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wanted everyone to see that I was okay, and still able to ride and maybe I was trying to prove it
to myself, too.
"How's Lance doing?" people would say.
I wanted my friends to say, "Well, he seems pretty good. He's riding his bike."
Maybe I needed to tell myself that I was still a rider, not just a cancer patient, no matter how
weak I had become. If nothing else, it was my way of countering the disease and regaining the
control it had stripped from me. I can still do this, I told myself. I might not be able to do it like I
used to, but I can still do it.
Then one day Kevin and another friend and local cyclist, Jim Woodman, came over to take me
for our usual little ride. I still had the scars from my surgery, so I wore a helmet, and we moved
at a very slow pace, just idling along. Again, it wasn't anything I would have previously
classified as a ride.
We came to a small rise in the road, nothing difficult at all, just an incline that required you to
rise from your seat and stroke down on the pedals once or twice. I'd done it a million times. Up,
down, and then sit and coast into a left-hand turn, and you're out of the neighborhood.
I couldn't do it. I got halfway up the incline, and I lost my breath. My bike wobbled beneath me,
and I stopped, and put my feet down on the pavement. I felt faint.
I tried to breathe, but I couldn't seem to draw in enough air to revive myself. Black and silver
specks fluttered behind my eyes. I dismounted. Kevin and Jim wheeled around and stopped
short, concerned.
I sat down on the curb in front of a stranger's house and dropped
my head between my knees.
Kevin was at my side in an instant. "Are you okay?" he said. "Just let me catch my breath," I
wheezed. "Go ahead without me, I'll get a ride home."
Jim said, "Maybe we should get an ambulance." "No," I said. "Just let me sit here for a second." I
could hear myself trying to breathe. It sounded like Whoo. Whoo. Suddenly, even sitting up felt
like too much effort. I felt a rushing light-headedness, similar to the sensation you get when you
stand up too quickly only I wasn't standing.
I lay back on the lawn, staring at the sky, and closed my eyes.
Is this dying?
Kevin hovered over me, distraught. "Lance!" he said, loudly.
"Lance!"
I opened my eyes.
"I'm calling the ambulance," he said, desperately.
"No," I said, angrily. "No, no, I just need to rest."
"Okay, okay," he said, calming us both down.
After a few minutes, I gradually recovered my breath. I sat up, and tried to pull myself together.
I stood. I tentatively straddled my bike.
My legs felt shaky, but I was able to ride downhill. We coasted very slowly back the way we
came, and made our way back to my house. Kevin and Jim rode right next to me, never taking
their eyes off me.
Between deep breaths, I explained to them what had happened. The chemo had robbed me of
healthy blood cells and wiped out my hemoglobin count. Hemoglobin transports oxygen to your
vital areas, and a normal value of hemoglobin for a fit person is about 13 to 15.
I was at seven. My blood was totally depleted. The chemo had attacked my blood relentlessly
every two weeks, Monday through Friday, and I had finally overdone the bike riding.
I paid for it that day.
But I didn't stop riding.
THERE ARE ANGELS ON THIS EARTH AND THEY COME IN subtle forms, and I
decided LaTrice Haney was one of them. Outwardly, she looked like just another efficient,
clipboard-and-syringe-wielding nurse in a starched outfit. She worked extremely long days and
nights, and on her off hours she went home to her husband, Randy, a truck driver, and their two
children, Taylor, aged seven, and Morgan, four. But if she was tired, she never seemed it. She
struck me as a woman utterly lacking in ordinary resentments, sure of her responsibilities and
blessings and unwavering in her administering of care, and if that wasn't angelic behavior, I
didn't know what was.
Often I'd be alone in the late afternoons and evenings except for LaTrice, and if I had the
strength, we'd talk seriously. With most people I was shy and terse, but I found myself talking to
LaTrice, maybe because she was so gentle-spoken and expressive herself. LaTrice was only in
her late 20s, a pretty young woman with a coffee-and-cream complexion, but she had
self-possession and perception beyond her years. While other people our age were out
nightclubbing, she was already the head nurse for the oncology research unit. I wondered why
she did it. "My satisfaction is to make it a little easier for people," she said.
She asked me about cycling, and I found myself telling her about the bike with a sense of
pleasure I hadn't realized I possessed. "How did you start riding?" she asked me. I told her about
my first bikes, and the early sense of liberation, and that cycling was all I had done since I was
16. I talked about my various teammates over the years, about their humor and selflessness, and
I talked about my mother, and what she had meant to me.
I told her what cycling had given me, the tours of Europe and the extraordinary education, and
the wealth. I showed her a picture of my house, with pride, and invited her to come visit, and I
showed her snapshots of my cycling career. She leafed through images of me racing across the
backdrops of France, Italy, and Spain, and she'd point to a picture and ask, "Where are you
here?"
I confided that I was worried about my sponsor, Cofidis, and explained the difficulty I was
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