Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong Page B

crushed. “Well, look,” I said. “We’ll just try it again.”
    But trying again meant Kik would face constant needles, pills, sonograms. It meant she would have to stay home while I traveled, because she would have so many medical appointments. It meant longer separations, and all for another potential disappointment.
    For a few days, we considered waiting another year. But that was doubly depressing, so we decided to start the cycle all over again.
    The timing was hard: I was scheduled to go to an annual series of Postal training camps in preparation for the 2001 Tour, and in combination with Kik’s IVF that meant more time apart from my family than ever. Luke was changing all the time, and I missed things. He chattered away about “Da DEE this, and Da DEE that,” and pointed to bicycles and said, “Da DEE?” And then finally, stated morosely, “Da DEE bye-bye.”
    I went to camp in Spain , and on my days off I looked for a new place to live. I finally found it, an ancient apartment in the town of Girona , a popular cycling haven. One of Kik’s oldest friends, José Alvarez-Villar, lived 45 minutes away, and he helped with everything from finding a realtor to closing the deal with translators and attorneys.
    I’d always loved Spain , and now I threw myself into renovating a lovely apartment that had been part of an old palace and needed special care. I set about finding artisans who could restore it—it gave me something to do other than simmer about the investigation.
    We felt buffeted, between the separations, the investigation, the departure of my best friend to a rival’s team, the decision to move, the difficulty of finding a new home, and a disappointing IVF treatment. But as lousy as those months were, Kik and I tried not to get too discouraged, because we always had illness as a context: career reversals and the indignities of a drug investigation couldn’t scare us.
    Whenever we needed a reminder of the difference between the small troubles we were experiencing and truly terrible vagaries, there was a cancer checkup.
    I still visited my oncologist, Dr. Nichols, twice a year for blood work and scans, and it was always an uneasy experience. I wouldn’t be declared formally cured until the five-year mark. That fall, Kik and I had flown to
Oregon
for my four-year exam.
    The funny thing was , everyone thought I was done with cancer. They thought I’d beaten it, whipped it, willed it away. But surviving cancer was an evolution, rather than a limited experience confined to a time span or a location.
    Some days the disease seemed like it had happened ages ago, and other days it seemed like it had happened yesterday. I had the odd sensation that I was still expelling poisons from my body, that there were still toxins in me. My body had been suffused not just with the scourging poisons of chemo, but also with anesthesia during two surgeries. Anesthesia could linger in the cells. It was a near-death experience; you were flooded with drugs, brought to a state of such deep, gassed unconsciousness that you were within a millimeter of death. And then they just held you there, chemically.
    My head was shaved, and covered with small markers. The surgeon explained the procedure, as if he were talking about a piece of lumber.
    “We’re just going to cut a little hole, pop it out, remove the lesions, put it back in, and cover it up.”
    He was talking about my skull.
    I still worried continually about my health. Little things other people might blow off, a bump, or an ache, provoked the thought, “My cancer is back.” The slightest head cold was trouble around our house, and cause for in-depth analysis, deep pondering, and distress.
    Even a little fatigue was a matter for concern and phone calls to my doctors and trainers. I was always putting socks on, never running around in bare feet, always with something on my neck. A sniffle was a case for long discussion, a bowl of hot soup, and a nap. If I didn’t feel