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radioactive protection when handling them. The most important ingredient of the three was cisplatin, which
is actually platinum, and its use against testicular cancer had been pioneered by a man named Dr. Lawrence
Einhorn, who practiced at the Indiana University medical center in Indianapolis. Prior to Einhorn s
discovery, testicular cancer was almost always fatal 25 years earlier it had killed a Chicago Bears football
star named Brian Piccolo, among many others. But the first man who Einhorn had treated with platinum, an
Indianapolis schoolteacher, was still alive.
Had I lived 20 years ago, I would have been dead in six months, Youman explained. Most people think
Piccolo died of lung cancer, but it started as testicular cancer, and they couldn't save him. He died in 1970
at the age of 26. Since then, cisplatin has become the magic bullet for testicular cancer, and Einhorn's first
patient, the Indianapolis teacher, has been cancer-free for over two decades on his anniversaries they have
a big party at his house, and Dr. Einhorn and all his former nurses come to visit him.
I thought, Bring it on,give me platinum. But Youman warned that the treatment could make me feel very
sick. The three different anticancer toxins would be leaked into my system for five hours at a time, over
five straight days. They would have a cumulative effect. Anti-emetics would be given to me along with the
toxins, to prevent me from suffering severe nausea, but they couldn't curb it entirely.
Chemo is so potent that you can't take it every day. Instead it's administered in three-week cycles; I would
take the treatment for one week, and then have two weeks off to allow my body to recover and produce
new red blood cells.
Dr. Youman explained everything carefully, preparing us for what we were about to face. When he
finished, I had just one question. It was a question I would ask repeatedly over the next several weeks.
"What's the cure rate for this?" I asked. "What are my chances?"
Dr. Youman said, "Sixty to sixty-five percent."
My first chemo treatment was strangely undramatic. For one thing, I didn't feel sick. I walked in and chose
a chair in the corner, the last one along a wall in a row of six or seven people. My mother kissed me and
went off to do some errands, and left me with my fellow patients. I took my place among them.
She had prepared me to be disturbed by my first encounter with other cancer patients, but I wasn't. Instead,
I felt a sense of belonging. I was relieved to be able to talk to other people who shared the illness, and
compare experiences. By the time my mother got back, I was chatting cheerfully with the guy next to me.
He was about my grandfather's age, but we hit it off, and we were jabbering away when my mother walked
in. "Hey, Mom," I said brightly. "This is Paul, and he's got prostate cancer."
I HAD TO KEEP MOVING, I TOLD MYSELF. EVERY morninging during that first week of chemo I
rose early, put on a pair of sweats and my headphones, and walked. I would stride up the road for an hour
or more, breathing and working up a sweat. Every evening, I rode my bike.
Bart Knaggs returned from Orlando with a Mickey Mouse hat he had picked up at Disney World. He
handed it to me and told me he knew I would need something to wear when I lost my hair.
We would go riding together, and Kevin Livingston often joined us. Bart made huge maps for us, as large
as six feet in diameter. He would get maps of counties from the Department of Highways and cut and paste
them together, and we would stand over them choosing new routes for ourselves, long winding rides out in
the middle of nowhere. The deal was to always find a new road, someplace we hadn't been before, instead
of the same old out-and-back. I couldn't stand to ride the same road twice. The training can be so
monotonous that you need newness, even if half the time you end up on a bad piece of road, or get lost. It's
okay to get lost sometimes.
Why did I ride when I had cancer? Cycling is so hard, the suffering is so intense, that it's absolutely
cleansing. You can go out there with the weight of the world on your shoulders, and after a six-hour ride at
a high pain threshold, you feel at peace. The pain is so deep and strong that a curtain descends over your
brain. At least for a while you have a kind of hall pass, and don't have to brood on your problems; you can
shut everything else out, because the effort and subsequent fatigue are absolute.
There is an unthinking simplicity in something so hard, which is why there's probably some truth to the
idea that all world-class athletes are actually running away from something. Once, someone asked me what
pleasure I took in riding for so long. "Pleasure?" I said. "I don't understand the question." I didn't do it for
pleasure. I did it for pain.
Before the cancer, I had never examined the psychology of jumping on a bicycle and riding for six hours.
The reasons weren't especially tangible to me; a lot of what we do doesn't make sense to us while we're
doing it. I didn't want to dissect it, because that might let the genie out of the bottle.
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