in there, and I’m sure your physician will be waiting back at your eye exam to tell you all about it.”
I get back, and that was the day my family was arriving in Cleveland for my annual cancer benefit. And he said, “You have a brain tumor.” It’s like, wait, I just had cancer. I paid my dues. I did my duty. What do you mean, brain tumor? That’s not fair. That’s not fair at all; that’s not right.
He said, “No. We don’t know what it is. We don’t think it’s attached to your testicular cancer. We can’t rule anything out until we know what it is.”
My wife arrived that day and she came in and she goes, “What’s going on?” My little boy was banging the phone on the cradle like all little boys do. I’m looking at him wondering what my future’s going to be. I looked at her and said, “I have a brain tumor.” Simple as that.
Without skipping a beat, she grabbed both of my hands, bowed her head, and she started to pray. It was simply the most powerful moment in my life because I realized I was going to be just fine no matter what. I had the best source of support and strength that I could possibly ask for, and it was standing right in front of me and above me this whole time.
So we don’t what it is. A week goes by, and they still can’t figure out what it is. They say they have to biopsy it. The tumor is in my brain. How are you going to do that?
And the doctor said, “We seem to have found a safe corridor. We’re going to stick a knitting needle down through your brain, through this safe corridor, we’re going to take a piece of it out and we’re going to figure out what’s going on.”
The complications that could happen are this, this, this and this. So we pray, we pray some more, we hold each other. I go in the biopsy. I wake up at 10:20 in the morning. I know where I am, I know who I am, I know why I’m there, and I just said, “Test, test.” Okay, I can speak. This is good!
My wife walks in, the biggest smile on her face ever, and she says, “We know what it is.” I go, “Really?” My brain surgeon comes in and he says, “We know what it is.” And I go, “What is it?”
“You were born with it.”
“What?”
“You were born with it.” In looking at all the material that comes with a cranio-pharyngioma – I called it a lunatic pharyngioma because I can’t learn all this stuff. It had something to do with my “hippopotamus” that was attached to me!
I go through all this, and my wife’s reading it and she goes, “Oh, this is interesting.” You see, when I was adopted, I stopped growing for several years. No one could ever diagnose what was going on. They thought it was cystic fibrosis. They thought it was Shwachman-Diamond syndrome. They thought it was all these things and they finally had to give up because they couldn’t diagnose it. It’s when I started skating that it all went away. When I stopped skating, and all of a sudden I’m having all these symptoms.
Cranio-pharyngioma is a brain tumor you’re born with that shows itself by a lack of development in young children. Hmmm. I guess the moral to that is that if you live long enough, all questions will be answered.
Wow! I have this brain tumor. Now what? “We’re going to go into radiation and we’ll see if we can control it.”
All right. So they go in for radiation. They zap the nuke, a little sucker, it’s like a little briquette in the middle of my brain. I’m feeling really good about things, but the one thing that kept bothering me was, Did I stop skating because this brain tumor was starting to rob me of my strength and conviction? Is that what did it? I have to know because skating was my whole life.
I decided after five years of being away from it, I’m going to strap on the skates and I’m going to do it again. Five years is a long time. And I get out there, and I don’t have any flexibility, I don’t have any strength, but I had lots of determination and I was gonna make this thing work no matter what.
I went to the rink every day. I went to the gym three times a week. I was starting to lose a little weight, starting to gain a little back here – likin’ that. I started to feel kind of good again.
So I go out for my annual cancer benefit – that was going to be my comeback night. I go out and I’m a little nervous because I haven’t done this in a while and I knew there was going to be expectation.
About a week before I started getting over casually on back flips. I thought there might be expectations that I do back flips. I’m going around and I prepared and this evening meant so much to me just to find out what it was all about – what I could rise above.
I went around and the first easy jump in the program is a double flip, and I realized that I’m on my bottom. I’m embarrassed, thinking this is a really significant program. This is a big performance for me. The next thing I have to do I have to go all the way down there to come all the way back here where I’m sitting and try a back flip. My legs are dead, gone, over.
I get up and I go around the corner. I start to get some speed up and I look right in the audience and there’s William Shatner. I just looked at him and I smiled and my legs are doing this [shakes legs]. So I go around and I threw this back flip as hard as I could, and I made it over – just barely. Just made it over enough where I could actually stand up.
For the next 30 seconds, the remainder of the music, 8,000 people stood. And I realized that’s what it’s all about, that’s what this whole thing is all about. You fall down. You get up. We all fall down, right? We all make mistakes we all do something that lets ourselves or others down. But the only thing we can do is get up. Thinking about that performance, I thought, this represents everything, this is the whole thing. This is my entire adventure. You fall down. You get up.
2010 – I thought it was going to be my next year in skating and everything was going to be perfect. My peripheral vision went again. I realized that I had another challenge in front of me.
I sat down with my assistant who looks after me day to day and I go, “Michelle, I think my brain tumor’s back.” She just looked at me and she started to cry for a second and then she giggled. I said, “What’s so funny?” She goes, “I can’t wait to see where this one takes you.”
For every down, there was an up, and she couldn’t wait to see where this one took me.
It brought me to you. Every morning I get up and I look in the mirror and I say, “Who are you going to be today?” I’m not schizophrenic, I’m not a master or disguise, and I’m not in the witness protection program. I’m looking in the mirror, and I’m saying, “Who are you going to be today? How are you going to handle today?”
I have three choices. I can succumb to whatever my situation is. I can adapt or I can evolve and be a little better than I was before. I try every day to evolve, to be a little better than I was yesterday. I don’t always succeed but I give it everything I’ve got.
The Great Eight taught me a lot about myself. It’s a book that’s out there – shameless plug – but it taught me a lot about myself because I had to put into words exactly all the things that allow me to be the best that I can be. I am a short, bald, half-neutered, chemoed, radiated, surgically repaired male figure skater of unknown ethnic origin, and I’ve never been happier in my life. Blessed beyond my wildest dreams.
All of us can feel that. I’m here to give you this pep talk. All of us can do that. We can rise above anything. When the pituitary tumor took away my testosterone, and likely my ability to father another child (we wanted one more), I injected my legs six times a week for two years, trying to father a child. Six injections a week for two years.
And it was when I finally gave up, three weeks later, my wife was expecting. Maxx came out with red hair. I’m Irish!
So rise up, be the best you can be, stick around long enough to answer all questions, and God bless you all!
